AHR Forum

Crooked Lines

WILLIAM H. SEWELL, JR.

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GEOFF ELEY’S A CROOKED LINE DEFIES CLASSIFICATION in existing genres of historical
writing. It partakes of intellectual history, memoir, theoretical treatise, and political
tract without being quite any of these; it embodies the sort of experiment with form
that Eley praises in the work of Carolyn Steedman, one of his historiographical
heroines. Its deepest affinity seems to be with the work of the British Marxist literary
critic Raymond Williams, whose name and example emerge again and again at cru-
cial points in the text. Eley’s argumentation and in fact his very sentences have the
slow, complex, dialectical, and ruminative quality that one has learned to associate
with Williams—he is never quick to judge, always aware of the many-sidedness of
the problem at hand, theoretically alert but wary of abstraction, ever reflective about
his own historical placement within the argumentative complex, yet firm and con-
sistent in his Marxist-humanist moral and political bearing. Eley’s book displays an
admirable realism and humility in the face of the many surprises and disappoint-
ments that have troubled the historical experience of the “sixties generation” and
a willingness to learn both from that experience and from other people whose judg-
ments and perspectives are different from his own.
One of Eley’s purposes is to show what it means to be both intellectually am-
bitious and politically engaged as a historian. “My hope,” he writes, “is that mapping
a series of personal encounters between the tasks of historical writing and the sur-
rounding political climate may make it possible for others to recognize their own
analogous accounts, whether converging with mine or not” (6). Eley makes it clear
that the problems of historical engagement reach to the core of the historian’s emo-
tional being: the chapters of the book, after the initial “Becoming a Historian,” have
titles that evoke changes in Eley’s dominant feelings about history and politics over
time: “Optimism,” “Disappointment,” “Reflectiveness,” and “Defiance.” Eley says
he became a historian “because history really mattered; it was necessary for making
a difference” (ix). He has sustained this motivation through all the twists and turns
(a crooked line, as he puts it) of both world politics and professional historiography
during the course of his career. The book is, among other things, an eloquent tes-
timony to history as a moral calling; students contemplating a career in our discipline
should read it and take it to heart.
The chief subject matter of the book is the two great historiographical movements
that have reshaped the profession since Eley began his undergraduate work at Balliol
College, Oxford, in 1967: the rise of social history in the 1960s and 1970s and the

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394 William H. Sewell, Jr.

turn to cultural history in the course of the 1980s and 1990s. Eley’s account of these
transformations is written from the standpoint of his own career and his own en-
gagements as a historian and is, hence, biased toward European history, particularly
German and British, with an emphasis on history written from a left-of-center per-
spective. (His extended discussion of the rise and triumph of social history in Ger-
many, and its eventual challenge by Alltagsgeschichte, is particularly masterful.) The
range of reading and historiographical reference is, however, very wide, and the book
includes shrewd observations on American, French, and South Asian historiography.
Nor do other disciplines escape his gaze: Eley comments on developments in so-
ciology, anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and lit-

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erary criticism, all of which, as he notes, have played crucial roles in the transfor-
mation of historical writing and research, including his own, over the past four
decades. His footnotes, which take up nearly a third of the book, are a goldmine of
references and commentary.
Eley was himself a participant in both of the great historiographical movements
he narrates. Entering graduate school (at the University of Sussex) in 1971, he was
part of the generation that rode the rising tide of social history. In his English milieu,
social history was fundamentally Marxist in orientation—strongly influenced by E. P.
Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, Christopher Hill, and other British
Marxist historians. However, as Eley points out, the other major schools of social
history—the French Annales school and international but especially American social
science history—had highly convergent programs. All were in search of what Charles
Tilly pithily termed Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons; all had the
ambition of grasping historical totality; all were open to interdisciplinary collabo-
ration with other social sciences; and all were committed to an essentially materialist
model of explanation in which economic structures held pride of place.1 Rather than
rivals, the three styles of social history seemed collaborators on a common project.
But social history had no sooner gained hegemony in the historical profession
(toward the end of the 1970s) than some of its leading practitioners began to assert
the insufficiency of materialist explanation and to emphasize instead the importance
of cultural structures and processes. Over the course of the 1980s and accelerating
into the 1990s, what came to be called cultural history overtook social history as the
leading edge of scholarship—but not without some fierce struggles. Like the social
history movement, this linguistic or cultural turn in history was international in scope
and profoundly interdisciplinary. But the disciplinary partners shifted from sociol-
ogy, political science, geography, and economics to anthropology, philosophy, cul-
tural studies, and literary criticism. Just as the social history movement was deeply
influenced by populist or socialist political aspirations, the cultural history movement
was pushed forward by a new set of political passions—by feminism, most decisively,
but also by identity movements around race and ethnicity. At the same time, the
declining plausibility of totalizing socialist utopias converged with a new concern for
the local and for questions of personal identity. The search for big structures gave
way to microhistories and histories of subjectivity; meanwhile the certainties of struc-
tural explanatory strategies were corroded by the poststructuralisms of Foucault,

1 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984).

