In May 1963 Peter Laslett, anxious that his research into the social structure of early modern England lacked support in Cambridge, contacted C. P. Snow, a novelist and public figure known to have influence with the foundations that are the lifeblood of fledgling academic enterprises.Footnote 1 At the same time Snow was preparing his response to F. R. Leavis's attack on The Two Cultures, eager to shift the ongoing controversy onto what he considered favorable terrain: his optimistic reading of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Snow identified Laslett as a potential ally in his public quarrel with Leavis and his private campaign against the New Left, and he moved quickly to secure support for the nascent Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. When Laslett sent him a draft of the first five chapters of The World We Have Lost the following year, Snow was delighted: here at last was the new social history, employing the tools of the social sciences to demolish the romantic delusions of his critics.Footnote 2 Despite his overall approval, however, Snow was quick to object to the penultimate sentence of Laslett's first chapter: “Time was when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size.” In this—what was to become one of the most famous lines of historical prose of its era—Snow detected the very nostalgia the new social history promised to eradicate.Footnote 3
This collaboration between Snow and Laslett stands at the intersection of two stories from the 1960s: the development of a scientific style of social history and the “two cultures” controversy.Footnote 4 This article argues that this intersection forces the reconsideration of both of these stories, shifting our attention to the political stakes that drove what have since become familiar disciplinary developments. When Snow delivered The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution as the Rede Lecture in Cambridge in 1959, his greatest success was to establish the terms through which commentators analyzed the ensuing controversy: Snow was thus identified as an advocate of the sciences, Leavis as a defender of the humanities, and together they were assigned their places in an argument dating back to T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold.Footnote 5 While there is no doubt that the Snow-Leavis episode somehow fits into this longer history, the imposition of that narrative upon their argument presents a number of interpretive problems. First, the very precedents that seem to explain the affair beg the question of how so venerable a quarrel could have generated such hostility in the early 1960s.Footnote 6 Second, casting Leavis and Snow as defenders of the arts and sciences, respectively, neglects those points at which they fit uncomfortably, if at all, into their assigned roles. And third, the long historical perspective that depicts the debate in terms of arts-versus-sciences obscures a more salient fault between these antagonists: a clash not of disciplines, but of ideologies.Footnote 7
Rather than adopting Snow's terms to explain the controversy, then, this article takes the dispute as a lens through which to explore a wider political rift. Beneath the arts-versus-sciences language in the debate lay opposing views on progress, history, and society. As a writer and public figure Snow advanced a liberal reading of the progress afforded by industrial civilization; as a university teacher and literary critic Leavis advocated a critical stance against precisely these articles of faith. That these opposing positions were thrown into conflict in the early 1960s is not a surprise: at home it was a time of economic prosperity, when the government had just won an election by reminding the electorate they had never had it so good; abroad it was a time of decolonization, the retreat from imperial administration but not from the assumption that industrial development held the key to prosperity for newly independent states. Critics of the telos of industrial progress that dominated the political discourse of the day thus had to confront the reading of history that underlay it.Footnote 8
This article explores one aspect of that confrontation between advocates and critics of industrialization in their competing efforts to shape the emerging field of social history. In the course of those efforts the appeal to “science,” the need for “objectivity,” and the desire for a “scientific history” appeared repeatedly, but here they are treated less as novel attributes of a new kind of history than as rhetorical weapons employed on behalf of wider political aims.Footnote 9 I begin by situating the conflict in the context of the postwar development of historical study, arguing that the confluence of institutional expansion and discipline formation offered the rare opportunity to define a field poised to dominate a generation of research and teaching. Then I trace the development of Snow's interest in social history from the time of his first comment on the “two cultures” in 1956 to his collaboration with Laslett almost a decade later, showing how he came to graft the prestige of science onto his primary commitment to an optimistic reading of history. Next I examine Leavis's alternative vision for social history, one that advocated an expertise and methodology contrary to Snow's but that cannot be understood as antiscientific. Finally, I consider the implications of this episode for our understanding of cultural politics more generally, suggesting that it attests to the need to historicize rather than adopt inherited categories of analysis.
