Ideology, Mentalité and Social Ritual: From Social History to Cultural History

This chapter assesses an important historiographical development: the emergence of a ‘New Social History’ and, beyond that, of what is termed ‘Cultural History’. The chapter’s main aim is to explain, by drawing upon a wide range of examples, the linkages (and competition) between these more recent turns towards the cultural and the older forms of Marxist-inspired social history of the 1960s. In some respects, the two traditions have lived side by side: the keystones of Marxist social history, works by such influential writers as E.P. Thompson, were quickly assimilated into an Anglophone historiographic tradition. The Americans were particularly quick to seize the opportunities afforded by such analyses of workers’ lives. Whilst many important Annales’ social histories pre-dated the work of Thompson, the spread of their ideas in the non-Francophone world was initially restricted to those who could read French. Nevertheless, the two approaches were, as Lynn Hunt rightly argued, ‘two dominant paradigms of explanation’ in ‘the move towards the social’.1