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 Crooked Lines 395

Derrida, and Lacan and by the vogue for postmodernism. Eley, while never a prime
advocate of these changes, was certainly sympathetic to the new sensibility of cultural
history; at the same time, he never renounced the perspectives of social history.2
Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the novelty of cultural history
and the linguistic turn has begun to wear off, Eley ends his book with a plea for
theoretical and methodological pluralism: “between social and cultural history,” he
concludes, “there is no need to choose” (181).3
The book stimulates two lines of rumination. First, as Eley hoped it would, his
story has prompted me to think about how my historiographical and political en-
gagements resembled and differed from his. His account is, at one level, immediately

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recognizable to any historian who has lived through these years. But it is also very
particular. I, for one, was struck by how Anglo-centric Eley’s attachments and judg-
ments continue to be, after his nearly thirty years at the University of Michigan. The
three superb intellectual portraits of historians that he uses to conclude his central
chapters—Edward Thompson for “Optimism,” Tim Mason for “Disappointment,”
and Carolyn Steedman for “Reflectiveness”—are all English, as is Raymond Wil-
liams, Eley’s most consistent point of theoretical reference, and Eric Hobsbawm,
whose “History of Society” slogan is one of Eley’s organizing tropes. As an Amer-
ican-born historian who has struggled through the same general succession of his-
toriographical changes, I find that the specificity of this English standpoint serves to
highlight specificities of my American experience. Comparing the crooked lines
marked out by these two trajectories poses questions about how we should under-
stand the relationship between historical context and historiographical changes over
the past four decades.
My second rumination, apparently unrelated but in fact closely linked to the first,
arises from a sense of dissatisfaction with Eley’s stance in the historiographical
present, particularly in his final chapter, “Defiance.” It is, of course, difficult to know
quite how to judge or to criticize a book so utterly sui generis as this one. As a report
on Eley’s own ambivalent feelings about contemporary politics and historiography,
his concluding chapter is as eloquent as those that precede it. Yet I find his claim
of defiance out of step with his seemingly uncritical stance toward the currently
dominant style of historiographical practice, what is commonly labeled “the new
cultural history.” I believe that leftist historians can be productively defiant in the
dispiriting political conjuncture of the early twenty-first century, but that it will re-
quire some hard theoretical labor on our part. We need both to find a theoretically
satisfactory way of overcoming the current divide between social and cultural history
and to recognize how our own efforts to rethink history are conditioned by con-
temporary transformations in global capitalism.

THE CROOKED LINE OF MY OWN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DEVELOPMENT broadly parallels

Eley’s. It was, moreover, tightly intertwined with his for a while. When I taught at
2 His somewhat ambivalent position was well stated in “Is All the World a Text? From Social History

to the History of Society Two Decades Later,” in Terrence McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the
Human Sciences (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), 193–243.
3 The point is repeated on p. 201.

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396 William H. Sewell, Jr.

the University of Michigan in the later 1980s, Geoff Eley and I were both members
of the steering committee of the Program on the Comparative Study of Social Trans-
formation. CSST, as it was called, was an explicitly interdisciplinary program in-
cluding historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and literary
scholars. It was the prime site of the discussions (and hammer-and-tong intellectual
battles) that accompanied the linguistic or cultural turn in Ann Arbor in those
years—and a perfect example of the sort of dialogue between disciplines and the-
oretical perspectives that Eley properly identifies as a potent source of historio-
graphical innovation. During the heady days of our joint involvement in CSST, our
historical lines tracked each other’s very closely.

