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These identifications are almost always – albeit subliminally – self-congratulatory. They involve double misrecognition both of the people of the past and of ourselves, in the first place denying them their otherness, and the specificity of their existence in historical time; in the second reinforcing a sentimental view of ourselves. The imaginary community with the past can thus serve as a comfortable alternative to critical awareness and self-questioning, allowing us to borrow prestige from our adoptive ancestors, and to dignify the present by illegitimate association with the past.’Social history, if it is to fulfill its subversive potential, needs to be a great deal more disturbing. If it is to celebrate a common humanity, and to bring past and present closer together, then it must take some account of those dissonances which we know of as part of our own experience – the fears that shadow the growing up of children, the pain of unrequited love, the hidden injuries of class, the ranklings of pride, the bitterness of faction and feud. Far more weight needs to be given, than the documents alone will yield, to the Malthusian condition of everyday life in the past and to the psychic effects of insecurities and emergencies which we can attempt to document, but which escape the categories of our experience, or the imaginative underpinning of our world view, ‘Defamiliarisation’, in short, may be more important for any kind of access to the past than a too precipitate intimacy
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In a reaction against this some historians have gone to the other extreme and argued that social history should become the history of society: societal history. The idea is that political, economic, military and other specific types of history each study only one aspect of a society. It is necessary to bring these various types of history together into a single framework if that whole society is to be understood. This is the task of societal history.There are many difficulties with this view of social history. First, the whole approach is based upon the assumption that there is a society to study. But when we use the term society we do not normally mean a distinct social structure, but rather the inhabitants of a certain territory or the subjects of a particular political authority. It remains to be established whether there is a distinct social structure which shapes the way these people live their lives. There is a danger that this assumption of a single society will be imposed upon the evidence. Thus the assumption that English society was becoming industrial during the nineteenth century, along with various ideas about what a pre-industrial and an industrial society are like, can distract from the proper task of the historian. Instead of describing and analysing specific events, the historian is lured into categorising various elements of ‘society’ according to where they are located on the path from pre-industrial to industrial. This ‘evidence’ is then cited in support of the original assumption. The argument is unhistorical, circular and empty of real meaning.
