The Political as Communicative Space in History: The Bielefeld Approach

Willibald Steinmetz and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt

Political History and its Discontents: Towards a New Consensus?

There was a time when political history was declared outdated by promi-nent members of the historical profession in most Western countries. The high point of the assault on political history was reached in the 1970s and 1980s under the double blow of, first, social history, and second, cultural history. It is true that the traditional topics of political history - the rise and fall of nations, the making and unmaking of constitutions, the strategies of political parties, the encounters between great leaders and the people, in short: the business of government - continued to dominate teaching in schools and universities as well as TV documentaries and popular text-books. However, although still an important subject, this kind of conven-tional political history had lost much of its former attraction by the 1970s, especially among younger scholars. The slackening of interest was due partly to the fascination exerted by new and until then largely unexplored fields such as gender history, the history of the body and sexuality, or the history of marginal and subaltern groups. Furthermore, critics were dis-satisfied with the unresponsiveness of traditional political historians to new methods and approaches such as comparison, discourse analysis, or the study of images. At times, these discontents culminated in more funda-mental calls for a paradigm shift in the entire discipline. Politics, it was claimed, was only a dependent variable in the historical process. The real forces shaping long-term developments were assumed to be either socio-economic "structural" constraints, or the mentalities and sign systems that - together - make up the "culture" inhabited by the historical agents and informing their beliefs and behaviour. Political history, the critics argued, had to be dethroned 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