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But if we generally saw eye to eye in those years, our previous historiographical
and political development had been quite different. Although I am ten years older
than Eley, I, too, was deeply influenced by the politics of the 1960s. I grew up in
Madison, Wisconsin, the son of New-Dealer parents. For me, coming of age in the
1950s, the burning issue was not the workers’ struggles but civil liberties and civil
rights. The first political cause I strongly identified with was the “Joe Must Go”
campaign—an unsuccessful attempt in 1954 (when I was fourteen) to recall Joseph
McCarthy, my state’s junior senator. During my college years at the University of
Wisconsin, the dominant issue was the civil rights movement. Even during my grad-
uate school years at Berkeley, it was a kind of radical left-liberalism rather than
Marxism that defined the political terrain. The free speech movement of 1964, de-
fending the right of students to organize on campus for civil rights activism, was the
great galvanizing event. Issues other than free speech and civil rights of course arose
in ensuing years—most importantly, opposition to the War in Vietnam. The Bay
Area was also at the center of “lifestyle” cultural radicalism in the 1960s: experi-
mentation with psychedelic drugs, the San Francisco rock music scene, the sexual
revolution, gay liberation, communes, challenges to conventional sex roles—the en-
tire panoply of what we called “the expansion of consciousness.” In Berkeley in the
1960s, the venerable liberal right to the pursuit of happiness was given a powerful
new impetus. By contrast, Marxism, while present in the vibrant politics of Berkeley,
was hardly central.
I arrived at Berkeley determined to study social history. My outlook partook of
the default economic determinism of the moment, yet I was not a Marxist. I read
and was thrilled by E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in the
winter of 1964, when I was developing my dissertation project in labor history. But
what impressed me most in the book was Thompson’s depiction of the enormous
diversity in circumstances and attitudes within the laboring population, and espe-
cially his demonstration that artisans took the leading role in the workers’ struggles.
For me, Thompson’s book served as a welcome blow against the then-conventional
Marxist argument in labor history—that worker radicalism resulted from the growth
of a uniform factory proletariat. Thompson’s findings seemed to me consonant with
detailed quantitative studies of the relationship between social structure and po-
litical engagements by sociologically inspired scholars such as Stephan Thernstrom
and Charles Tilly.4 In European, and specifically French, labor history, Marxism
4 Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge,

Mass., 1964); Charles Tilly, The Vendée (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).

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 Crooked Lines 397

seemed the dead hand of tradition, not the cutting edge. By contrast, liberal Amer-
ican social science offered valuable tools for getting at the social origins of nine-
teenth-century worker radicalism.5
My lack of political or intellectual commitment to Marxism undoubtedly made
my subsequent move to cultural history easier. Although my common sense was
materialist, my materialism lacked political weight. When my University of Chicago
colleagues Bernard Cohn and Ronald Inden introduced me to the wonders of sym-
bolic anthropology in the early 1970s, I had no political reason to resist. Besides, I
was growing frustrated with the limitations of quantitative social history, which could
indeed reconstruct social structures in exquisite detail, but which remained silent

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about what people felt or believed. Approaches borrowed from anthropology were
attractive because they promised to yield deep insights into the meaning of workers’
utterances and collective action. But for me, this desire to discover people’s cultural
meanings also had a charge that went beyond the purely intellectual. I had been
vaguely aware ever since graduate school that the quantitative techniques definitive
of social history had a complicated political valence. On the one hand, they had a
certain democratic implication because they seemed the best means of getting at the
experiences of the sort of people—for example, workers and peasants—who rarely
left behind written sources. But on the other hand, quantification was redolent of
precisely the bureaucratic corporate mentality that the counterculture of the 1960s
found deeply objectionable. Taking on the intellectual perspective of cultural an-
thropology not only produced new data about workers: it seemed positively liber-
ating. Rather than being limited by a narrow and bureaucratic form of research that
gave me access only to the outward forms of working-class life, I could now explore
the surprising and wonderfully variegated realms of workers’ symbolic life—effec-
tively, their consciousness and collective unconscious. These new forms of research
revealed alternate moral universes by no means reducible to the facts of occupational
structure, wage rates, and degrees of economic exploitation. For me, and I think for
many other historians of my generation, cultural history resonated with the yearnings
of the 1960s counterculture. I certainly never renounced quantitative history, but
from the mid-1970s forward I began to regard quantification more as an ancillary
technique than as the royal road to historical truth.6
Up to this point in my career, I had been rather dismissive of Marxism as a frame-
5 That these tools were indeed valuable was demonstrated by several young American scholars of

