[In the following review of The New History and the Old, Clarke asserts that, while her essays are stimulating, Himmelfarb's arguments are flawed and uneven.]

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Macaulay hoped that his work would be remembered in the year 2000; towards the end of the twentieth, historians nourish precisely the same ambition. As history has become trendy, historians have become uneasily aware that there is nothing so outmoded as a trend whose time has gone. “Who now reads Macaulay?” Gertrude Himmelfarb demands (ironically) in one of the stimulating essays reprinted in The New History and the Old—pausing, like the good scholar she is, to recall that her rhetorical question echoes not only Edmund Burke (“Who now reads Bolingbroke?”) but also Alexander Pope (“Who now reads Cowley?”) In her struggle to defend the old history from the ruthless encroachment of the new, she finds a stalwart ally in Sir Geoffrey Elton. Yet Elton himself has become notorious for his dismissive iconoclasm about the best-known Tudor historian of the previous generation, in effect reiterating, “Who now reads Neale?”

It is, of course, not new history as such that arouses Himmelfarb's scepticism, any more than Elton's, but the New History as practised by a generation of social historians whose approach has often been marxisant if not formally Marxist. In the process, it is alleged, social history has indeed come to approximate to Trevelyan's much-derided definition as “history with the politics left out”. Himmelfarb's denunciation created quite a stir when it was originally published some three years ago, and it is reprinted unchanged except for an unapologetic postscript responding to her critics. She denies that she was “pronouncing an interdiction on all of social history”, insisting that “in the course of the paper I said, no fewer than seven times, that my objections are not to social history as such but to its claims of dominance, superiority, even ‘totality’—not to social history as it may complement or supplement traditional history but to that which would supplant it”.

The threat which she perceives may have had some verisimilitude in American universities in the 1970s. In British universities in the 1980s, it must be said, most historians are more scared of external threats than of this particular enemy within. Meanwhile, political history seems to flourish despite all attempts to brand it as old-fashioned or élitist. Himmelfarb's own response to the latter charge is an ambitious outflanking strategy. She argues that ignoring the great men of any era involves defaming also “all the anonymous people who bought their books, listened to their speeches, and otherwise accorded them the title of greatness”. In ignoring this, the New History becomes “the most insidious kind of élitist history”. As a populist defence of the Old History, this might be more forceful if it were rephrased as an injunction to restore the appropriate historical context to the great books or great men she wishes to rehabilitate.

A related focus of interest in the book is the essay on “The ‘Group’”—the British Marxist historians who originally came together in the Communist Party Historians' Group in the 1940s and who were instrumental in founding the journal Past and Present in the 1950s. The work of Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and E. P. Thompson, with others, is put in this context with notable economy. Indeed economy runs to reductionism when, for example, Thompson's rich-textured and thought-provoking exploration of early nineteenth-century Methodism is despatched with the comment that “his account is only a more sophisticated version of the ‘opium of the masses’ theme’. She reproaches Thompson for not writing “a candid memoir of his experiences in the party”, yet her own use of such autobiographical fragments as have been published by members of the Group hardly make the invitation attractive. Hobsbawm's retrospective admission, that in the early 1950s he fell into the temptation to invoke arguments which were “sometimes designed a posteriori to confirm what we already knew to be necessarily ‘correct’”, is quoted (omitting “sometimes”) as though it were a confession of his current precepts. Happy is the historian who has no skeleton in his cupboard; but unwary is the historian who candidly unlocks the door.

Himmelfarb's acuity in discerning the self-serving and self-deceiving nature of our ideological preconceptions seems strikingly uneven in insight. It is as though a one-way mirror stands between her and the Group; she can see them for what they are with perfect clarity but she is confident that they cannot see her. Thus she goes so far as to acknowledge that Marxists say—“and quite rightly”—that all historians have values which preclude total objectivity. Yet her only riposte is a bland assertion that the “eclectic” or “empirical” historian “tries to understand each subject in whatever terms seem appropriate to it”, whereas “the Marxist historian is bound by a predetermined schema that applies to all periods and events”. Only by setting up and knocking down the straw man of party-line determinism could such a sophisticated intellectual as Gertrude Himmelfarb prepare us for this touching declaration of faith in naïve empiricism. Her final sally in this essay, however, surely deserves a retort culled from the platitudes of the Old History itself. She arraigns the members of the Group—Hilton, the medievalist; Hill, the authority on the seventeenth century; Thompson, the expert on the eighteenth; Hobsbawm, the specialist on the nineteenth—for the lack of “a scholarly work on twentieth-century Communism”. Someone should whisper to Himmelfarb, above the last fusillades of the cold war, that actually it's not their period.