edited by Asa Briggs and John Saville Macmillan. 42 s.
the historiography of British Labour has been discussed twice in recent months in ULR (numbers 3 and 6), and it may therefore seem somewhat gratuitous to reopen the subject in this journal. But the central question with which one is left after reading these Essays is, What is Labour history all about?; or, more precisely, what should be the methods and content of this field of study? Should we agree with John Saville that “the study of working class history is a necessary corrective to present doubt and one of the guides to future action”, and rejoice that “in seeking to understand the dynamics of the British Labour movement we shall recreate within ourselves the traditions of those who, in the past, struggled and sacrificed for a better society?” Or should we, while accepting Eric Hobsbawm’s plea for the greater depth of insight that comes from commitment to the Left, seek to avoid the almost Victorian crudity of thinking of history as teaching by example? Surely the standards for the contemporary historian (whether of the Labour movement or any other field) must be those of Asa Briggs’ Age of Improvement, rather than the lectures of Charles Kingsley (even though he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge).
To date, the bulk of writing on Labour history has dealt with organisations and economic conditions, leavened with details of the struggles and quarrels of working class leaders. Very few Labour historians have started from the position of G. M. Young, who held that history is not so much what happened as what people felt about it when it was happening. Yet the supreme aim of every historian, Labour or other, must be to strive to hear the people of a past age talking. No amount of economic analysis or tracing of trends can be a substitute for this. The weakness of much Labour history is that it has not yet emancipated itself from approaches and methods derived from economic history and biography; whereas the most exciting developments seem likely to be made by the social historians and the historians of ideas.