French labor history, including Robert Bezucha, The Lyon Uprising of 1834: Social and Political Conflict
in the Early July Monarchy (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), and Joan Wallach Scott, The Glassworkers of Car-
maux: French Craftsmen and Political Action in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1974). My
dissertation on the working class of nineteenth-century Marseille was never published, but for my work
in this vein, see William H. Sewell, Jr., “The Working Class of Marseille under the Second Republic:
Social Structure and Political Behavior,” in Peter N. Stearns and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Workers in
the Industrial Revolution: Recent Studies of Labor in the United States and Europe (New Brunswick, N.J.,
1974), 75–115, and “Social Change and the Rise of Working-Class Politics in Nineteenth Century Mar-
seille,” Past and Present 65 (November 1974): 75–109.
6 Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge,

1980) was the principal product of this period of my historiographical development. Its arguments cut
strongly against the predominant Marxisant themes of labor history in this era. French socialism, it
argued, was a product not simply of the industrial revolution or even of “proletarianization,” but also
of a political and cultural struggle that created a new working-class political culture between 1830 and
1848 by grafting old regime guild solidarities onto the language and political forms of the French Rev-
olution.

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398 William H. Sewell, Jr.

work for social history, on the grounds that it tended so strongly toward reduction-
ism.7 But during the late 1970s and the 1980s, I began slowly to revise this position.
Getting to know the Marxist economists David Gordon, Herb Gintis, and Rick Ed-
wards and the Marxist art historian Tim Clark during my years at the Institute for
Advanced Study in the late 1970s and participating in a Marxist study group at the
University of Arizona in the 1980s made it clear that my grasp of Marxism had been
utterly superficial and that I had a lot to learn. So by the time my crooked line began
to overlap with Eley’s in Ann Arbor in the later 1980s, my appreciation of Marxism
had risen considerably. At the same time, political developments in the 1980s, par-
ticularly Reaganism in the United States and Thatcherism in Britain, made it clear

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that class war, of the rich against the poor, was alive and well. The wrenching changes
in the U.S. economy—massive deindustrialization, the shift of power from the
Northeast and Midwest to the South and West, the globalization of finance—made
issues of economic structure and change seem absolutely urgent. Finally, the fall of
the Berlin Wall, which was seen by many commentators as marking the definitive end
of Marxism, seemed to me to liberate Marx from the grotesque totalitarian regime
that had falsely claimed to incarnate his ideas. Thus, during the time we worked in
tandem at the University of Michigan, Eley and I were both eclectics, drawn si-
multaneously by exciting innovations in cultural theory and an appreciation of Marx-
ist perspectives. And since our formal partnership ended in 1990, when I moved back
to the University of Chicago, both of us have continued to look for ways simulta-
neously to embrace social history, Marxism, and cultural history. Both Eley and I
have taken defiant political postures in the face of the left’s political difficulties since
1980, refusing to accept the seeming triumph of global capitalism and plutocratic
democracy as anything like the “end of history.” For the time being, at least, our lines
continue to advance, however crookedly, in roughly parallel directions.

ANY READER OF ELEY WILL RECOGNIZE THIS THUMBNAIL SKETCH of my historiographical

development as in some sense a variant of his. The differences in our trajectories—
for example, Eley’s early commitment to Marxism and my early liberalism or my
more precocious and emphatic linguistic turn—are easy to explain by our particular
biographies. But what about the similarities, which clearly were shared by many his-
torians in our broad generation, not only in North America and Europe, but in South
Asia as well?8 In all of these places, there was an upsurge of social history in the 1960s
and 1970s, followed by a move to cultural history in the 1980s and 1990s. The timing
and the particular details varied, of course, but the sequence has been surprisingly
uniform.
Although Eley discusses a wide range of national historiographies, he rarely steps
back to consider the reasons for this wider transnational pattern. It is paradoxical
that while he consistently advocates retaining social history’s totalizing ambition, he

7 I had always admired the work of E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, but thought of them as

unrepresentative mavericks.
8 For these purposes, I would define our generation as roughly those born between the late 1930s

and the early 1950s. I am too ignorant of the historiography of other areas of the world to know whether
the same pattern applies to historians in, say, Africa, East Asia, Latin America, or the Middle East.

