A Short Note on Lawrence Stone's article on 'The Revival of Narrative'
A Short Note on Lawrence Stone’s article on ‘The Revival
of Narrative’
Quite by chance, I came across Lawrence
Stone’s 1979 article on this subject yesterday evening. It was originally
published in Past and Present and subsequently appeared in his 1987
collection of essays, The Past and Present Revisited. I have commented
before on the way in which Stone, who was at Princeton University from 1963,
lost touch with the evolution of historiographical thinking in the U.K. about
the origins, course and outcomes of the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s in the
British Isles. Inevitably, perhaps, Stone was surprised the development of ‘revisionism’
from the middle of that decade onwards.
This sense of disassociation has
something to do, I suspect, with Stone’s account of the works of “the new
British school of young antiquarian empiricists” led by Conrad Russell and John
Kenyon and urged on by Geoffrey Elton. According to Stone, they were writing
political narratives implicitly denying that there was any deep-seated meaning
to history save for the accidents of fortune and personality and trying to
remove any sense of idealism or ideology from the two English revolutions of
the seventeenth century. This was pure neo-Namierism just when that phenomenon
was dying as an approach to the eighteenth-century. Stone speculated that this
attitude to political history might stem from the inexorable economic decline
and reduced power of Britain.
There was something quite odd
about this analysis. Elton and Kenyon were historians of Stone’s own generation
and, while Elton had certainly objected to the kind of economic and social
determinism that appealed to Stone as an explanation of the English Revolution,
neither he nor Kenyon could be accurately described as a “revisionist”. Russell
himself was in his forties by 1979 and roughly a decade or so older than
figures like Kevin Sharpe or John Morrill. His act of intellectual liberation
from the presuppositions of Tawney, Stone and Hill was a much slower process
than that experienced by his younger contemporaries. It was also based, although
this point has not been fully grasped by most specialists in
seventeenth-century political history, on a mistaken reading of early Stuart
Parliamentary history. From as far back as R. G. Usher’s work in 1924, the
existence of “opposition” had been disputed: John Ball’s brilliant Cambridge
Ph.D. on Sir John Elliot had dealt a death blow to Whig interpretations while J.H.Hexter
had repudiated the idea of a struggle for sovereignty in 1958: J.S.Roskell had explained
as early as 1964 that ideas about the House of Commons exercising ‘power’ were
fallacious before the end of the seventeenth century. Had Stone been better
informed about political history, he might have made much more telling
criticisms of the so-called ‘revisionists’.
Between Stone and those he
criticised in 1979, there was more than just a difference in approach to the
study of this period. Like Christopher Hill, he had been considered up until
the mid-1970s as being at the forefront of re-interpreting the seismic events
of the 1640s and 1650s. But suddenly there had been a significant change in the
historiographical and intellectual atmosphere. The old assumption that
political history simply reflected material changes in the economy of English,
Welsh, Scottish and Irish societies, that, indeed, its course had been
essentially explained already, was exploded. Stone like many others was no
longer a fashionable guide to these events. Admittedly, he and others tried to
push back as the commentaries produced by Hexter and his allies showed. It was
too late. The ‘antiquarian empiricists’ now commanded the field, at least until
c.1990. Lament it as he did, Stone’s time was over.
23rd
August, 2020
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