Writing Political History Today

from its top position, because social history, or respectively cultural history, possessed much more explanatory potential.

The French historians of the Annales school were among the earliest, and most outspoken, opponents of political history. They not only refused the positivistic traditions of French republican history, but struggled against the priority of politics in historical writings in general. As Jacques Le Goff stated in 1978 - nearly fifty years after the founding of the Annales journal - the fight was not over yet: "Detrôner l'histoire politique, ce fut l'objectif numéro un des Annales, et cela reste un souci de premier rang de l'histoire nouvelle." Not surprisingly, this massive challenge caused angry reactions and a stiffening of attitudes with some practitioners of old-style political history, whereas it encouraged others, in France and elsewhere, to promote revisions and apply new concepts to the historical study of politics. Thus, René Rémond, historian of the French Right, coordinated a volume defending political history in 1988 in which he defined its goal in almost Weberian terms: to study the political as an "activité qui se rapporte à la conquête, à l'exercice, à la pratique du pouvoir." And Jacques Julliard, historian of the French Left and labour movement, directed the attention of historians to the "strategies of actors in the face of historical necessities" and stated that "in modern societies, the interrelations are sufficiently numerous to give birth to events, institutions, and even structures that are sufficiently complex for the word 'political' to remain the only one capable of describing them." Political history as a history of structures, not just events, became conceivable.

From another angle, cultural history in France was particularly productive in questioning the practice of political history. Important works on political culture, such as Mona Ozouf's study on revolutionary celebra-tions (1976), as well as a sustained interest in national myths and the rituals of memory were outcomes of this shift of focus. Pierre Nora's project on the French Lieux de mémoire (1984-1992) found international followers and brought the content, form, agents, and effects of myth making and memory building to the attention of political historians. In spite of, or rather because of the Annales historians' criticisms, and inspired also by the works of social scientists like Pierre Rosanvallon, Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, French political history has again become a differentiated and lively field of historical research.

Objections to conventional political history were less pronounced in Anglo-American academia than in France. British historian Susan Pedersen could state in a 2002 article on the prospects of the discipline, that the "study of politics has always been the British historian's first concern", and she only cautiously criticised her fellow political historians for still concen-trating primarily on the doings of statesmen and stateswomen, party orga-nisations, parliamentary affairs, and governmental and electoral politics. Similarly, Mark H. Leff adopted only a mildly revisionist tone in his 1995 article on the state of U.S. political history for the centennial issue of the American Historical Review. As a "working definition" that reflected "com-mon practice", he put forward that "political history deals with the devel-opment and impact of governmental institutions, along with the proximate influences on their actions." While he had some harsh words to say about conservative historians who abhorred multiculturalism and wanted to im-pose an orthodox, "patriotic" view of U.S. political history, the only inno-vations he found worth commenting upon were, first, the abortive "new political history" of the 1960s and 1970s relying solely on quantitative methods; second, the more successful, qualitative approach of "new institutionalists" such as Theda Skocpol who aimed at explaining how public policy was shaped by complex "interactions between governmental structure, legislative actions, private groups, and underlying social assump-tions", and third, the endeavours of some historians of labour, gender, and race relations to more thoroughly consider the "infrapolitics of oppressed groups" as yet another element for explaining institutional and policy changes.

In the meantime, however, major challenges for political history in the Anglophone world came from the sidelines rather than the core of the discipline. As in France, cultural history and the (comparative) history of nation building introduced new themes, approaches, and concepts to political history. Lynn Hunt's books on the symbolic and gendered dimen-sions of political culture in the French Revolution (1984, 1992), Eric Hobs-bawm's and Terence Ranger's collection of essays on the "invention" of tradition (1983), Linda Colley's work on the "forging" of Britons and the British nation (1992), and, most notably, the path-breaking study on "imag-ined communities" by Benedict Anderson, specialist on South East Asian history (1983), all helped historians to contend with the fact that the politi-cal communities they wrote about: states, nations, peoples, empires, and so on, were "constructed" entities in the first place, entities that could not be treated as given, but whose emergence had to be part of the story. The construction of the polity itself, and along with it, the notions of identity and difference, of citizenship and political space thus came to the fore in the writings of English-speaking political historians.

Thomas RisseHistorical Politics Research - Luise Schorn-SchütteThe Opening Up of Political History - Henk te VeldePolitical History Matters: Everyday Life, Things, and Practices - Frank TrentmannNotes on Contributors