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 Crooked Lines 399

fails to pursue this ambition in his own historical account of recent historiography.
He gives us a fine-grained analysis of intellectual movements in the discipline and
relates these to ongoing political struggles, but fails to relate them to the develop-
ment of global capitalism—which, for him as a Marxist, would seem to have defined,
or at least participated importantly in defining, the social totality within which both
historians and political actors were constrained to act.
About the only general claim that Eley makes about the initial rise of social
history is that “the radical politics of the sixties were inseparable from the histo-
riographical story. The breakthrough to social history was unimaginable without the
sense of political possibility beckoning during the later 1960s” (59). The radical po-

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litical movements called up by the metonym “1968” were, of course, famously in-
ternational, and this quasi-global radicalism certainly fired the imaginations of many
social historians in the making. But in my opinion, 1968 is better understood as giving
a particular spin to a historiographical movement that was already well under way.
When I arrived in Berkeley in 1962, many graduate students, myself included, were
already planning to work in social history; by 1968, we were well into our disser-
tations. Instead of seeing the political radicalism of the late 1960s as a necessary
antecedent to the “breakthrough to social history,” I think this breakthrough and the
ubiquitous radical movements of these years must both be seen as arising from
deeper social causes. Elaborating a full argument to this effect would take much
more space than I have here. But I think that the epistemological optimism of social
history—its faith in the possibility of reconstructing a history of the social totality—
was made plausible in large part by the specific form of capitalist development that
characterized the great worldwide postwar capitalist boom. So-called “Fordist” or
state-centered capitalism, with its fundamental pact between big business, big labor,
and big government, its standardized mass production, its Keynesian steering of the
economy, its fixed exchange rates, and its global guarantee by United States military
power, had produced, or at least seemed to have produced, a graspable, predictable,
and steadily progressing form of society. To use Raymond Williams’s language, one
might say that the “structure of experience” generated by postwar capitalism un-
derwrote the plausibility of social history, whether in its Marxist, its Annaliste, or its
social-scientific form.9
But so, in a different but related way, did Fordist capitalism underwrite the 1960s
revolts. Those revolts were spearheaded by young people, and more specifically by
university students. As Daniel Bell pointed out in The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society, the type of capitalism that arose in the postwar boom in the wealthy countries
was increasingly dependent on the production and management of knowledge.10
This required a better-trained labor force, which entailed a vast expansion of the
university systems in all advanced democracies. In the late 1950s and the 1960s,
university students made up a far higher proportion of their age cohorts than ever
before. They were generally ensured of good jobs once they graduated, were con-
9 For a similar argument about sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, see George Steinmetz, “Scientific

Authority and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The Plausibility of Positivism in American Sociology since
1945,” in Steinmetz, ed., The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological
Others (Durham, N.C., 2005), 275–323.
10 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York,

1973).

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400 William H. Sewell, Jr.

fident about the future, were living independently without adult responsibilities, and
were supplied with inexpensive paperbacks and new and effective birth-control tech-
nologies. Although university students were clearly beneficiaries of the Fordist
boom, universities also afforded them the social space and intellectual resources to
develop a critical political culture and to experiment with new lifestyles. The student
milieu combined the optimism that grew out of the apparently permanent prosperity
of the postwar boom with a highly critical attitude toward the form of capitalism that
in fact enabled that prosperity. The student radicals’ rhetoric and their mode of life
was quite specifically anti-Fordist—especially hostile to bureaucracy, corporate con-
formity, and mass culture. It seems fair to conclude that the student movements of

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the 1960s were deeply embedded in the contradictions of Fordist capitalism, at once
dependent on its promises of endless prosperity and insistently pointing beyond it
to a less stultifying form of life that its very material abundance made thinkable. In
short, understanding the rise of either social history or the radical movements of the
1960s—both of them clearly transnational phenomena—can be enhanced by show-
ing how these phenomena were linked to the broad forms and dynamics of global
capitalism in their eras.
I think Eley’s account of the cultural turn suffers from the same sort of problem
as his account of the initial rise of social history. Again his story combines intellectual
and political history via personal narrative, but it contains little reflection about the
macrosocial environment in which the historiographical changes took place. In the
course of his account, Eley mentions two aspects of the sociopolitical environment
of the late 1970s and 1980s that undermined social history’s modes of explanation.
On the one hand, “class was weakening in its persuasiveness as a master concept”
(100), largely because of the decline of the labor movement internationally after
about 1976 and the shocking victory, with significant working-class support, of a
viciously anti-labor Thatcherist Conservative Party in Britain in 1979 and again in
1983.11 The other was the rise of feminism, a political and intellectual movement that
no self-respecting leftist could ignore, but that, by the 1980s, was insisting that “fun-
damental areas of social life simply couldn’t be subsumed into the analytical terms
of class” (98). For a British social historian whose view of the social totality was
premised on class, this was indeed a potent combination. But here Eley’s account
is too local to make sense of the overall historiographical and political conjuncture.
The weakening of the labor movement certainly was discouraging for the left ev-
erywhere, and feminism everywhere posed conundrums for the implicitly masculinist
assumptions of social history and leftist politics. But for social historians not strongly
cathected to class as an analytical category—for example, American social-science
historians like me or French Annalistes—the fading plausibility of class explanation
was a matter of relative indifference and therefore cannot explain their turn to cul-
tural history.
In my opinion, the decline no less than the rise of social history must be connected
to the changing macrosocial forms and fortunes of world capitalism. The postwar
boom that underwrote both the rise of social history and the political-cultural revolts
of the 1960s ceased abruptly in the early 1970s, and the world economy entered a

