Thursday, January 7, 2010: 3:40 PM
San Diego Ballroom Salon A (Marriott)
Few historians in the last thirty years have been as important to debates in historiography as Geoff Eley. Part of the generational cohort who began to make their mark in the 1970s, Eley is English (rooted in the intellectual and political traditions of the British new left), is a social historian of modern Germany and European socialism, and has primarily spent his academic career at the University of Michigan. His effortless ability to move between these three intellectual environments--Britain, Germany, and the United States--gives him a rare vantage point. Most important, his historiographical essays, written over more than a twenty-year period (some with his colleague Keith Nield, longtime editor of Social History), and his intellectual autobiography, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005), represent both contributions to understanding transformations in recent historiography and interventions in those very transformations.
In my paper, “The Crooked Line: Geoff Eley and the Future of Cultural Marxist History Writing,” I analyze Eley’s contribution to producing a narrative of historiographical trends and his efforts at producing a theoretical perspective that brings together the achievements of social and cultural history--Marxist materialism and the linguistic turn--perspectives that for decades were thought by their adherents to be antithetical. Eley’s effort at synthesis marries Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and Foucault’s emphasis on the microphysics of power and resistance. His perspective has roots in British cultural Marxism’s attention to agency, yet embraces a notion of culture indebted to poststructuralism. While contemporary historiography is too fragmented to ever produce the kind of hegemony that social history once enjoyed, Eley’s theoretical project represents a creative path forward for historians, especially for those who still believe that history can be a form of political activism and have totalizing aspirations, yet be grounded in specialist, archival studies.
In my paper, “The Crooked Line: Geoff Eley and the Future of Cultural Marxist History Writing,” I analyze Eley’s contribution to producing a narrative of historiographical trends and his efforts at producing a theoretical perspective that brings together the achievements of social and cultural history--Marxist materialism and the linguistic turn--perspectives that for decades were thought by their adherents to be antithetical. Eley’s effort at synthesis marries Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and Foucault’s emphasis on the microphysics of power and resistance. His perspective has roots in British cultural Marxism’s attention to agency, yet embraces a notion of culture indebted to poststructuralism. While contemporary historiography is too fragmented to ever produce the kind of hegemony that social history once enjoyed, Eley’s theoretical project represents a creative path forward for historians, especially for those who still believe that history can be a form of political activism and have totalizing aspirations, yet be grounded in specialist, archival studies.