9 - From Folk History to Structural History: Otto Brunner (1898-1982) and the Radical-Conservative Roots of German Social History

Summary

“Folk history is the need of the hour.”

Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship, 1st ed. (1939)

“Structural history is the need of the hour.”

Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship, 4th ed. (1959)

Whether we choose to view social history as a salutary antidote to the elitism of traditional historical narrative, or, with Gertrude Himmelfarb, as a symptom of cultural and political decline, the writing of social history is usually identified with the political Left. There is ample evidence to support this judgment. Visions of History, a volume of interviews edited in 1984 by the Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization, includes testimonials from such eminent social historians as Natalie Davis, Herbert Gutman, and E.P. Thompson, all Anglo-American scholars who arrived at social history via a radical or Marxist critique of traditional historical scholarship. Among French historians there comes to mind Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, both men of the Left whose “social interpretation” of the French Revolution proved so influential, while the West German partisans of “historical social science” who rose to prominence in the 1970s repeatedly stressed the critical and politically emancipatory function of social history.

In fact, however, the impetus behind the rise of social history has come from the Right as well as the Left. If the idea of a social history rooted in radical-conservative thought seems anomalous, it is perhaps because we tend to associate sociology - the discipline from which social history has drawn most of its categories if not its insights - with the liberal or oppositional thought of Mill, Marx, or the Frankfurt School. To a significant degree, however, sociology also arose out of the conservative and restorationist concerns prompted by the political and industrial revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.