Eve Rosenhaft

Hands and Minds: Clerical Work in the First ''Information Society''

This article examines some aspects of the labour involved in generating, recording and transmitting information in eighteenth-century Europe. It centres on the study of a particular occupational group: the men involved in the day-to-day operations of the schemes for the marketing of lifecontingent pensions which would develop into modern life insurance, a form of enterprise whose growth was deeply implicated in the emerging ‘‘information society’’. The bulk of the work these men did was what we would now call clerical work: keeping and processing records and accounts, managing correspondence, preparing reports for publication. It was in the nature of the information regimes within which they worked and the kind of information they were handling, though, that the responsibilities and demands placed on them went beyond those associated with the mechanical function of recording and reproducing. This made for an occupational profile which was relatively fluid, and only gradually came to be distinguishable from other contemporary forms of middle-class employment, in terms of the disciplines peculiar to it and the hazards it incurred. Among the hazards were forms of mental and physical strain that accompanied rapid increases in the volume of data that had to be handled and in the speed of its circulation, as a direct consequence of its character as ‘‘information’’. While the account focuses on the study of a particular kind of enterprise in a particular place, northwest Germany, it draws on comparative data for officers and staff in analogous forms of commercial and administrative employment in Britain. The article concludes with a consideration of how their occupational profile might fit into an extended account of the historical development of information work.

On Geoff Eley and William H. Sewell Jnr

In these volumes, two leading practitioners offer their accounts of the trajectory of the project of social history since the 1960s. The stories they tell are recognizably the same in outline and in most of their details. In both cases the account is explicitly a personal one (though in differing ways and degrees), since both Eley and Sewell have been directly engaged in core developments and debates. Each of the books could serve as a vade mecum for anyone now or a hundred years from now wanting to reconstruct a history of this particular branch of knowledge in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, not least because as scholars of European history (Eley of modern Germany, Sewell of modern France) with global interests whose careers have been characterized by multiple displacements, both authors have privileged perspectives on, and very interesting things to say about, consonances and dissonances between developments in Britain, France and the United States. (Unsurprisingly, Eley also writes perceptively on German historiography and gives extended attention to south Asian historians in the context of ruminating on subaltern studies.) Of the same generation, having worked together in various contexts and acknowledging one another’s work, Eley and Sewell also reveal shared enthusiasms and sources of inspiration, not only among historians but notably in the cultural criticism of Raymond Williams. And each of the books is both brilliant and (which is not always the same thing) illuminating. At the same time, they are quite different sorts of books, and they can be fruitfully read in dialogue with one another. This is because they propose different sorts of answers to the two core (and related) problems implicit in the shift from structure-based social (science) history to the various forms of historiographical practice (micro-, qualitative, interpretive. . .) signalled by the phrase ‘cultural turn’. The first of these is the methodological challenge of how we relate the understanding gained through close analyses of particular events or phenomena to the understanding of processes at the level of whole societies – with the associated problem of relating Social History Vol. 34 No. 1 February 2009

Communisms and Communities: Britain and Germany between the Wars

Why was it that parties which were manifestly and profoundly undemocratic in their internal organization, and which remained associated with the Soviet Union over a long period when it was the object of a constant barrage of very effective bourgeois propaganda, much of it based on historical facts, nevertheless won and kept the freely consented allegiance of the vanguard sectors of their national working class?

Introduction: The Agency of the “Masses”

