Musgrove defensively tied to explain this mildly shocking
statement by saying "Hands-up, this was a somewhat clumsy attempt by us to
engage with a conversation started on Twitter by the historian Hallie Rubenhold
that suggested there is too much focus in public and popular history on great
figures (principally men), and by extension the great events they were involved
in (wars, acts of parliament etc.) – to the detriment of the presentation of
the lives and times of the less exalted people of the past".However,
because of our initial poorly-phrased tweet, we threw ourselves into the fire
of Twitter opinion with many historians wryly, drily, or angrily observing that
we appeared to have overlooked many decades of deep and detailed work into
social history".
Musgrove while conceding the tweet was wrong went on to
defend the magazine's stance of excluding the working class from its history
magazine and blames his working-class readership for their supposed disinterest
saying"Right now though, I'm afraid, it's a much harder task to get the
passing reader to pick up a magazine that shouts about the life of a person who
has not come into your consciousness at all. I suppose, also, there is the question
of consequence; however fascinating the life of an 'ordinary person' from the
past might have been if that person's actions didn't have an impact on wider
developments in history, the passing reader seems to be less inclined to want
to invest time and money in a magazine in order to find out about them".
While I am all for the study of working-class people because
hopefully, that is what historians like Hallie Rubenhold mean by "ordinary
people" however I am against the clumsy and unscientific usage of the
term.
Many historians have used the term mainly to blame the working class for various bad things that have happened in history. This term was heavily popularised by the historian Daniel Goldhagen in his wretched book Hitler's Willing Executioners. His usage of the term "ordinary Germans" was criticised by the Marxist writer David North who wrote
"The methodological flaw of Professor Goldhagen's book
is indicated in its title: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and
the Holocaust. Let us stop right there: What is meant by "ordinary
Germans?" For those of you who would like a textbook example of an
"abstract identity," this is it. This is a category that is so broad,
it is capable of including virtually everyone, except, presumably, Germans of
Jewish parentage. What, after all, makes any particular German an
"ordinary" one? Is it a large girth and a fondness for knockwurst and
sauerbraten? Is it blond hair, blue eyes and a penchant for sunbathing in the
nude? Is it a talent for abstruse philosophising and a passion for 300-pound
Wagnerian sopranos? A concept built upon such foolish and arbitrary stereotypes
cannot be of any scientific value in the cognition of objective reality".[1]
Hallie Rubenhold is a gifted and respected historian her
book[2] is
selling like hotcakes and has generated a large amount of interest.
Unfortunately, this interest far outweighs the importance of the work.
Rubenhold recently said that "I do feel that what our
culture recognises as 'history' needs some recalibrating. For too long, its
focus has been 'the great deeds of great men' - monarchs, Generals, politicians,
wars, Acts passed by governments. By these standards, the lives of ordinary
people are disregarded”[3].
If Rubenhold is talking about writing about the working
class, then she should say so why to continue with this "abstract identity".
Another abstract identity favoured by Rubenhold is "peoples history"
or "history from below". Like ordinary people, this phrase removes
any class content from the subject being discussed this is a little ironic
given that "peoples history" was a type of history produced by the
Communist Parties around the world to justify their class collaboration with
their respective bourgeois regimes.
As the Marxist writer, Ann Talbot notes "the Communist
Party sponsored a form of "People's History", which is typified by
A.L. Morton's People's History of England in which the class character of
earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding
them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical
approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to
internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the
supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People's
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to
supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of
political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which
provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine
revolutionaries, including Trotsky”.[4]
[1] A critical review of
Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners- David North- www.wsws.org/en/articles/1997/04/holo-a17.html
[2] The Five: The Untold Lives
of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper- Houghton Mifflin
[3] https://twitter.com/HallieRubenhold/status/1106166560547356672
[4] "These the times ... this the man": an
appraisal of historian Christopher Hill Ann Talbot
-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
