Abstract
Few social phenomena are absolutely identical. How, then, can we tell when they are similar enough to be regarded as members of the same class of objects or dissimilar enough to be put into different classes? How, that is to say, do we draw justifiable boundaries around social phenomena which are not exactly the same?
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Notes, References and Further Reading
Hexter, On Historians, pp. 241ff. The context was a discussion of the works by Christopher Hill and the generalising/particularising traits of historians.
Werner Sombart, Why is There no Socialism in the United States? ed., C.T. Husbands, White Plains, N.Y., 1976.
For a critical view of this argument see e.g. J. Black, Convergence or Divergence?: Britain and the Continent, New York, 1994.
Historians, as we all know, have evolved a stock of conventions that indicate how the particular entities they deal with can be appropriately categorised. Such conventions are established through common usage, from the unconscious or unthinking accumulation of precedents — when successive works in a given field follow the example of their predecessors and employ the same class term to designate the same specific entities, without their authors being much aware of the fact. For example, from the mass of literature on the First World War we know there is a convention that the Battle of the Somme in 1916 belongs to a general class of battles collectively called the ‘First World War’. There is also a convention that the state of Virginia in 1840 can be put into the general class of past places designated the ‘Antebellum South’, that eleventh century France belongs to a general class of periods we name ‘the medieval era’, and that the growth of woollen mills in Bradford in the nineteenth century is a member of a general class of processes we know as ‘industrialisation’. What these conventions imply, of course, is that the specific objects grouped under each class are comparable. Hence, when we categorise the Battle of the Somme of 1916 as an event in the First World War, we imply it is comparable with other battles during the same war such as Ypres, and Messines. In many instances, we should not automatically assume that everyone will agree with our understanding about what a particular convention is. With these, we would be well-advised to defend our lumping or splitting decisions explicitly. The usual technique for doing this is to discuss the historical literature in the field, or salient areas of it, and demonstrate, by citing all the relevant texts, that it provides ample precedents for our decisions. However, as I have noted in other places, social history is a largely pre-paradigmatic discipline and, as a consequence, its practitioners tend to possess sharply conflicting views about the ontology — the composition — of the social past. Symptomatic of this is the contentiousness of so many of the specialised class terms that social historians and historians have invented (or borrowed from the social sciences) to designate the constituent elements in the social past and their relationship. Some of these terms — for instance, ‘bastard feudalism’, ‘refeudalisation’, ‘slave societies’, ‘class conflict’, ‘the Protestant ethic’, ‘modernisation’, ‘separate spheres’, ‘the bourgeois’, ‘the aristocracy of labour’, ‘patriarchy’ — are very charged indeed. What makes them so is that are associated with intense debates over certain theories that have seldom been conclusive.
Indefinite particularity is not unique to social phenomena; it applies to other phenomena as well. J. Hospers, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, London, 1965, p. 20, says: ‘The common characteristics which we take as criteria for the use of a class word are a matter of convenience. Our classifications depend on our interests and our need for recognizing both the similarities and the differences among things.… There are as many possible classes in the world as there are common characteristics or combinations thereof which can be made the basis of classification’.
New York, 1989.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, e.g. pp. 468–9, 651.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 816.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 7.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, e.g. pp. 373, 380, 476, 531, 502, 524, 485, 481, 505, 652, 488, 507, 596, 518, 563, 586, 510, 610–11, 653, 727, 772, 777, 788.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 783, 889; note that in the first context he indicates that the situation he is referring to in America’s case is apparent in every decennial census, while in the second he says he is also talking about the situation ‘today’.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 812 and 816.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 345.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 360–5.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 368ff.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 374.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 383.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 485.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 496.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 591.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 615, 621.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, p. 634.
Fischer, Albion’s Seed, pp. 634–5.
Edinburgh, 1979.
Although the book advances an interesting argument about the survival of a peasantry under capitalism, it seems nonetheless to be based on something of a chimera. What makes the book interesting is the arresting paradox it postulates right at the beginning: that although capitalism’s domination of agriculture was complete by the 1840s, its domination was compatible with a large and thriving peasantry. As he proceeds, however, he lets slip every now and then that capitalism was immature in 1840 and was still maturing in the late century, e.g. pp. 31, 96. Had he started off by postulating that capitalism was immature by 1840, would its compatibility with a large and thriving peasantry still be an interesting problem and an arresting paradox? Surely, we would expect an immature capitalism to co-exist with a peasantry — with a pre-capitalist social formation. Indeed, he conflates the two issues — capitalistic domination and capitalistic maturity — on p. 21 where he states that between 1780 and 1840 ‘capitalism matured to be the dominant mode of agricultural production in the region’ [my emphasis].
Carter, Poor Man’s Country, p. 7.
Carter, Poor Man’s Country. His definition was also influenced by the seminal work on peasant societies by T. Shanin, see fn. 15, pp. 4, 186.
Carter, Poor Man’s Country, p.26.
Carter, Poor Man’s Country, p. 26. See also p. 23.
Carter, Poor Man’s Country, p. 28.
Carter, Poor Man’s Country, p. 28, and fn. 81 p. 190.
Carter, Poor Man’s Country, p. 104.
Carter, Poor Man’s Country, p. 107.
Carter, Poor Man’s Country, p. 107.
Carter, Poor Man’s Country, p. 21.
Carter, Poor Man’s Country, calculated from Table 4.4. p. 106.
Oxford, 1978.
Macfarlane, Individualism, p. 163.
Later in the text, Macfarlane indicates that the concept of joint family property rights refers to immoveable property, not to chattels. What might be ambiguous, is whether he is referring to the actual practice of disposing of property or just to the law/custom on the matter — the latter does not entail the former.
Macfarlane, Individualism, p. 17.
Macfarlane, Individualism, p. 33.
Macfarlane, Individualism, p. 18.
Macfarlane, Individualism, p. 18.
Macfarlane, Individualism, Ch. 2 ‘When England Ceased to be a Peasant Society: Marx, Weber and the historians’, pp. 34ff.
He finds it no coincidence that some of the most influential medievalists who propagated the standard interpretation were of east European origin: E.A. Kosminsky, Sir Paul Vinogradoff and M.M. Postan. He asserts that they, coming from eastern Europe where the ‘central feature’ was the norm, automatically presupposed it would prevail in England in the medieval period; see his p. 18.
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© 1999 Miles Fairburn
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Fairburn, M. (1999). The Problem of Establishing Similarities and Differences — of Lumping and Splitting. In: Social History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27517-5_6
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