Social History in the Sixties
History was a booming field when Snow delivered the Rede Lecture of 1959. As the welfare state supplied increasing numbers of students, economic prosperity provided matching resources. The number of students in higher education was in the process of doubling between 1954 and 1966, and in 1963 the Robbins Report promised continuing—indeed, accelerating—growth.Footnote 10 As David Cannadine has said, “Undeniably, the period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s was indeed a Golden Age for professional British historians, a time when academe in general was an affluent society, and when Clio in particular had never had it so good.”Footnote 11
At the same time historians in Britain and throughout the West were rethinking the methods and perspectives of their discipline. In France the historians associated with Fernand Braudel and the journal Annales were demoting the significance of personalities and political events in favor of the analysis of long-term population trends, climate, and geography. In the United States the “cliometricians” were employing a combination of neoclassical economics, statistical analysis, and data-processing technologies to revisit major questions in American history. And in Britain the scholars affiliated with the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, including Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson, and E. J. Hobsbawm, fanned out across the centuries to reconfigure the landscape of British history.Footnote 12
The group largely disintegrated following the convulsions in international communism in 1956, but their concern to widen the scope of historical inquiry and reorient its perspective fed the development of social history. Nowhere could that development be better seen than in the pages of the journal they had established, Past and Present, which did much to introduce the work of the Annales demographers to a British readership and where the debate over the transition from feudalism to capitalism was showcased. There and elsewhere over the course of the 1950s economic history, the history of the poor, and the history of everyday life converged to carve out a more confident place for its increasing numbers of practitioners.Footnote 13 By 1960 social history looked to be the most promising area for young historians to enter into, and in 1966 Keith Thomas displayed the confidence of the field when he proclaimed, “The social history of the future will … not be a residual subject but a central one, around which all other branches of history are likely to be organized.”Footnote 14 John Brewer has recently recalled the appeal of the new trends in history to the generation of university students at this time, trends promising emancipation from Victorian constraints and in sync with the politics of popular culture and Labour revisionism.Footnote 15 Social history stood at the vanguard of these trends, its advocates fusing methodological innovations and the rhetoric of modernization to fashion an intellectual juggernaut poised to sweep the field.
This is not to imply anything like unity within the diverse intellectual enterprise that was social history in the 1960s. After all, G. M. Trevelyan's landmark English Social History could hardly have been more different in intent from the work of the Historians’ Group.Footnote 16 Moreover, the appeal of science was prominent but not unanimous, as attested to by E. P. Thompson's guarded embrace of the social sciences in a special number of the Times Literary Supplement on “new ways in history” in 1966.Footnote 17 And the trends generated outright opposition as well: Hugh Trevor-Roper warned of “the creeping paralysis of professionalism” in the armory of journals, conferences, and jargon that attended the growth of the discipline, and Geoffrey Elton labeled many of the new approaches to history so many “false gods.”Footnote 18
Indeed, rather than the rise of some monolithic “social history,” the early 1960s should be seen as a time of diverse possibilities for a field whose disparate origins and methodological catholicity rendered it attractive to a range of practitioners. Each of these practitioners had the opportunity to influence the methodology, perspective, content—indeed, the very definition—of the subject set to establish the parameters of inquiry for the coming generation. And with the Robbins Report in 1963 stressing the need to double undergraduate places within the next five years, promising increased postgraduate numbers in the social sciences and humanities, and endorsing the establishment of six new universities, the opportunities were not only intellectual but institutional.Footnote 19 To adapt a phrase of Trevelyan’s, social history in the 1960s was history with the politics very much in—and it was in this context that Snow, Leavis, and their respective allies advanced their alternative visions for the field.
Snow, Laslett, and the Making of a Scientific History
This section explores the origins of Snow's collaboration with Peter Laslett. Their cooperation attests to Snow's interest in establishing history as a social science and would seem to accord with a reading of the “two cultures” as a turf battle between advocates of the arts and the sciences. However, we shall see that Snow's interest in social history predated his association of it with the social sciences. His initial motivation was not to ground history in scientific methodology, but to advance a reading of history in accord with his faith in industrial progress. As the debate attending the “two cultures” developed in the early 1960s, Snow armed this reading of history in the rhetoric of science and modernization, advocating a new social history but never losing sight of his primary aim.
Snow was interested in social history from the time of his first statement on the “two cultures,” nearly three years before his Rede Lecture made the phrase famous.Footnote 20 In the New Statesman in 1956 he observed a division between the arts and sciences, suggesting that the balance of the misfortune lay with those on the arts side who were regrettably unacquainted with the superior morality of their scientific peers. In contrast to the Rede Lecture, there was little on the need to restructure British education and no mention of how the cultural gap hindered the ability of the West to raise the standard of living of the developing world. What was present, however, was the assertion that, while scientists were interested in little of the traditional culture, they were avid readers of social history. By this Snow meant “the sheer mechanics of living, how men ate, built, traveled, worked,” and he pointed in particular to the work of Trevelyan.Footnote 21 This was history as the whole way of living, and while it may have been devoid of politics, in Snow's hands it was bristling with ideology.
