over-long books – Tad Suiter

E.P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class

This book, while a bit ponderous, was quite interesting.

I’ve read
dozens of authors who acknowledge a debt to Thompson, so I’ve been eager
to read it. The size, and having a week to read it, meant that I had to
“gloss” or “gut” the book more than read it, but I enjoyed the task, and
hope to return to it when I have more time. (I never thought I’d see the
day when I see Foucault coming up in a syllabus and think, “finally, a
nice quick read!”)

This book looks at the rise of class consciousness among the British
working classes in the period between the 1790s and the 1830s. Thompson
divides the book up into three sections. The first section is primarily
an intellectual and religious history. I found it a bit hard to follow,
as I’m not too familiar with the history of many of the groups that
Thompson feels it is sufficient to simply mention without explanation.
For this reason, I have to admit I had wikipedia on my laptop next to me
for a lot of this section.

The next section looks at material and
cultural conditions in the lives of workers—looking at specific
industries before moving onto issues of standards of living, religion in
the lives of the poor and working class, and broader cultural issues of
leisure, immigration, etc. The final section deals with conflicts that
represent the inchoate working class coming toward a final class
consciousness in the first part of the nineteenth century.

The thing that most struck me about the book was Thompson’s emphasis on
class consciousness, rather than simply class. Many Marxist scholars,
moreso even than Marx himself, have this tendency to see class as a
structural fact. Under capitalism, there are workers and there are
capitalists, and therefore class exists, and should be treated as a
material reality.

Thompson argues that it is awareness of class
structures, and the perception of more commonalities within class strata
than across them. For this reason, the book deals with the period that
it does—Thompson trying to record the advent of workers’ class
consciousness, and the process of its formation. He questions the common
assumption that industrialization necessarily and immediately brought
about the creation of a new working class, arguing that “…we should not
assume any automatic, or over-direct, correspondence between the dynamic
of economic growth and the dynamic of social or cultural life.” (p. 192)
It’s a situation of correlation and impact rather than direct causation.

Overall, I don’t necessarily agree with the argument put forth by some of the folks in my Historiography class that Thompson is unduly influenced by Marxist ideology.
Given the context of his times, there were many Marxists who were still
very strict adherents of dialectical materialism. In the consistent
emphasis he places on the social and cultural, Thompson signals a break
from such strict by-the-Das-Kapital Marxists.

Of course, I’m the product of a loose socialist upbringing, and went to
a pretty overwhelmingly Marxist college. So there’s a chance I’m just a
little blind to overt commie propaganda…

Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

Braudel’s first volume of “The Mediterranean” is a great work of
scholarship. It certainly displays a great mastery of a variety of
topics, a knowledge that is notable in both its depth and breadth. It’s
also a logical inclusion in the syllabus of an historiography class, as
Braudel is fundamentally attempting to shift the focus of what had been
previously considered historical thought—a trend that would only proliferate in the next
half-century, ending in the current state of affairs, where the
sub-disciplines of History are so numerous and compartmentalized that
sometimes it seems they can hardly recognize one another.

Braudel attempts to refocus the discipline, which he seems to see as
overly focused on the political, military, and biographical. His
response is to produce a work that moves from the socio-geographic to
the socio-economic and demographic. It’s definitely well-written,
well-researched, and full of those curious tidbits that keep a reader
interested when reading a rather dry history text.

While my attention
wandered at times, I found the book intensely interesting at others.

One thing that particularly grabbed my interest was the section on mail
and couriers on pages 355-371, as it seemed to give a much deeper
background to something I found interesting in Habermas’s “Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere,” but which Habermas unfortunately
glossed over in a matter of a few paragraphs.

Another was his repeated
use, in his socio-geographic description of the mountain ranges of the
Mediterranean, of the word “civilization.” Unlike Prescott a hundred
years earlier, Braudel seems to use the word in a very value-neutral
sense, as a complex that includes both positive features like improved
quality of life, refinements, etc., but also features negative
qualities, such as greater and more widespread despotism, heightened
class disparity, corruption of the clergy, etc. It seemed a very modern,
progressive view.

All of this aside, however, I had an overall negative response to the
book. It seemed to me that Braudel was over-reaching with this work—he
created a book with an impossible scope, and thus inevitably, the result
is mixed at best. To attempt a history of such a large area is a very
difficult task, and to do so through multiple lenses, without a single
unifying grand narrative or theoretical structure, seems downright
foolhardy. The result is a book that is meandering, at time confusing,
and desultory in its organization and evidence.

While it may or may not
have been the author’s decision, not indexing the first volume within
the first volume seems to me to be a horrible decision, one that reduces
the use of the book as a reference, while the complaints I’ve listed
above make it highly unlikely I’ll ever decide to re-read the book at
leisure.

That said, as someone who is very interested in historical cultural
geography, the book fascinated me, as it seems to represent just that,
in its nascent state, before the birth of cultural theory and cultural
history.