History Made Conscious Politics of Knowledge, Politics of the Past

How History has changed in the half-century since the 1960s

During the last fifty years, the writing of history underwent two massive transformations. First, powered by Marxism and other materialist sociologies, the great social history wave instated the value of social explanation.

Then, responding to new theoretical debates, the cultural turn upset many of those freshly earned certainties. Each challenge was profoundly informed by politics, from issues of class, gender, and race to those of identity, empire, and the postcolonial.

The resulting controversies brought historians radically changed possibilities, expanding subject matters, unfamiliar approaches, greater openness to theory and other disciplines, a new place in the public culture. History Made Conscious offers snapshots of a discipline continuously rethinking its charge. How might we understand "the social" and "the cultural" together? How do we collaborate most fruitfully across disciplines? If we take theory seriously, how does that change what historians do? How should we think differently about politics?

Geoff Eley has taught at the University of Cambridge (1975-79) and the University of Michigan (1979-2022). His earlier books include Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000, The Future of Class in History: What's Left of the Social? [with Keith Nield], and Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945.