In citing Trevelyan, Snow was referring to the supervisor of his friend J. H. Plumb. Plumb was Snow's junior by six years, and both had successfully navigated the journey from provincial Leicester to Christ's College, Cambridge. From the 1930s through Snow's death in 1980 the two corresponded tirelessly, shared a love of good wines, reviewed each other's work, and exchanged updates on the intrigues of the literary and academic worlds.Footnote 22 Plumb had gone to Cambridge in 1933 to become Trevelyan's only research student, and after working on code-breaking at Bletchley Park during the war he was elected a Fellow of Christ's in 1946. He was at the forefront of social history, having edited Studies in Social History in 1955. This volume attests to the harmony at this point between social history and the older tradition of literary history: the dedication praised Trevelyan as one “who for more than fifty years has maintained the tradition that history is literature.” To Plumb that tradition of literary historiography flowed directly into the new social history, the field that promised to provide the greatest insights of the coming generation.Footnote 23
Snow and Plumb shared a common political stance, one best understood as a species of liberalism. Both men considered themselves left of center, progressive but not Marxist, and they supported Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson in British politics and John F. Kennedy in America.Footnote 24 Reflecting their own journeys from Leicester to Cambridge, the cornerstone of their creed was the individual, and they believed that the best society would enable individuals to realize the potentials set by their merit rather than their class. The program was thus neither traditional conservatism nor egalitarian socialism, and as such it was in sync with the modernizing elements of the Labour Party—of which Snow himself became the symbol when he entered the House of Lords as the Labour government's spokesman for the new Ministry of Technology in 1964.
That liberal political vision was inextricable from their reading (and writing) of history. The year of the debut of the “two cultures” was also that of the first volume of Plumb's landmark Sir Robert Walpole: Making of a Statesman.Footnote 25 Plumb's dissertation had been written beneath the long shadow of Lewis Namier's influence, but increasingly he came to view his work as a deliberate challenge to Namier and his epigone.Footnote 26 Plumb's taste for political and personal narratives ran against the static structural histories of the more conservative Namier, and privately he observed to Snow that “there is a deep resistance in the Namier school to what I am trying to do.” That resistance, he knew, was well-founded: “I stand for something quite different to the Namier school.”Footnote 27
Snow shared Plumb's hostility to Namierite history because he believed that such a static view of society failed to acknowledge historical progress. Snow believed that modern history was the story of material progress for the vast majority of the British people, progress made possible by the Industrial Revolution. This reading of history as progress, though as the unfolding of material betterment rather than political liberty, might be labeled the “new Whiggery”—and just as the Whigs had had to overcome a succession of Papist, Jacobite, and French threats to English liberty, in the new Whiggery the agents of prosperity were continually beset by a series of reactionary rivals. In 1959 Snow fingered these opponents of material betterment as, somewhat surprisingly, the literary intellectuals of the previous two centuries. Through a series of such tendentious yet rhetorically powerful moves, Snow was advancing a reading of history that reached right up to the present, contrasting a conservative literary culture responsible for Britain's decline with the progressive scientists who were the nation's sole hope for renewal.
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution was the Sir Robert Rede Lecture in Cambridge in 1959. Snow was then approaching the zenith of his fame as a novelist and public intellectual, and his background as a scientist, administrator, and novelist seemed to uniquely qualify him to address the issue of disciplinary factionalism. As he addressed that topic, however, his historical vision and its political implications were never far from the surface. Snow's argument in The Two Cultures is familiar: Western intellectual life was divided between the two cultures of the arts and the sciences; literary intellectuals had never appreciated the benefits of industrialization in the nineteenth century and stood in the way of harnessing the scientific revolution of the present; yet industrialization was the only way to reduce the gap between the rich and poor nations of the world; if the West failed to act the Soviets surely would; the need to reform British education was therefore immediate. The lecture was widely reprinted and generously praised, and even its critics credited Snow with having identified a problem that demanded attention.Footnote 28
Setting aside questions as to the novelty and merit of Snow's case, what needs to be stressed here is the ideological nature of its historical vision. Laboring people had welcomed industrialization: “For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them”; they had benefited accordingly: “Health, food, education; nothing but the industrial revolution could have spread them right down to the very poor”; and the lesson was there for all to see: “For, of course, one truth is straightforward. Industrialization is the only hope of the poor.”Footnote 29 Not to accept this characterization was to reveal suspect political sympathies: “The industrial revolution looked very different according to whether one saw it from above or below”; creative writers in particular were incapable of understanding the beneficent consequences of industrialization: “Plenty of them shuddered away … Some, like Ruskin and William Morris and Thoreau and Emerson and Lawrence, tried various kinds of fancies which were not in effect more than screams of horror”; these screams point to an attitude of reactionary incomprehension: “Intellectuals, in particular literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites”; and the successors to these Luddites, the Modernist writers in vogue from 1914, were implicated in the worst crime of the twentieth century: “Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?”Footnote 30
While Snow's attack was publicly aimed at the supposedly conservative literary culture, in private he directed his animus against the emerging New Left. In 1959 Snow got in touch with Raymond Williams, inquiring into his connections with Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner (shortly to amalgamate to become the New Left Review). Snow believed that in these idealistic intellectuals he spotted a familiar type: radicals blind to material progress in history who opted out of meaningful political action in the present. In his letter to Williams he differentiated what he took to be their critique of modern society—mere “existential discontent”—from the pragmatic brand of progressive political reform that he favored.Footnote 31
