Welcome to Monday Methods, our bi-weekly feature for discussing theory, methodology and conceptual concepts in the field of history!
Tomorrow is International Labor Day, so happy labor day everyone!
Fitting this occasion, I thought it a good opportunity to discuss labor history resp. its parent social history. Social History is an approach noted for its often quantitative approach (looking at the historical development of bread prices, wages and so forth) in order to focus on such phenomena as classes and movements, urbanization and industrialization, family and education, work and leisure, mobility, inequality, conflicts and revolutions, while emphasizing structures over actors.
For discussion, questions would include have you used this approach or other experiences with it? What problems and advantages does such an approach hold? Should the historical field at large, now that actors are more at the center of inquiry, reevaluate social history and its emphasize on structure?
With the proviso that I've never really done labour history specifically...
It is surely a question of what the question is. There are certain points for which statistics are invaluable, and necessary to make a solid argument. But a work longer than a journal paper these days surely benefits from a hybrid approach. This interesting discussion from yesterday between yourself, u/sunagainstgold and u/MelvisProctacardt seems to highlight the fact that theoretical rigidity is not really where it's at these days.
In writing social history for public consumption (and also just because they're interesting), subtypes such as history of everyday life and mentalités deserve centre stage, and are now well-established on it. The quant stuff helps illustrate how common something was, why a trend might have shifted when it did, and so on.
If anything, I find myself leaning in the opposite direction from the question the opening post. I used to crave more and more insight into mentalités, although I accepted there were limits on their accessibility. Statistics are more discrete, and now I find I'm interested in more exact answers to things where they are obtainable, and in using statistics. Trying to write about fascinating but nebulous topics, as I've found on here, seems to take more energy and time than a few nice precise stats. To think I once considered, and decided against a quant-heavy undergrad social history module because "god that sounds boring!" (A question I would love to answer now, which really needs stats - but which seems impossible a) without buying British Historical Statistics and b) because the earlier stats don't exist - is "Was the English North-South Divide really caused by the Harrying of the North?" It's an attractive theory that gets bandied about in some places, but I wouldn't be content with an answer that didn't involve statistical analysis from pre-Conquest to present, and as such it's an impossibly huge project.)
I recall one of the round table threads (?) suggesting that Reddit often demands scientific-style answers where they are not always possible. So I can see why there could be some degree of reaction against that due to being on Reddit. I suppose I think it's good to mix it up after a while and if you were very into the stats, try another approach, and vice versa.
I've never used social history myself as a methodology, outside of perhaps the crossover I see between some of the focus in social history on everyday life and the focus in cultural history on microhistory.
Something I find frustrating is that it is hard to get a handle on the quantitative aspect of social history. There are a number of good books using social history that I like (all those books Evans edited in the 80s), but I find it difficult to figure out how to do it myself, despite seeing the final product. The most obvious problem is that I am not used to working with data sets, so often have to ask friends in Econ how I would even collect data, let alone analyze it in a useful way. The best work I've seen that actually explains how to do social history is probably Pat Hudson's book, but I think it is around 20 years old.
To actually answer one of the questions, I think that the tension between actor-centered history and the structural approach of social history is probably an artifact of the time. I would think that the formal methods of economists (e.g. rational-choice theory) could be used to model actors and the quantitative information gathered from social history could be used to model their environments. I would think the big issue would be that rational-choice theory has a very thin conception of the agent, which makes it rather useless for historical work and so some thicker notion of the historical agent (their motives, the norms they follow, etc.) would be needed. Of course, even if historians could supply that, I guess the issue would be that history is less about making predictions as much as offering certain sort of explanations, but it seems plausible to me that if one could model agents, then one could look at structures as being based on those agents rather than seeing the two approaches as in opposition. (Albeit, obviously, one could do that without formal modeling, I am assuming that one uses formal modeling because it seems to fit better with a quantitative approach.)