1) Bibliographic Data
Kocka, Jurgen. (2003) "Losses, Gains and Opportunities: Social History
Today”, Journal of Social History, V.37-1, Fall:21-8
2) Question(s) addressed by the author and working arguments
The author seeks to evaluate the present of the social history in function
of the losses and gains that this sub-discipline has confronted and
to emphasize its present and future opportunities.
First, there were not only losses, but gains as well. Depending on the
criteria used, the latter may be seen as more important as the former.
Second, a new turn seems to be imminent which may lead to a renaissance
of social history though in a deeply structured form.
Losses
The decline of social-scientific history-Social history have offered
a lot of opportunities for the application of analytical methods ,
some of its areas of inquiry provided the possibility of collecting
mass data for being analyzed by statistical methods; but Social-scientific
history is only a small part of Social history and it has been relegated
. Even though Quantitative Methods can’t replace or fulfill the
functions of interpretative methods, historians most reevaluate their
importance and utility to certain kind of questions.
The lost of the Economy
Traditionally social history was closed tied to economic history, but
over the last two decades it has gained independence and moved closer
to cultural history. Many social historians have lost interest in relating
their topics to broad economic structures and processes, to the modes
of production and distribution, to the basic needs of people and the
constraints set by scarcity.
Lost or gain?
Paradigm Change
Historians have become less interested in establishing the causes and
conditions, and more interested in (re)constructing the meanings of the
past phenomena. Some may deplore this shift, and, indeed, question whether
it is possible at all to reconstruct the historical meaning of the past
without trying to explain it. Others may welcome the shift from explanation
to understanding, from causes to meanings, as a step towards more freedom
in dealing with the past.
Gains
Internal Expansion- Women’s and gender history, the new stress
on perceptions, experiences and actions as dimensions of historical reconstruction,
the rise of different variants of cultural history, the ‘linguistic
turn’ etc.
External Expansion- interconnections of social history with political,
economic and cultural history.
Opportunities
Moving to new and more comprehensive levels of analysis, like the trans-national,
it’s an exiting possibility. Comparison, “Connected Histories”, “entangled
histories”, histoire croiseee are programmatic metaphors of approaches
which try to be transnational. They intend to reconstruct interrelations,
mutual influences, interconnections and border-crossings. Networks
and relations become objects of study, instead of social entities like
specific societies or groups within specific societies.
3) Conceptual references to transnational-transnationalism
Transnational
4) Conclusions or Final Remarks
The overall evaluation could be asserted as positive. The recent experiences
of internationalization and the increasing quest for trans-national
approaches in historical thought, research and writing have started
to confront social historians with challenges and opportunities; it
will be interesting to see how they can cope with such new challenges
and opportunities.
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