Arthur Marwick

Arthur John Brereton Marwick FRHistS (29 February 1936 – 27 September 2006) was a British social historian, who served for many years as Professor of History at the Open University. His research interests lay primarily in the history of Britain in the twentieth century, and the relationship between war and social change. He is probably best known, however, for his more theoretical book The Nature of History (1970; revised editions 1981 and 1989), and its greatly reworked and expanded version The New Nature of History (2001). In the latter work he defended an empirical and source-based approach towards the writing of history, and argued against the turn towards postmodernism.

Quotes

• History is the study of the human past, through the systematic analysis of the primary sources, and the bodies of knowledge arising from that study, and, therefore, is the human past as it is known from the work of historians. The human past enfolds so many periods and cultures that history can no more form one unified body of knowledge than can the natural sciences. The search for universal meaning or universal explanations is, therefore, a futile one. History is about finding things out, and solving problems, rather than about spinning narratives or telling stories.
  • "Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" (1995), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 300

• The insistence that language determines ideas, and is itself a system arising from the existing power structure in society, is as grandiose a piece of speculative thought as ever dreamed up by Hegel or Nietzche.
  • "Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" (1995), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 301

• Primary sources did not come into existence to satisfy the curiosity of historians. They derive 'natural', 'organically', as it were, or, more straightforwardly, 'in the ordinary course of events', from human beings and groups of human beings, in the past society being studied, living their lives, worshipping, decision-making, adjudicating, fornicating, going about their business or fulfilling their vocations, recording, noting, communicating, as they go, very occasionally, perhaps, with an eye on the future, but generally in accordance with immediate needs and purposes. The technical skills of the historian lie in sorting these matters out, in understanding how and why a particular source came into existence, how relevant it is to the topic under investigation and, obviously, the particular codes or language in accordance with which the particular source comes into being as a concrete artefact.
  • "Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" (1995), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 302

• If the historian finds himself resorting to metaphor or cliché, that may well be a warning that things have not been sufficiently worked out, and substantiated, to be conveyed in plain simple prose.
  • "Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" (1995), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 303

• Society has a right to demand from historians accounts which can, if so desired, be used in trying to understand the evolution of political ideas or institutions, or the origins of the many conflicts throughout the world, or to gain the necessary contextual information for enjoying more fully a painting or a poem or some favourite tourist attraction. Those seeking such understandings will not be helped by some speculative theory about the need to replace humanism with radical ideology, or of the inescapability of their situation within language, but will want to feel that the explanations, interpretations, and information they are provided with are based on serious study of the evidence; and it will do them no harm at all if they are also made aware that all sources are fallible, that all study of them must be carried out in accordance with the strictest principles, and that there are always things which we do not know with any certainty.
  • "Two Approaches to Historical Study: the Metaphysical (including 'Postmodernism') and the Historical" (1995), cited in Tosh, ed. Historians on History, p. 304-5

• For most countries involved in modern war the experience has resulted in, among other things, the testing of the cruder fallacies of economic liberalism, the testing of human reluctance to exploit the full potential of science and technology, and the testing of the general inadequacy of social provisions of the weaker members of the community: looking for the moment only at the broad perspective, one can detect change towards management of the economy, towards a more science-conscious society and towards a welfare state.
  • Total War and Social Change

• Historians do not, as too many of my colleagues keep mindlessly repeating, “reconstruct” the past. What historians do is produce knowledge about the past, or, with respect to each individual, fallible historian, produce contributions to knowledge about the past. Thus the best and most concise definition of history is: “The bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians, together with everything that is involved in the production, communication of, and teaching about that knowledge.
  • The Fundamentals of History. The Open University