Soon thereafter Norman Podhoretz, a rising star among American liberal intellectuals and the new editor of Commentary in New York, pressed Snow for an article about the New Left in Britain.Footnote 32 Snow agreed to the idea, but looked to widen its scope to consider progressive politics more generally. This would include the New Left Review circle, but not be limited to them: “As you will easily guess,” he told Podhoretz, “I have not much use for a lot of them; politics is not simply, or even mainly, a matter of existential discontent.”Footnote 33 When Podhoretz pressed again for the article, Snow's verdict sharpened: “I shall have to read a certain amount of the more or less half-baked outpourings of the New Left here,” he wrote. “The more I think of them the more hopelessly inept I think they are, and they have about as much relation to real politics as they have to major league baseball.”Footnote 34 Snow was especially skeptical of their reading of history, and although he respected Williams and Richard Hoggart, he viewed them as the inheritors of a socialism derived from those archetypal Luddites, Ruskin and Morris—a tradition, he noted privately in 1960, they arrived at through F. R. Leavis.Footnote 35
Snow was right to be wary of Leavis, for in the Richmond Lecture at Downing College in February 1962 the doyen of English criticism delivered a withering assault on The Two Cultures and its author. Leavis insisted that Snow was insignificant in himself, a nonentity both as novelist and sage. What was significant, however, was that Snow was taken seriously in both roles. In this way Snow was a portent, the telling product of a coterie world that passed as literary culture in a degenerate civilization. Leavis thus had his own reading of history, one very different from Snow's (which will be examined in the next section). To be noted here is that Leavis confronted Snow squarely on the ground of history: “[Snow] knows nothing of history,” he insisted. “He has no notion of the changes in civilisation that have produced his ‘literary culture.'” Leavis zeroed in on Snow's reading of industrialization: “Of the human history of the Industrial Revolution, of the human significances entailed in that revolution … it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Snow exposes complacently a complete ignorance.” He countered Snow's assertion that the poor walked eagerly off the land and into the factories: “This, of course, is mere brute assertion, callous in its irresponsibility. … If one points out that the actual history has been, with significance for one's apprehension of the full human problem, incomparably and poignantly more complex than that, Snow dismisses one as a ‘natural Luddite.’” He ridiculed the crass materialism that could tolerate such a charge: “The upshot is that if you insist on the need for any other kind of concern, entailing forethought, action, and provision, about the human future—any other kind of misgiving—than that which talks in terms of productivity, material standards of living, hygienic and technological progress, then you are Luddite.” Yet Leavis insisted, “I am not a Luddite.”Footnote 36 The Richmond Lecture amounted to a denunciation of Snow, his credentials, and his thesis—all of which Leavis challenged on the plane of history.
Snow refused to respond to Leavis publicly, claiming that such a base personal assault warranted no response, but in private he was orchestrating his defense. “I think I have got to ask my friends to do some of the fighting for me,” he wrote to Plumb two days before Leavis's lecture was published in the Spectator. “Can you … write a letter to the Spectator on the historical points? They are absolute nonsense.”Footnote 37 Plumb obliged, and three weeks later his letter appeared endorsing Snow's depiction of the poor leaving the land for the factory: “Now, as an historian, I must stress that this is no brute assertion, but is a simple historical fact.”Footnote 38 Snow kept up the pressure, urging Plumb to take his case on the Industrial Revolution to the airwaves with a broadcast on the BBC.Footnote 39 And Plumb worked the case against Leavis into his lectures in Cambridge, as well as in talks to college societies and schoolmasters.Footnote 40
At the same time, Snow and Plumb realized that their opponents were arrayed across a wider spectrum. Plumb connected Leavis to Williams and Hoggart, and cast them in the tradition of “the dangerous descendants of the craft-socialists—the Chestertons, Coles, ultimately … Morrises, who worked to turn time back on industrialization and, as most people do, tried to find an historical justification for their attitude and found it—uncritically—in Barbara and J. L. Hammond.”Footnote 41 The counterattack, then, was to center on their opponents’ intellectual bulwark. Plumb cited the authority of the social sciences, particularly anthropology, psychology, and economics, against Leavis's misreading of history.Footnote 42 Snow, meanwhile, assured Podhoretz, “The English social historians are getting very tired of what they and I regard as a mis-reading of the eighteenth and nineteenth century social condition here, as performed by the New Left Boys.”Footnote 43 When Snow revisited the controversy in October 1963, the new social history took center stage.Footnote 44
“The Two Cultures: A Second Look” registered a change in Snow's tactics, from an emphasis on historical interpretation to how that interpretation was to be effected. Snow wrote that he spotted a third culture coming into existence, ranged across a number of fields but all directed toward the factual investigation of human existence: sociology, demography, political science, government, economics, medicine, psychology, architecture—and social history.Footnote 45 Their empirical investigations into such problems as the human effects of industrialization—“the fighting point of this whole affair”—required that they be in touch with their scientific colleagues.Footnote 46 Snow challenged his critics to produce any evidence of a past golden age and threatened to deploy his newfound allies to root out the truth of the matter: “Where was this Eden? … Then the social historians can examine the case.”Footnote 47 These historians worked in a mode very different from that of Trevelyan, whom Snow had identified with social history in his first statement on the two cultures seven years before. Their history was scientific (if not a science), and Snow cast them as lovers of truth, professionals who analyzed fact rather than sentiment and communicated their findings in the “dry but appallingly eloquent language of statistics.”Footnote 48 Ranged against them were purveyors of myth, peddlers of lies, advocates of “false social history” who clung to “the stereotypes of fifty years ago.”Footnote 49 But the tide was with the emerging third culture, and Snow cited in particular the historical demographers in France and Peter Laslett and his colleagues in Britain.
