Academic Blight THE NEW HISTORY AND THE OLD

By Otto Friedrich

Gertrude Himmelfarb recalls meeting a young historian who described his work as being on the "cutting edge of the discipline." He was writing one of those infinitely detailed studies of the inhabitants of a New England town in the late 18th century, their working conditions, their attitudes, their sex lives. Himmelfarb asked how he connected his work to the major event of that period, the creation of the U.S. "He conceded," she writes, "that from his themes and sources -- parish registers, tax rolls, census reports, legal records, polling lists, land titles -- he could not 'get to,' as he said, the founding of the United States. But he denied that this was the crucial event I took it to be. What was crucial were the lives and experiences of the mass of the people. That was the subject of his history; it was the 'new history,' social history."

Some cutting edge! Some discipline!

There are actually few things less new than the "new history." Its arrival was announced at least as far back as 1912, by James Harvey Robinson, who declared that "trifling details" of dynastic wars must be displaced by the chronicle of the "common man," and that such chronicles should rely on the discoveries of "anthropologists, economists, psychologists, and sociologists." This arguable proposition has increasingly become the conventional wisdom of academia, taught in all the better universities to young armies of new historians, who dismiss most of the traditions of political and cultural history as elitist, impressionistic and irrelevant. History as a narrative study of great men and great events? Obsolete. History as a branch of literature? Absurd.

But not to Himmelfarb, a conservative-minded professor at the City University of New York, who specializes in 19th century history (Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians). Her sonorous scorn for the excesses and rigidities of the new history might win the approval of the ghost of Carlyle. She loathes the idea that social history should base itself on a substructure of material detail "that supposedly goes deeper than mere political arrangements and is not amenable to reason." Worse, anthropological history explores "such nonrational aspects of society as mating customs and eating habits"; psychoanalytic history dwells "upon the irrational . . . aspects of individual and collective behavior"; mentalite history gives "greater credence to popular beliefs than to the 'elitist' ideas of philosophers."

Despite her indignation, Himmelfarb does not want to suppress these new forms; what she opposes is their domination of the profession. Part of the profession, anyway: in the publishing marketplace, traditional history still fares quite well. In the work of historians as diverse as, say, Daniel Boorstin and Barbara Tuchman, the traditional practices of storytelling, political analysis and moral judgment are all flourishing. But if the fads of the new history continue to blight the academic scene, Himmelfarb argues, we will be threatened with a profound loss: "We will lose not only the unifying theme that has given coherence to history, not only the notable events, individuals, and institutions that have constituted our historical memory and our heritage . . . but also a conception of man as a rational, political animal."