and represented. Foreign to his thinking was any notion of an ahistorical, acultural idea of a rational interest somehow independent of affect, values, and cultural norms.
Although Thompson’s turn toward culture and consciousness, in many ways like Geertz’s emphasis on signification, would lead successive scholars to play down or ignore altogether the material, structural, “objective” side of social determination, both of these authors retained a focus on the material. In his essay “The Peculiarities of the English,” a polemic against Anderson and fellow Marxist Tom Nairn, Thompson argued that the growing moderation of English workers in mid-century was the product of their progressive imbrication into the fabric of English society. Their very successful entry and the improvement of their well-being made them less revolutionary. Here structure, rather than agency, is paramount. Thompson wrote: “Let us look at history as history—men placed in actual contexts which they have not chosen, and confronted by indivertible forces, with an overwhelming immediacy of relations and duties and with only a scanty opportunity for inserting their own agency.”15 Thompson suggested that the relative determinative power of agency and structure shift though history, so that one or the other may take on greater power at different conjunctures. In the period of The Making, that is, up to 1832, workers faced an unconsolidated capitalism, an embryonic industrial society, with the ideological structures of liberalism and political economy not yet securely in place. Here the political opening was available and certain lessons had not yet been learned, whereas later workers had already undergone certain experiences, successes and failures; structures had become consolidated; ideological hegemony of the middle class was gaining strength; and the very successes of workers in ending the earlier social apartheid and integrating within the new social order entangled them in unanticipated ways and reduced their aspirations toward revolutionary destructuring.
Along with his elevation of consciousness and culture—what Marxists often dismissively referred to as “superstructure”—and his repositioning of agency, E. P. Thompson embraced Marxism, not as an all-encompassing explanatory theory, but as a tradition of historical materialist, empirical inquiry. What was most exciting was the sense that the seemingly one-dimensional “natural” world of capitalist economics was itself a product of specific histories, and people who would become its victims stood up against it with values and passions that survived from an older form of social organization. Rejecting the reductionism of earlier Marxists, Thompson and other theorists, like Raymond Williams, reminded us of the radical historicism in Marxism.
While some Marxist sociologists, like Erik Olin Wright, took the objectivist road, and materialist understandings of interest found their way into political science through economics, many historians and historical sociologists took the implications of Thompson’s work further to explore the origins and evolution of consciousness, culture, and historical contextualization. The important interventions by Gareth Stedman Jones, William H. Sewell Jr., and Joan Wallach Scott, among others, in the late 1970s and early 1980s shifted the analytical focus from the material to the linguistic and marked a turning away from the sociology of earlier social history toward a greater association with anthropology.16 Borrowing from the work of feminist historians, Scott faulted Thompson for taking experience for granted, as simply existing out there busily determining consciousness, and insisted that experience itself is being constituted, contested, and given meaning all the time. Interests themselves, like identities, must be understood to be discursively articulated and constituted. Experience should not be “seen as the objective circumstances that condition identity; identity is not an objectively defined sense of self defined by needs and interests. Politics is not the collective coming to consciousness of similarly situated individual subjects. Rather politics is the process by which plays of power and knowledge constitute identity and experience.”17 Moving on from Thompson, historians became increasingly interested, not in the “facts” of experience itself, but in how “experience” was experienced by historical actors.
The very questions Marxism raised about consciousness and ideology, the inexplicable power of nationalism, and the particular kinds of oppression visited on women and experienced in the family led to new ways of answering that moved beyond anything conventionally included within Marxism. For some, the limits of Marxism encouraged expanding the boundaries of the tradition, for others the constraints of Marxism provoked rejection and defection. First, the influence of Foucault and the growing interest in language that flowed from Saussure through structuralism into post-structuralism, the new emphasis on meaning and discourse, fundamentally changed the direction of much research by Marxist (now perhaps post-Marxist) historians and social scientists. The direction of the arrow of determination shifted from the material to the realm of discourse, culture, and language. Second, Marxism as a potent, totalizing grand narrative was undermined by the post-modernist suspicion of all such master narratives with their ideas of progress, their teleological certainty, and their resistance to anomalies and ambiguities.18 Third, at a moment of confusion and doubt among Marxists, even before the disappearance of European state socialisms, scholars replaced the focus on class (at least for a time) with a concern for other social collectivities. The most important were nation and gender. Feminist historians and theorists rapidly moved from an inclusivist women’s history driven by a commitment to recover and include women in the existing narratives, to questioning those narratives themselves, and ultimately to a deep interrogation of the category “woman.” Once the earlier confidence of Marxist and social historians in the primacy of the social was shattered, culture and discourse appeared to offer possibly richer forms of explanation.
From the Geertzian Revolution to the Cultural Turn
The cultural turn is neither the same as the linguistic or historical turn nor coterminous with post-structuralism or post-modernism, but it has overlapped temporally and intellectually with a number of concerns shared by all of them. The attention to language and its deep structures preceded the renewed interest in history within American social science in the 1980s and 1990s, a profound reversal of the post-1945 rejection of history from political science and sociology particularly.19 The cultural turn, it should be noted, was neither the same as “bringing culture back in” (though it certainly entailed that as well) nor the belief that “culture matters,” a stance that would lead in a quite different direction (and a different implied politics) from the cultural turn.20
One might tell the story of the evolving, revolving “cultural turn” from a number of key texts—Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973), Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975, translated into English, 1977); or from the seminal works of Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, Marshall Sahlins, or Raymond Williams.21 But—again from both generational and personal experience—the most influential text was probably Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973). Few come away from this book indifferent to its challenge or unaffected by its lapidary language. The program of Geertz (and others like White) was to reject positivist approaches to understanding human experience and to insist on the centrality of meaning, the historically and culturally specific constructions of understanding and feeling. As Sherry Ortner puts it,
Geertz’s battle against various forms of functionalist and mechanistic perspectives (regardless of their theorists of origin—Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and so on) was important … because it challenges a view of society as a machine, or as an organism, a view in which complex human intentions and complex cultural formations are reduced to their effects on that social machine or social organism.22
Or in Geertz’s own description of his research program: “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”23 To be opposed were all forms of “objectivism” and “reductionism”—something against which Marxists and social historians were then struggling.
In