Laslett was the driving force behind the most ambitious project in quantitative historical analysis in Britain. He and E. A. Wrigley were shortly to establish the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, setting out to pursue a comprehensive analysis of parish registers throughout Britain to assemble data on fertility, mortality, and marriage patterns for the whole of society from Tudor times to 1837. The project was pioneering in method as well as scope, employing volunteers throughout Britain to assemble the vast quantities of data. Laslett's language when soliciting funding from the Gulbenkian Foundation stressed the scientific pedigree of the project: their study would be “systematic,” their technique “statistical.” The Cambridge Group was Britain's answer to the Annales, employing the latest concepts, techniques, and methodologies to answer questions about social structure before and during industrialization. Moreover, Laslett hoped, the results would filter into academic curricula in Cambridge and beyond.Footnote 50
As he was preparing his response to Leavis, Snow became increasingly interested in Laslett's research. “Do you know Peter Laslett?” he wrote to his friend George Steiner at Churchill College in Cambridge. “I was deeply impressed by his piece in The Listener this week. This work looks to me of critical importance.”Footnote 51 Snow's enthusiasm for Laslett's methodological innovations was of a piece with his ideological stance: “I have been meaning to write to you for some time,” he wrote to Laslett a few months later. “I think [your demographic researches] are an essential foundation for any society that you and I and people like us now want.”Footnote 52 A society, that is, that would acknowledge the reality of material progress, attribute that progress to industrialization, and export it to the developing world. But to effect a transformation in accord with this program, they first had to win the historical argument.
In 1963 the prospects for Snow's new allies in the Cambridge Group were tenuous. When Snow urged Laslett to drive his research students forward, Laslett replied that he wished he could but all he had was a library assistant and three amateur volunteers. They were, however, applying for a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation, and he hoped they could use Snow as a reference.Footnote 53 Early the next year, the application stood at a critical juncture: while Laslett understood that they were on the verge of receiving a grant of £5,000, they actually needed something like three times that amount. Might Snow intervene? “For if we fail with the Gulbenkian now,” Laslett wrote, “it will be at least six months before we can screw up another Foundation to the point Thornton has now reached and by then I may have lost the support of my volunteer assistants, and the university may well have decided that the lack of Foundation support demonstrates that the project is no good.”Footnote 54
Snow replied by insisting that it was in the public interest that the Cambridge Group receive the resources they required.Footnote 55 Anticipating a Labour victory in the pending election, he had already offered to introduce Laslett to Richard Crossman.Footnote 56 Now he wrote personally to the secretary of the Gulbenkian Foundation, and suggested to Laslett that he might be able to drum up some money from America.Footnote 57 The recourse to American money proved unnecessary, however: in June 1964 Laslett informed Snow that the Gulbenkian Foundation had awarded the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure £8,000—not as much as they might have hoped for, but enough to establish them in Cambridge.Footnote 58
The first product of that research was Laslett's landmark portrait of preindustrial English society, The World We Have Lost.Footnote 59 Laslett translated mountains of data into graceful prose, addressing in ten chapters such questions as the nature of English society before industry, life in a village community, and whether the peasants really starved. He demonstrated that in early modern England families tended to be nuclear rather than extended, marriages occurred relatively late in life, and populations evidenced unexpected mobility.
