Freddy Foks (University of Manchester) was awarded the 2023 History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for his essay ‘Finding modernity in England’s past: social anthropology and the transformation of social history in Britain, 1959-1977’. The article is forthcoming in the journal. We asked him some questions about the winning text and his future research.

History of the Human Sciences: First of all, why were a particular group of social historians – your article focuses on four case studies: Keith Thomas, Peter Laslett, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm ­– in Britain drawn to social anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s?

Freddy Foks: There are two main reasons. The first was about anthropology and its ideas and status and the second was about what the historians wanted to do with those ideas.

Laslett, Thomas and Thompson all wanted to explain that social change change wasn’t just determined by economic change. By the 1960s social anthropologists in Britain had been making arguments like that for decades. Not only that but it was a pretty high-status discipline with a lot of prestige in the academy. Some big names had published big ethnographies by the 1960s: Audrey Richards, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman, Victor Turner etc. Those are names that might even be familiar to some historians today.

So the historians saw a prestigious discipline doing something they wanted to do: they didn’t want to subscribe to an economically determinist account of history (apart from Hobsbawm, who I think we’ll talk about later in the interview). Anthropologists tended to analyse religion, economy, kinship, ritual etc. as part of a whole account of a society. That’s what really appealed to the historians: this focus on the small scale and moving away from political elites.

HHS: Why did Keith Thomas think that engaging with social anthropology might enable historians to break with ‘vulgar Marxism’?

FF: In the early 1960s Keith Thomas was frustrated with colleagues who were mostly looking at very high politics – the lives of politicians, foreign policy, wars, battles etc. Historians who wanted to avoid doing ‘high politics’ in that era tended to reach for Marxism to explain social and economic change even if that method didn’t reflect their politics. The term ‘vulgar Marxism’ has a political slant. It has connotations during the height of the Cold War of a politics associated with the Soviet Union. In terms of ideology this ‘vulgar Marxism’ implies rigid Marxist-Leninism. By implication, Thomas suggested that historians might be uncomfortable simply drawing uncritically on Marxist historiography. And he proposed that anthropology might be a way to avoid high politics and allow historians to write about economics by connecting it to all these other facets of social life, such as religion and kinship. Using social anthropology as a theoretical toolkit rather than Marxism has the advantage, as Thomas saw it, of not placing the historian in the same camp as official Communist Party historians.

HHS: How did Thomas argue that social anthropology might be helpful for making sense of the emergence and subsidence of witchcraft accusations in England? How did his arguments differ from those made by Max Gluckman?

FF: By the time you get to the late 1950s and early 1960s witchcraft had become a classic subject to study in social anthropology. The really key insight that anthropologists had brought to the table was that witchcraft should be understood as neither irrational nor random but as something that’s connected to changes in the social structure, as something that may even have its own particular logic for the people who believe in it, and for those who accuse others of it, and maybe even for the people who are accused of it. That might sound like common sense for social scientists or historians today but that’s because we’re working in the wake of classic works of social anthropology from the 1930s onwards which set out those kinds of arguments.

The anthropologist Max Gluckman made the argument that witchcraft accusations rose in Central Africa as a result of colonialism and capitalist expansion. As people experienced more social dislocation, stress, anxiety, uncertainty about the world they reached for scapegoats. Gluckman then made a comparative point about how he thought the future would pan out. He thought that the decline of witchcraft beliefs in England had occurred once  industrial production had got to a certain scaleand more rational forms of production took hold and so he argued that the same process would probably help dispel witchcraft beliefs in Central Africa.

Thomas posed a problem with Gluckman’s’s reading of English history. It wasn’t during the industrial revolution that witchcraft accusations subsided in England. Witchcraft accusations fell away a century earlier, at the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth. Thomas agreed with Gluckman to the extent that witchcraft accusations arose because of social dislocation and social stress, but at least in England’s case witchcraft accusations subsided in England because social structures stabilised after the introduction of a new set of poor laws and there was much less political stress within the system after the Glorious Revolution. Thomas suggested that the witch craze died down because of the stabilisation of the social structure more generally and not just because wealth increased.

HHS: Who were the American Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP), why did they make overtures to Thomas and what were the results?

FF: The American Committee on Comparative Politics were a group of mostly American political scientists who came together in the 1950s. They were really interested in applying new social science techniques to the contemporary world. They thought that you could chart the current problems that countries might be facing, especially in terms of social breakdown and revolution, by looking back at sequences of history. This became known as modernization theory which posited that countries pass through particular stages, through certain crises, in a particular sequence. If social scientists knew more about how those crises arise and what the sequence of crises would be, then maybe policymakers and political elites could avoid social breakdown that might cause revolution (which in a Cold War context was about avoiding a turn towards the Soviet Union).