11 The equivalent American events were Ronald Reagan’s victories in 1980 and 1984.

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 Crooked Lines 401

period of sustained structural crisis. It was not just that economic growth slowed, but
that the underlying structures of Fordist capitalism came unraveled over the course
of the 1970s and 1980s. Industrial heartlands became “rust belts.” Keynesianism,
which could not solve the riddle of “stagflation,” gave way to monetarism and mi-
croeconomics. The system of pegged exchange rates collapsed, making way for the
hypertrophic growth of “off-shore” currency speculation, enhanced, of course, by the
new electronic communications technologies. Financial services replaced manufac-
turing as the leading sector in the wealthiest countries. Labor unions declined in
power and numbers. Corporations themselves metamorphosed from hierarchically
structured “national champions” to much more loosely structured “multinationals”

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that, taking advantage of the new electronic communications technology, could lo-
cate manufacturing, back-office work, and technical services wherever they could be
performed most cheaply. At all levels of the occupational hierarchy, both for man-
agers and for production workers, job security and the well-defined career ladder
were eroded, as workers increasingly experienced a kind of occupational picaresque,
featuring lateral movement between firms, bouts of temporary work, self-employ-
ment, and frequent retraining. International trade surged, as did international labor
migration, both legal and illegal. Nation-states were ever less capable of controlling
the economic activities that went on within their boundaries; indeed, some have
claimed that the very notion of a “national economy” ceased to make sense. The
state-centered sociopolitical imaginary of the postwar era, with its confidence in state
economic steering, growing welfare-state benefits, guarantees of full employment,
and state-led cooperation between labor and capital, lost its hold. This older political
imaginary was gradually and unevenly displaced by a rising “neoliberal” political
imaginary, one that exalted individual responsibility, universal entrepreneurship,
privatization, deregulation, and globalization.
It is puzzling that an avowed Marxist such as Eley never asks how the epistemic
practices of historians might have been affected by such a fundamental transfor-
mation of the social forms of world capitalism. Most obviously, if the consolidation
of Fordism in the 1950s and 1960s made social structures seem graspable, predict-
able, and quantifiable, it makes sense that the unraveling of Fordism in the 1970s
and 1980s undermined the plausibility of the social history paradigm. By the later
1970s, not only politics and social structure but even personal identities seemed
disconcertingly up for grabs. When historians turned from the pursuit of big struc-
tures to microhistory, from socioeconomic determinism to studies of culture, from
master processes to the sources of subjective identity, this search for new forms of
intelligibility in the past reflected the difficulties of making sense of a present in
which Fordist capitalism had disintegrated and was being replaced by the more fluid
and unpredictable forms of an emerging global neoliberalism.12 Nor was it only his-
torians who, in these years, eschewed the reified categories of the previous intel-
lectual era. Anthropologists abandoned the conventions of preexisting ethnography;
12 The French historian Jacques Revel would seem to agree. Concerning the late 1970s and the 1980s,

Revel remarked that “the doubts that . . . spread through our societies, confronted as they were by forms
of crises that they could not comprehend, nor even, in many cases, describe, has certainly contributed
to the diffusion of a conviction that the project of an overall intelligibility of the social had to be, at least
provisionally, put in brackets.” Revel, “Microanalyse et construction du social,” in Revel, Jeux d’échelles:
La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris, 1996), 18.

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402 William H. Sewell, Jr.

literary critics adopted deconstruction; postmodernism became a rallying cry across

a whole range of academic disciplines. Even social scientists who continued to em-
brace mathematics and scientific method reflected this tendency to eschew reified
structures and rebuild their disciplines from the ground up. Rational choice, with its
stringent assumption of methodological individualism, made great strides in eco-
nomics and political science. And in sociology, the new methodology of social net-
work analysis insisted that social structures could not be simply posited, but had to
be built up laboriously from the social interactions out of which they were ultimately
constituted. The era of transition from Fordist or state-centered capitalism to the
globalized capitalism of neoliberalism was characterized all across the human sci-