At the same time, Laslett confronted rivals on two fronts: Marxists and “impressionist” historians. He had announced the death of “class” as a viable category of analysis as long ago as 1958, remarking with approval in Encounter that “class is on the way out for historians: it is going fast, and faster among the English economic historians than anywhere else.”Footnote 60 By 1965 his impatience with Marxist history was total. In The World We Have Lost he again denied the utility of “class,” dismissed “alienation” as so much twentieth-century cant, insisted that the English Revolution was nothing like a social revolution, and proposed that the relevant historical division was not between feudalism and capitalism but between preindustrial and industrial society. The new empirical history was dispensing at last with the Marxist framework: “It would, if it were possible, be far better to lay ‘The Rise of the Gentry’ carefully alongside ‘The Rise of the Middle Classes,’ and to place them reverently together in the great and growing collection of outmoded historians’ idiom.”Footnote 61
Impressionist historians (those who relied on literary rather than quantitative evidence) fared no better at Laslett's hands. Instead of relying upon misleading snippets of fictional evidence, demographic analysis promised to ground conclusions on the basis of fact. On the question of the average age of brides, for instance, “[The evidence] decidedly does not confirm the impression made by Shakespeare and the other literary sources. Their evidence must be called systematically deceptive in this matter. It is best to look at the facts in a table.”Footnote 62
Tables, facts, demography: The World We Have Lost announced the arrival of the new era of historical science. At last dispensing with outmoded Marxist categories and misleading literary evidence, history was to take its place alongside statistics, economics, sociology, anthropology, and even genetics.Footnote 63 And while the book's title is easily taken to suggest mournful regret for a lost golden age, Laslett insisted that only one conclusion was possible regarding life before the Industrial Revolution: “The coming of industry cannot be shown to have brought economic oppression and exploitation along with it. It was there already.”Footnote 64 In the world we had lost, Laslett made clear, infant mortality was higher, life expectancy shorter, living harsher—and only the coming of industry made possible the improvements enjoyed in the twentieth century.Footnote 65
Snow was delighted when he received that draft of the first five chapters of The World We Have Lost, reading and rereading it and writing Laslett twice in two days. “It is a remarkable achievement, and will transform the whole of this kind of study,” he wrote. “I am lost in admiration.”Footnote 66 Here was the emerging “third culture” that he had fostered privately and staked his case on publicly, employing the tools of the social sciences against his twin rivals of Marxism and literary romanticism. Yet Snow's challenge to Laslett's conclusion to that first chapter is a reminder of his priorities: despite the scientific rhetoric, methodological innovations, and modernizing appeal, Snow's interest in the new social history in 1964 derived from the same impulse as his favorable reference to the old social history eight years before. A scientific social history was not an end, but a means to an end: it was the trojan horse that would carry a liberal reading of industrial progress into classrooms and lecture halls throughout Britain.
Leavis's Alternative Social History
The Times Literary Supplement of 9 December 1965 featured a knockabout critique of The World We Have Lost.Footnote 67 Entitled “The Book of Numbers,” the review opened by declaring, “The engagement has been long announced, but some will be surprised to learn that the marriage between History and Sociology has already been solemnized. … The World We Have Lost is a manifesto of the new science.”Footnote 68 It mocked Laslett's scientific pretensions, confronted him squarely on the ground of method, and endorsed a social history that included literary as well as quantitative evidence. Laslett's failing was not that he adopted the demographic techniques of French historians, but that he did so in a slipshod manner: “The new science gives rise to statements about social structure which are, too often, bathetic or wholly imprecise.”Footnote 69 Laslett was accused of “guessing a little,” excoriated for his “unsatisfactory manner of treating scanty data,” and chastised for his failure to employ “expertise” and “objectivity” in handling evidence.Footnote 70 The tables were confusing, the documentation thin, and the text in need of proofreading. The critique thus targeted the precision upon which Laslett based his authority. It was not an attack upon social history, but a call for a different kind of social history—one that neither exaggerated claims for quantitative evidence nor dismissed literary evidence. The anonymous reviewer was E. P. Thompson.Footnote 71
Thompson pointed out that The World We Have Lost was written for an audience that included Lord Snow, and this was not the first time that Thompson had brushed up against Snow. The Rede Lecture had been reprinted and discussed in successive issues of Encounter—the CIA's monthly journal of politics and culture, established and secretly funded to shore up Western liberalism vis-à-vis Marxism in the Cold War.Footnote 72 While commentators in those pages attended to the grave problem of how to mend the gap between the arts and sciences, however, Thompson saw through the ostensible differences between the “two cultures” to recognize the political stakes buried within Snow's formulation: “Herod (the liberal) is never more boring than when he appears in the guise of the ameliorative man of science,” he wrote in 1960. “Hence that schizophrenic feature of Natopolitan ideology, the ‘two cultures’: the one a vast Cain armed with the Bomb, the other an acquiescent, pietistic Abel, baring his genteel hair-shirt for the blow.”Footnote 73 Three years later, in The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson sided with Leavis in a tactical foray into the debate: “When Sir Charles Snow tells us that ‘with singular unanimity … the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them’, we must reply, with Dr. Leavis, that the ‘actual history’ of the ‘full human problem [was] incomparably and poignantly more complex than that’.”Footnote 74 With his belief in participatory democracy, Thompson would have had little sympathy for Snow's centralizing, bureaucratic, and technocratic tendencies. And Thompson and Leavis certainly shared certain literary and intellectual affinities—Thompson's English teacher at school had been influenced by Leavis, and Thompson himself read English at Cambridge following the war.Footnote 75 Nevertheless, in an argument in which the primary axis of disagreement was political, Thompson and Leavis made for very strange bedfellows indeed: how did they find themselves aligned against Snow and a scientific social history?