The Committee were interested in Keith Thomas because he also seemed to be applying social science to history. So they flew Keith Thomas out to America and he went to a couple of their conferences. He was quite intrigued by the idea of applying social science to history but he became skeptical of modernization theory. This was something he shared with a number of other historians who worked with the Committee – they were all pretty skeptical of the idea that there was a unilinear or teleological modernization happening in history, and that you could squash all of the different societies and nations in the world onto one abstract sequence of progress and breakdown. Thomas did up being influenced by the broader turn towards social science in history, and that’s partly why he looked to anthropology, but he didn’t think that the kind of American modernization theory which the Committee on Comparative Politics was generating was that helpful for describing the European past. It was a too much of a blunt instrument.

HHS: In Peter Laslett’s work how were the politics of early modern historiography tied to Cold War debates about revolution?

FF: This is something that we’ve been circling around in this interview so far, which is how far these quite specialized debates about changes in the countryside or industrial production in seventeenth or eighteenth-century England might relate to the biggest clashes of ideology and geopolitics in the mid-twentieth century.

Peter Laslett, like Keith Thomas, also related English history to the Cold War. For Soviet historians and for many Marxists in Britain, the mid seventeenth century in England gave rise to the first bourgeois revolution in world history. This English Revolution was part of a sequence of revolutions that moved through the French and American to the Russian Revolutions.

If the civil wars in England came about because of a class struggle between a rising bourgeoisie and a feudal monarchical order then the Marxist story seemed right. If that wasn’t the case, then maybe that would pose a broader challenge to the way that Marxists understand the history of revolutions and what causes them. Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost is very keen to say that England in the mid-seventeenth century was not a class society. He used anthropology to suggest that what you see in England is a society in which elites are relatively closed off from the rest of society but that there isn’t the kind of antagonism that Marxists would want to suggest between elites and the rest of the rest of the social world. Instead he described the elite as a ‘web of kinship’ in the same way that contemporary anthropologists explained other pre-capitalist societies.

HHS: What was distinctive about EP Thompson’s engagements with anthrology and how were they informed by his political convictions?

FF: The two historians we’ve been talking about so far thought that social anthropology was useful because it helped to explain societies that were very different from their own. For Keith Thomas, anthropology provided a series of analogies to make sense of witchcraft beliefs in the past. Peter Lalett’s thinking about kinship drew on analogies between English history and societies that anthropologists were studying where there were struggles between kinship lineages and within the elite over political power.

E. P. Thompson wanted to use anthropology to understand the past and also to help us understand later political developments and he came up with the idea of the moral economy to do this. This is the idea that there’s a form of economic and social life which is informed by common-sense ideas of justice, to which market rationality and profit-seeking and capitalism, especially at moments of social stress, seems to be in total opposition.

That’s something that Thompsons saw playing in English history and also something he saw in anthropological literature describing many different societies.

Thompson proposed that the moral economy was something that could be drawn on as an inspiration for contemporary politics. The moral economy didn’t just describe a world that had been lost. For Thompson the moral economy could provide some lessons and inspiration and it reflected a series of struggles going on around the world in the mid twentieth century that he thought historians should be interested in.

HHS: You claim that in Thompson’s article ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ (1971), he ‘used anthropological exemplars in exactly the way he chided other historians for doing’ – what were his criticisms of other historians and how did he fall into the same trap?

FF: In a review Thompson published a year after his moral economy article he’s really keen to suggest that history is really about particular contexts and that each society has to be treated on its own terms. He was very into empiricism generally and he was pretty skeptical of social theory more broadly. In 1972 he warned about making grand comparisons between different societies. But in his famous 1971 article on the moral economy he does seem to do exactly what he criticised others for doing, which is to make big comparisons and connections between very geographically dispersed societies at different periods of time. He says that the moral economy really is something that’s global, not just national and that you can see examples of it all around the world. One of those examples is England. Thompson certainly didn’t just apply abstract models to the past in the way the Committee on Comparative Politics did but he did definitely have a kind of implicitly comparativist mindset. He did – more than has been understood before by people writing about him – use social science comparatively, but the social science that he’s using is anthropology and ethnography. It’s not abstract in the sense that contemporary modernization theory or development economics were abstract, his social-scientific sensibility was ethnographically sensitive and particularist but it nevertheless drew him to make comparisons across different societies and different contexts to explain the English past.