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ences by a general epistemic uncertainty—an uncertainty that has a certain elective
affinity with the heightened “flexibility” that is one of the hallmarks of the new global
economic order.13 In history, this uncertainty took the form of the cultural turn,
flirtations with poststructuralism, and a fascination with microhistory and subjec-
tivity.
In the 1980s and the 1990s, many historians were intoxicated by the sense that
the linguistic turn had liberated them from the stifling frameworks and static politics
of social history. But that mood seemed to change as global neoliberalism consol-
idated itself around the turn of the new millennium. The spectacle of soaring ex-
ecutive salaries combined with stagnant wages, the increasingly apparent erosion of
democracy by plutocracy, and the unambiguous exaltation of exchange value over
all other forms of value have inspired a kind of nostalgia for social history—which,
for all its failings, at least attempted to wrestle with the problem of large-scale so-
cioeconomic transformations. Eley, with his current mood of political defiance and
his affirmation of the continuing value of social history, is a prominent example. He
might be a bellwether of a coming historiographical trend; it is too early to know.

ELEY’S SLOGAN FOR THE CURRENT ERA OF “DEFIANCE” is that “between social history
and cultural history, there is really no need to choose” (181). His basic desire, if I
understand him properly, is entirely laudable: to revive social history’s effort to grasp
(capitalist) social totality without giving up the immense intellectual gains made
possible by the cultural turn. But if the goal is laudable, I do not find Eley’s final
chapter very effective at pointing the way—above all, in my opinion, because he has
not found a theoretical perspective adequate to the task.
At one level, Eley’s claim that there is no need to choose turns out to be little
more than an expression of satisfaction with the sort of work being done at present
under the banner of “the new cultural history.” In this formulation, the admonition
to retain social history is weak, since it is far from clear whether anything worthy of
the name of social history is currently on offer. Thus Eley declares at one point that
social history “simply isn’t available any more,” that it has “ceased to exist” as a
coherent project, and that each element of its paradigm “has succumbed to relentless
and compelling critique” (189). Nothing remains, Eley implies, but fragmentary

13 On “flexible accumulation,” see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into

the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989).

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 Crooked Lines 403

themes or topics drifting free of the old social history paradigm. Near the very end
of the book, he argues that by the late 1990s, “the new cultural history,” now the
“broadly accepted description” for the best work going on in the field, had actually
become an “eclectic repertoire of approaches and themes” whose boundary with
social history was “extraordinarily more blurred.” Here Eley celebrates younger his-
torians’ ability to muddle through, to find, under the banner of the new cultural
history, concrete ways of combining social and cultural themes and topics while
avoiding “the programmatic advocacy of one authorizing form of theory against an-
other.” He praises the “hybridity” of the “new cultural history” for enabling histo-
rians to set theory aside and get on with a wide range of interesting empirical work

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(201).
But these rather uncritical paragraphs are followed by another that points in a
quite different direction. “Some confidence,” Eley writes, “needs to be regained in
the possibility of grasping society as a whole, of theorizing its bases of cohesion and
instability, and of analyzing its forms of motion” (201–202). Here Eley indicates, I
believe, his most deep-seated reason for continuing to advocate a combination of
social and cultural history: his appreciation of social history’s sense of the social
totality. In one mood, he seems content that various themes and topics recognizably
derived from the now-shattered social history paradigm can find their place in the
shapeless bazaar of the new cultural history. But in another mood, he is discontented
that historians have abandoned their efforts to grasp social totality. Yet even then
he remains diffident, as indicated by the far from ringing plea that “some confidence
needs to be regained in the possibility of grasping society as a whole.” He goes on
to say that “neither skepticism about the persuasiveness of grand narratives nor
critiques of Enlightenment thinking require altogether abandoning the project of so-
cietywide analysis or societal history” (202; my emphasis). He then admits that “for
my own part, I’ve continued thinking in terms of capitalism, class, the nation, social
formation, and so forth.” He has not, in other words, “altogether abandoned” his
Marxist categories. “But,” he continues, “I am far more cautious and uncertain about
exactly what these grand-theoretical concepts can allow me to discuss and explain.”
The paragraph that began with a call to revive social history’s effort to grasp social
totality ends not with an affirmation of the confidence he says must be restored, but
with reflections on the historical contingency of the very concepts, such as class and
society, by which totality might be grasped (202).14
Yet in the book’s final paragraph, Eley puts the ambivalence behind him to sug-
gest “defiance” as “the appropriate response for our new contemporary moment.”
In an era beset by grand narratives of neoliberalism and “brutally demonizing rhet-
orics about good and evil in the world,” he suggests that we (by which he means leftist
historians) need to develop metanarratives of our own, “new ‘histories of society’ ”
(203). I entirely agree with this conclusion. But I think that defiance must be more
than an attitude, and that any attempt at writing new histories of society (with the
totalizing ambitions Eley intends) must face head-on some theoretical difficulties
that Eley avoids in this book.
I see two fundamental theoretical problems. First, it is necessary to work out in
14 Here, as so often in this book, one must admire Eley’s willingness to articulate, openly and pain-

fully, his intellectual and political ambivalence.