From his base in the English School Leavis advanced an alternative social history. The sources for understanding social conditions and historical change were not parish registers but great writers, and the historian must pay close attention to this incomparable body of evidence. In Leavis's antimaterialist worldview, literature provided an index to the state of the language of the day, language enabled thought, and thought was an act of creation that to Leavis was life. Literature thus provided the essential point of entry into assessing the state of any civilization, and (pace the common association of Leavis with the New Critics) by studying its literature the historian would necessarily be led to wider questions: “What, as a civilization to live in and be of, did England offer at such and such a time? As we pass from now to then, what light is thrown on human possibilities—on the potentialities and desirabilities of civilized life? In what respects might it have been better to live then than now? What tentative conception of an ideal civilization are we prompted towards by the hints we gather from history?”Footnote 76 To attend to these questions the historian required a different sort of expertise from the statisticians: the ability to read. The historian thus had to be in close contact with the English School that was to stand at the heart of the university.
Leavis frequently revisited the question of what social history should be in the decade following his critique of Snow. Having retired from his post in Cambridge in 1962, he embarked on a phase of “higher pamphleteering”: a series of lectures in which he reiterated the case against Snow, opposed the expansion of the universities, and put forward his alternative vision for the university.Footnote 77 The English School would stand at the center of that university, serving as a liaison center for students and scholars in every other discipline. He used the case of social history to illustrate the ideal working relationship between literary and historical studies: in lectures at Cornell and Harvard in 1966 he insisted that Dickens, as a great novelist, was in fact a great social historian.Footnote 78 In his Clark Lectures at Cambridge the following year he extended the line of novelist–social historians to include the great novelists from Dickens to Lawrence, illustrating the novelist's insight by countering Snow's claim that the poor eagerly left the land for the factories with a quotation from Thomas Hardy: “This process, which is described by the statistician as the tendency of the rural population to the large towns, is really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced.”Footnote 79
But Leavis was not encouraged when he surveyed social history over the course of the 1960s. Writing in Scrutiny in 1945, he had been critical of Trevelyan for his tendency to use literature as an ornament rather than a central source, but he nevertheless read Trevelyan with gratitude and referred to his work with respect.Footnote 80 Trevelyan showed the potential for social history to be the study of civilization, even as his inadequate use of literary evidence illustrated the need to reconfigure the relationship between literature and history. The trend in the next generation, however, was disheartening: Plumb, for instance, was lambasted for siding with Snow on the question of industrialization, and by the early 1970s he had earned a minor place in the litany of the enlightened whom Leavis ridiculed for their complacent reading of historical progress.Footnote 81 Harold Perkin ran afoul as well: although Leavis used evidence from The Origins of Modern English Society (1969) to refute Snow and Plumb on the issue of the migration into the factories, he also chastised the first professor of social history in England for being “uncritically enthusiastic” toward the Industrial Revolution.Footnote 82 Moreover, Q. D. Leavis took Perkin as an exemplar of the failings of an historian that privileged “facts” and the writings of journalists and assorted cranks above the writers of the day.Footnote 83 As Leavis wrote in 1965, such historians neglected literary evidence at their peril: “A study of human nature is a study of social human nature, and the psychologist, sociologist, and social historian aren’t in it compared with the great novelists.”Footnote 84
In this way, Leavis's critique of social history was one part of his wider argument against the social sciences. Leavis had been at the forefront of the sociological approach to literary study in the 1930s, building off of Q. D. Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public (1932).Footnote 85 For the next two decades Scrutiny had continued to relate literary production to the society that sustained (or inhibited) it, but in the postwar decades Leavis was increasingly contemptuous toward the scientism of sociology, psychology, and linguistics. By wrapping themselves in the language and pretensions of the sciences, these social scientists were cutting themselves off from the insights of poets and novelists for the sake of a bogus and undesirable objectivity. They were consequently blind to the fact that Blake was a great psychologist, just as Dickens had been the supreme social historian.Footnote 86 Especially menacing was the contention of Robbins that, in the era of expanding universities, the humanizing complement to the natural sciences was to be provided by these very social sciences.Footnote 87 To Leavis, this meant the marginalization of the pursuit that sustained life itself.
Yet despite his hostility to the social sciences, the “two cultures” dichotomy of arts versus sciences explains Leavis's position no better than it does Snow’s: Leavis's critique was directed not against science but the social. Snow had opposed the condition of the individual, ultimately tragic because doomed to die a solitary death, with that of society, for which there was the hope of material betterment. To Leavis, this erection of a dichotomy between the individual and the social drained the latter of life and rendered it an inert mechanism, an aggregate to be manipulated by technocrats such as Snow and Robbins. On the contrary, Leavis conceived of the “social” as the meeting of individual minds in what he called the “third realm” or “human world.” This meeting was made possible by language, the inheritance of generations of creative human collaboration. It was that collaboration that made further creative thought possible, building on the living language and transmitting it through time.
