Volume 34, Number 20 · December 17, 1987
Resisting the New
By Lawrence Stone
The New History and the Old
by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 209 pp., $20.00
The important subject of Gertrude Himmelfarb's passionately written and intelligent book is the transformation of the methods, objectives, and content of much of current historical writing over the past forty years. Professor Himmelfarb, a distinguished historian of political ideas in Victorian England, is shocked by the alleged dominance of what is called 'new history,' for her a large category in which she includes the work of Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Theodore Zeldin, E. P. Thompson, Peter Laslett, among many others. She charges that by concentrating on social and economic history the new historians ignore or downplay the significance of political history; that they despise the ideas of great thinkers in favor of those of the inarticulate masses; and that they substitute analysis for narrative as the natural mode of historical writing.
Review, 4639 words
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