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A current discussion on EH.TEACH seems of relevance to our recent
discussion of Roy's editorial, and the different objectives of the
communities of historians and economists.
The conversation emerged out of a review of _Economics and the Historian_,
edited by Thomas G. Rawski. Berkeley: (University of California Press,
1996). The review was written by Michael Dintenfass, University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. For the review see:
http://cs.muohio.edu/Archives/eh.teach/sep-96/0029.html
In his review, Dintenfass suggests that _Economics and the Historian_ will
not be the success its contributors hope for, because the gap between
historians and economists is greater than they estimate it to be. After
illustrating how difficult it would be for a contemporary historian to
read articles in economic history journals, Dintenfass also points out how
shocked the economic historian would be to read contemporary history
journals:
"Whereas fifteen years ago social history, with its structuralist and
materialist inflections, was in the ascendant, it is a linguistically
inspired cultural history that today enjoys Clio's favor. The concern
with movements, forces, and conditions has given way to a preoccupation
with identities, memories, and representations as the making of the self
has claimed priority over the prosecution of its interests."
Dintenfass then goes on to say:
"The premise on which Rawski and his colleagues proceed, however, is that
the gap between history and economics is merely a problem of
accessibility. . . . Sadly, they fail to recognize that the concerns of
many historians nowadays are far removed from those of economists and that
speaking in a language historians can understand will not be enough to
inspire a substantive dialogue between them."
Dintenfass' review prompted the question: what then is a history focused
on identity and the making of the self?
Today, Dintenfass replied with the following:
"Let me turn now to what I regard as a far more important issue:
the making of the self and its relation to economic history. I did not
compose my review as the spokesman for historians of identities,
memories, and representations. It is therefore not for me to identify
the core research agenda of the history of subjectivities. I can only
articulate my own understanding of that project."
"For me, history is about giving back to the people of the past
the imaginative domains they constructed for themselves. These domains
included an economic--of "industry" and "trade," "enterprise" and
"employment," "output" and "efficiency," "wages" and "dividends," and
"profit" and "loss"--as well as a social, a political, a sexual, and so
forth. The selves that discursively fashioned the economic domain and
were in turn shaped by it may well have donned labels such as
"businessman," "artisan," "worker," "industrialist," "merchant," and
"unemployed" that we employ today. The historian must not assume,
however, that such terms meant in other times and places what they mean
to him or her today or that they occupied a comparable place in the
speech acts of the past. Rather, it is the burden of the historian to
read the representations of the economic domains of earlier cultures for
what they reveal about those cultures, however unfamiliar and complex they
may turn out to have been."
"Certainly, there is nothing in this that precludes a fruitful
engagement between historians of subjectivities and economic historians.
If that engagement has yet to take place, it is as much the fault of the
historians of the self, who have been egregious in their neglect of the
economic, as of economic historians inattentive to the subjective. That
said, it should be clear that the historical questions Rawski
identifies--the connection between Germany's economic difficulties in the
1920s and the rise of National Socialism, for example--are prime sites
for conversations among economic historians and linguistically-inspired
cultural historians provided they share an abiding respect for the
otherness of the past."
Ross Emmett
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