In the seventeenth century, however, disaster struck. In positing a reality distinct from human creation, Descartes drove a wedge into the unity of language and thought. Thought was henceforth conceived of not as creation, but as the striving of a mind toward some knowable reality; reality was no longer the result of creative human collaboration, but something already existing “out there” in nature. The language of the Royal Society, esteeming clarity and logic and striving toward mathematical precision, testified to the ethos of the new civilization: language—that which made thought possible—was now conceived of as its impediment, an obstacle to be circumvented through abstraction. The unified, organic culture which had sustained the living language and made Shakespeare possible was fractured. The march of civilization drove this process relentlessly forward, until the Industrial Revolution finally destroyed all but the last vestiges of the organic culture and the language that it had sustained.
Leavis's hostility to the “social,” then, derived from his radical critique of modern civilization itself. This is why, despite fundamental political differences, Leavis and Thompson stood together in their hostility to Snow and The Two Cultures. Leavis's ideology was predicated upon an idealized past, and in the 1960s he defiantly advocated an elite university against the democratic tide; Thompson was a democratic socialist who campaigned for a socialist transformation, placing his faith in the people of England past and present. But both of them recognized that Snow's case rested upon his liberal faith in the progress brought about by industrialization, and so their critiques closed in around him at once from the left and the right.
Conclusion: From the Science of History to the History of Science
By 1970 Snow's hopes for social history had been dashed. In his final major statement on the “two cultures” he lamented that the questions he had raised a decade ago remained unanswered.Footnote 88 History seemed to have slipped out of the conceptual net, and historians to have rejected progress as a vulgar concept. In a lecture at the University of Texas he expanded on this point, declaring that he had come to learn that history differed from science in that it was not “automatically progressive.”Footnote 89 While science could not help but show the direction of time's arrow, professional historians had lost track of any semblance of narrative. Instead of validating a grand and triumphant historical vision, contemporary historiography seemed content with the production of detailed studies of marginal significance.
At the same time, however, Snow identified a new field in which to invest his hopes: the history of science. A decade before Snow had suggested that the history of science might function as a bridge between the two cultures, but by 1970 his interest in the field had shifted along lines reminiscent of his earlier interest in social history: now the history of science promised not to bridge a cultural divide, but to serve as a refuge for the reading of progress in history.Footnote 90 After all, Snow said, due to its subject matter the history of science could not possibly join in the modish hostility to narrative. So in the early 1960s Snow had backed a scientific social history in the confidence that it would bear out his progressive reading of history, and in 1970 his attention shifted to the history of science for the very same reason.Footnote 91 In each case Snow hoped to realize his liberal vision in disciplinary form, and in each case the discipline and its methodology was secondary to this primary objective.
This article has thus aimed to recast the terms through which both the “two cultures” controversy and the emergence of the new social history are understood. It is not surprising that the 1960s were characterized by discussions of “two cultures,” the rise of the social sciences, and a modernizing zeitgeist, and my aim has not merely been to show that these and other developments were related. Instead, I have sought to disentangle the knot of disciplinary and political concerns at work in these developments in order to assign causation to the latter.Footnote 92 The debate attending the Rede Lecture provided the occasion, the rivalry between the arts and the sciences the language, and social history the terrain, for a conflict that was at root ideological. That conflict played out in part in the form of competing efforts, public and private, to establish the methodology and content of the new social history. In the context of university expansion and disciplinary fluidity, the chance to shape the emerging field represented nothing less than the opportunity to translate political ideals into institutional forms. In the course of these efforts the language and prestige of the social sciences loomed large—not solely as the methodological preference of optimistic historians, but as a rhetorical weapon employed by advocates of diverse intellectual and ideological positions.
Nevertheless, Snow's depiction of the “two cultures” as a rift between the arts and the sciences continues to structure conceptions of that debate, of twentieth-century history, and of contemporary culture—witness the recent symposium at the Royal Society on precisely this theme.Footnote 93 And just as the argument between Huxley and Arnold was invoked to explain the debate between Snow and Leavis, so too have Snow and the “two cultures” been appropriated to make sense of such affairs as the “science wars” of the 1990s.Footnote 94 I have argued here that Snow's categories are inadequate—indeed, misleading—in attempting to understand the locally charged and historically specific debate of the early 1960s (much less those of the 1880s or 1990s). Yet the continuing recourse to these terms results in the misunderstanding of the Snow-Leavis episode—a misunderstanding that obscures the relationship between politics, culture, and knowledge past as well as present.