The concept of “mass dictatorship” is distinguished from other analytical accounts of twentieth-century authoritarian regimes by its insistence on the subjectivity and agency of ordinary people. In Western languages, at least, deploying the term “mass” in this analytical frame involves a self-conscious appropriation and revisioning of a key word of classical modernity: the vision of the mass as a political actor was a product of the cultural pessimism of the fin de siecle, in which anxieties about the growing confidence of organized labour and the anomic conditions of urban life found support in new theories of crowd psychology. In this analysis, the crowd (foule, folla) of Gustav Le Bon (1895) and Scipio Sighele (1891) and the subject of Freud’s Massenpsychologie (1921) was typified by irrationality and suggestibility; while the mass could be moved to action by certain stimuli, its inherent intellectual state was passivity. It was in this character that radical politicians, mainly of the right, simultaneously celebrated and objectified the mass—as the subject of a new kind of political revolution and the object of calculated campaigns of propaganda and mobilization both before and after the seizure of power. We know that Hitler read Le Bon (Wiesen 2008, p. 150). Accordingly, when historians and political scientists speak the language of “mass” (as distinct, for example, from class), there is always a danger of recapitulating the vision of ordinary people as passive, brainwashed or at best suffering from false consciousness. “Mass dictatorship,” by contrast, invokes a dialectical relationship between the structures of domination which envision the population as a mass in order to contain it and that population as a body of autonomous actors whose actions and habitus are co-constitutive of those structures. Even in the preceding chapters, which focus on the objectives and methods of the respective dictatorial regimes, ordinary people have been at the centre of consideration, because each of the regimes in question placed a vision of the whole nation or body politic at the centre of its ideology and its planning for the future. The chapters in this section explore the ways in which people appropriated those visions: how they responded to what the regime offered, invested time, energy and sentiment in the projects it proposed, evaded its claims or indeed openly resisted its demands.

Inclusion and Exclusion as Instruments of Domination

If a common (perhaps defining) feature of those regimes we call “mass dictatorships” is the practice of violence directed both inwards and outwards, then a shaping precondition for that violence is the construction of internal and external enemies. The forms and degree of violence visited on those enemies are directly related to the fact that they are constructed as outsiders to society or the polity and accordingly outside the law; the “mass” envisaged by self-conscious “mass dictatorships” is never everybody, but commonly a mythic “us” that always implies a “them” and calls for “them” to be identified and eliminated. The other chapters in this section of the handbook discuss the ways in which internal terror and coercion are ambivalent in their functions and need to be modulated in such a way as not to endanger the legitimacy of systems that ultimately rely on a level of popular consent. Ensuring that it is “them” and not “us” who are (or appear to be) the objects of state violence is one way to maintain the balance.

Book Review: Women in the Third Reich

manages to convey the horror of the war years without lapsing into pious clichés. Central to the authors’ portrait is the notion of ‘war culture’, a concept that they employ to explore the most difficult question faced by historians of the war: how did the French population survive a conflict that surpassed anything they could have imagined in 1914, a total war which transformed their lives, leaving no family untouched by loss or physical hardship? The authors find the answer in terms of ‘consent’ – a sense of purpose that was nurtured in rituals of national belonging in 1914, and which transformed itself through a collective experience of trauma into a grim determination to see the conflict through to the end. The notion of ‘war culture’ is a useful one, and the authors carefully distinguish it from state-directed attempts to control public opinion and morale. ‘War culture’ was produced by a broader group of individuals, working both within and outside of the state, including ‘journalists, teachers, writers, actors, popular singers, photographers, painters, designers, film directors, artisans, industrialists, and many others’ (54). Ultimately, the representations of the war effort offered by this vast decentralized effort were ‘interiorized’ by the French population as a whole. This argument is useful, both for understanding the reasons for the crisis of 1917, when mutinies at the front converged with growing desperation among civilians, and for explaining why this crisis was not fatal to the war effort. The authors are so successful in their attempt to do justice to the sacrifice and dignity of those whose lives were touched or ended by the war, that one might ask if the book amounts to a rehabilitation of the war’s significance. For much of the century, the First World War has been held up as a tragedy because of the ultimate meaninglessness of the conflict. Having done so much to explore the meaning of the war to the French people, should the authors be accused of finding retroactive justification for this collective engagement in the name of the nation? If the answer to this question is yes, then one would want to explore the ways that a ‘war culture’ might have operated among the other belligerent powers, and how it differed from the French experience. A comparative context might also test the authors’ notion of ‘consent’. Given that most people were never fully in control of their circumstances during these years, ‘acquiescence’ and ‘resignation’ might be equally valid terms for describing an individual’s relationship to the war effort. Such criticisms, however, are beside the point, and the authors are correct to say that we still need national histories of the war, if only because the concept of the nation was so important at the time. This is a very valuable book, one that university teachers will assign with confidence, and that students will read with interest.