Theory, Method and Practice in Social and Cultural History

Two decades ago historical practice in the United States and Europe was challenged by social historians with "behaviourist" approaches. The approaches of these social historians diverged dramatically from the discipline's traditional preferences for textual evidence, to accounts that explained occurrences in terms of individual intention, and to narrative presentation of results. The new trends in the practice of social history emphasized instead quite different approaches including routinely generated accounts of individual behaviour treated quantitatively, explanations made in terms of functional or economically rational behaviour, and presentations that incorporated the social-science formalization of hypothesis and test. These behaviourist trends, however, by no means swept the field of social history.
Today's historical practices, in fact, widely call for actor-centred accounts that are not mentalistic but take into consideration biology and the unconscious; that do not focus upon individuals to the exclusion of groups, markets, cultures, and other socially defined fields of action, and that do so with due regard to the fact of and the limitations upon power in human societies. This is a tall order. If historical practices today, then, are in flux, so are the method and discourse employed in that practice. Militantly eclectic historians do not characteristically extract questions of method and discourse from practice. Far more often, they embed their reflections upon how to do historical work in the work itself. Because history as a discipline is classified in the United States as a discipline in the "humanities", and because accounts of historical phenomena are often offered in as seamless a fashion as possible, uncluttered with discussions extraneous to the flow of exposition and interpretation, explicit reflections upon "how to" are commonly left omitted from historical writing.