The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History ...

THE REVIVAL OF NARRATIVE 9Many historians now believe that the culture <strong>of</strong> the group, and eventhe will <strong>of</strong> the individual, are potentially at least as important causalagents <strong>of</strong> change as the impersonal forces <strong>of</strong> material output anddemographic growth. <strong>The</strong>re is no theoretical reason why the lattershould always dictate the former, rather than vice versa, and indeedevidence is piling up <strong>of</strong> examples to the ~ontrary.~ Contraception, forexample, is clearly as much a product <strong>of</strong> a state <strong>of</strong> mind as it is <strong>of</strong>economic circumstances. <strong>The</strong> ro<strong>of</strong> <strong>of</strong> this contention can be found inthe wide diffusion <strong>of</strong> this praciice throughout France, long before industrialization,without much population pressure except on smallfarms, and nearly a century before any other western country. We alsonow know that the nuclear family antedated industrial society, andthat concepts <strong>of</strong> privacy, love and individualism similarly emergedamong some <strong>of</strong> the most traditional sectors <strong>of</strong> a traditional society inlate seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, rather thanas a result <strong>of</strong> later modernizing economic and social processes. <strong>The</strong>Puritan ethic was a by-product <strong>of</strong> an unworldly religious movementwhich took root in the Anglo-Saxon societies <strong>of</strong> England and NewEngland centuries before routine work-patterns were necessary or thefirst factory was built. On the other hand there is an inverse correlation,at any rate in nineteenth-century France, between literacy andurbanization and industrialization. Levels <strong>of</strong> literacy turn out to be apoor guide to "modern" attitudes <strong>of</strong> mind or "modern" occ~pations.'~Thus the linkages between culture and society are clearly very complexindeed, and seem to vary from time to time and from place tolace.It is hard not to suspect that the decline <strong>of</strong> ideological commitmentamong western intellectuals has also played its part. If one looks atthree <strong>of</strong> the most passionate and hard-fought historical battles <strong>of</strong> the1950s and 1960s - about the rise or decline <strong>of</strong> the gentry inseventeenth-century England, about the rise or fall <strong>of</strong> working-classreal income in the early stages <strong>of</strong> industrialization, and about thecauses, nature and consequences <strong>of</strong> American slavery -all were atbottom debates fired by current ideological concerns. It seemeddesperately important at the time to know whether or not the Marxistinterpretation was right, and therefore these historical questionsmattered and were exciting. <strong>The</strong> muting <strong>of</strong> ideological controversycaused by the intellectual decline <strong>of</strong> Marxism and the adoption <strong>of</strong>mixed economies in the west has coincided with a decline in the thrust<strong>of</strong> historical research to ask the big why questions, and it is plausible tosuggest that there is some relationship between the two trends.9 M. Zuckerman, "Dreams that Men Dare to Dream: <strong>The</strong> Role <strong>of</strong> Ideas in WesternModernization", Social Science Hist., ~i( I 978).10 F. Furet and J. Ozouf, Lire et Pcrire (Paris, 1977). See also K. Lockridge,Literacy in Colonial New England (New York, 1974).