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404 William H. Sewell, Jr.

theoretical terms some means of combining, on the same epistemological terrain, the
materialism of “social history” and the idealism of “cultural history.” In a recent
book, I have offered my own attempt at such a theoretical reconceptualization. I
begin by denying that all social relations are reducible to language, but argue that
because all social relations have a meaningful content, they can nevertheless be
grasped by a modified or expanded version of the linguistic model. I try to show that
the whole range of human behaviors—for example, such activities as work, sex, cook-
ing, currency speculation, or basketball—can profitably be understood as constituted
by a web of “semiotic practices.” I also argue that if the implications of such an
approach are followed out correctly, we will find that interconnected semiotic prac-

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tices accumulate into what I call “built environments”—materially existing and spa-
tially located physical and social fabrics that endure but are also transformed by
continuing flows of semiotic practice. This theoretical framework may or may not
seem promising, but it explicitly goes beyond a mere attitude of defiance to meld
social and cultural history into a conceptually coherent and unified historiographical
project.15
The second necessary theoretical task is to rethink the problem of social totality.
The striking and often brutal transformations of capitalist social relations since the
1970s have helped convince me that capitalism is the crucial horizon of social totality,
not only in the present, but in the entire modern era. From this it follows that re-
thinking social totality requires an engagement with Marxism, since, in my opinion,
it is adherents of this tradition who have thought most deeply and productively about
capitalism. My own predilections within Marxist debate differ, I believe, from Eley’s.
I read his remarks on Marxism in A Crooked Line to imply that for him, class is the
fundamental category of Marxist analysis. I would tend to emphasize the endless
accumulation of capital as forming the crucial underlying dynamic of capitalism, with
class and class struggle figuring more as a context and outcome of the dynamic of
accumulation. In capital-centered Marxist theories, the endless accumulation of cap-
ital produces changing historical configurations of political power, spatial relations,
class struggles, intellectual forms, technology, and systems of economic regulation
that endure for a certain time until they are dismantled by their own contradictions
and replaced by new configurations.16 As I see it, these reconfigurations of capitalism
are as much cultural as material processes—evolving sets of semiotic practices and
at the same time evolving “built environments.” The difference between these two
conceptions of capitalism is, I believe, consequential for rethinking social totality.
It was, after all, the class-centric model of social totality that withered under the
assaults of neoliberal capitalist restructuring and feminist theory in the late 1970s
and 1980s; I think that conceptions of social totality centered on endless accumu-
lation (such as the one I have attempted, however crudely, to sketch out above in
15 This account is compressed, perhaps to an absurd degree, from chapter 10, “Reconfiguring the

‘Social’ in Social Science: An Interpretivist Manifesto,” in William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social
Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 318–372.
16 For three very different historical perspectives on the endless accumulation of capital, see David

Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford, 1982); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money,
Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London, 1994); and Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social
Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge, 1993) and “Contemporary His-
torical Transformations: Beyond Post-Industrial Theory and Neo-Marxism,” Current Perspectives in So-
cial Theory 19 (1999): 3–53.

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 Crooked Lines 405

my account of the global capitalist transformations following the 1970s) will prove
much less vulnerable.
Geoff Eley’s A Crooked Line is a powerful stimulus to reflection on the political
entailments and theoretical challenges of history—both as written and as lived. It
goes without saying that not everyone will agree with his judgments. As I have in-
dicated, I think that finding a way forward from the current historiographical per-
plexity will require a stronger dose of theory and a different sort of theory than Eley
has offered. But he has masterfully sketched out the terrain on which the debates
must take place.

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William H. Sewell, Jr., is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor
Emeritus of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. He has
written widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French history and has
published several essays attempting to introduce a more historical sensibility
into social theory. His most recent book, Logics of History: Social Theory and
Social Transformation, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005.
He is currently working on eighteenth-century capitalism and the cultural or-
igins of the French Revolution.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2008