Left Center Left

I came across this paragraph in James Patterson’s Grand Expectations (p.62).

The murder rate had halved by 1945. As became clear later, this situation was abnormal, stemming in part from the fact that the United States had a relatively small cohort of young men - those most prone to crime - at the time. This in turn was the result of a trend to smaller families, which had developed earlier in the century, and of the war, which had but the boys in uniform and sent millions overseas. Later, when crime rates exploded in the 1960s, people looked nostalgically to the 1940s, failing to reaalize the special demographic reasons that had helped make the low rates possible.

This really is an amazing claim, considering how widespread a general culturalist explanation is - the notion that the 60s brought social anomie, which in turn led to higher crime and the breakdown of government legitimacy of all sorts. I myself held some version of it. Of course, the presense of demographic reasons doesn’t mean that social cohesion or anomie doesn’t come into the picture at all. But it forces us to be less quick at the draw in assuming an independent, reified “culture” responsible for things.

It occured to me that Patterson’s paragraph might be the sort of thing that best separates academic from popular historians. The popularizers, after all, amass volumes of minutiae, half to satisfy a fetish for historical detail, half to make normative claims about the past (e.g. whether President X was a good one). Academic historians, at their best, know that the voluminous detail is out there; instead, it’s their job to condense and process it, to make sense of it and to provide the best analytical framework for understanding the past.

This may not break evenly by scholar or writer, but they are two modes of understanding what historians can and should do.

UPDATE: David Greenberg revisits the recent plagiarism scandals and assesses how much play the popular/academic divide plays into it. I like the summary (from Peter Hoffner) that

the New Left scholars of the 1960s overthrew the so-called “consensus” history of their forebears, demolishing myths of a harmonious American past and discrediting the history-as-hero-worship on which generations were weaned. But while the New Left historians won out in academia, they never brought most lay history readers around to their viewpoint. Most of the public not only continues to regard history as a discrete, verifiable body of facts—about presidents, wars, great events, and the like—but they like their history to portray America, as one witticism has it, having been born perfect and improving ever since.

It’s not as simple as optimism vs. pessimism, nationalism vs. minoritarianism though. There’s a methodological difference. New Left and mainstream academic historiography (they aren’t the same thing, though they overlap some) see historical explanation as something that’s contestable and in need of exploration. The popular historians, by and large, seek to give fuller, novelistic, more humanistic shading to historical narratives already known. Despite shared form and at times shared rigor of research, they are trying to do two fundamentally different things.