HHS: What did Eric Hobsbawm see as the potential dangers associated with historians borrowing methods from the social sciences?

FF: Hobsbawm, unlike Thompson, was very excited by the new histories of growth and economic development appearing in the 1950s. He was worried, though, about historians drawing from anthropology and sociology because, in his view, anthropologists and sociologists hadn’t thought enough about change over time. So while he thought that anthropology and sociology might be useful, they hadn’t been describing social change or creating models to explain how it happens. Hobsbawm was invested in the interdisciplinary discussions going on at the time between historians and other social scientists. But because he was a Marxist and an economic determinist he thought that the kind of social science that historians should be interested in should be a social science of change, conflict and development.

HHS: How did Hobsbawm’s accounts of ‘social banditry’ differ from the kinds of argument made by Thompson and how did this reflect their respective political outlooks?

FF: When I was talking about Thompson I explained that there’s a way of reading his work that suggests that protests against modern forms of economic rationality rely on this common sense moral disgust at profit-making, especially in times of social hardship.

The kind of protests he’s interested in are very similar to what Eric Hobsbawm had called social banditry just over a decade earlier. These bandits weren’t necessarily organised or part of a bigger political project. They might be local protestors who based their resistance on folk ideas of justice. For Thompson that would have looked like evidence for a sense of moral economy, but for Hobsbawm these bandits looked irrational, pre-modern and not very helpful for our understanding of what drove social change. For Hobsbawm only committed Communist Party discipline of a broadly Leninist kind was going to bring about socialism and then communism. This reflects, at least in part, Hobsbawm and Thompson’s different politics.

After 1956 with the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, Thompson left the Communist Party of Great Britain but Hobsbawm stayed on even though he had a very fraught relationship with the Party. What Hobsbawm calls social bandits may have been protesting against capitalism, but they did so on a moral basis and without being part of a vanguard party and without an economic understanding of the world, which he would see as necessary for the creation of socialism. Hobsbawm’s book on bandits came out of lectures given at Max Gluckman’s anthropology seminar at the University of Manchester and there are many similarities between his account and the work of the Manchester School of Gluckman and Victor Turner.

HHS: What distinct understandings of the relationship between the modern and the ‘primitive’ did these historians rely on?

FF: Social anthropologists in the mid-twentieth century were very sceptical of evolutionary social science, where the concept of the so-called primitive represented an earlier stage of human history and then history had progressed from that point forward. There’s a bit of an irony in the story I tell in the article because in many ways the historians began to reformulate the old Victorian story about evolutionary progress by drawing on the works of the anti-evolutionist social anthropologists.

Thomas, Laslett and Hobsbawm all reinstantiated a kind of historical teleology of modernity in which they used ethnographic examples from the twentieth century to read back into Europe’s pre-modern past. So, in a way, there’s a kind of irony here that the social anthropologists were trying to relativize amongst different societies around the world in order to challenge the notion of a ladder of history with English society at the top, while many of the historians recreated a version of that story by using anthropological examples to measure a distance from an ethnographically-informed past to the present. The one historian who really stands out in comparison to that idea is Thompson, who had a different idea of development and change in history. He never wrote a big manifesto laying it all out in a fully worked through theoretical way but amongst these four historians who I write about he’s the one who seems to be most relativist and the one who wants to maintain an anthropological sensibility by saying modernity hasn’t simply left behind the premodern past. Maybe  the premodern even provides resources – political, imaginative and moral resources – for ways to protest against and resist what he saw as the worst features of his present.

Finally, I wonder if you could briefly discuss what you’re currently working on and introduce your monograph Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain (University of California Press)?

FF: The book came out a couple of months ago. It’s a history of social anthropology in the twentieth century that looks at the discipline’s development over time and its effects on Britain’s intellectual culture. The book ends with a few brief comments about these historians that I discuss in the article, but it doesn’t go into nearly as much detail. Writing this article was a chance to draw on research I had done for a chapter of my PhD thesis which I then had to mostly cut from the book. So it’s been really great to get the opportunity to get this research out there and I hope it’ll be interesting for readers of HHS.

I’m now working on a totally different project millions of miles away from the stuff we’ve been talking about here. I’m working on a new book about emigration from the UK between the mid nineteenth century and the mid twentieth century. I’m  looking at how emigration from the UK transformed the British state and affected citizenship law. It explores ideas about race and empire, economic policy and social policy so it’s totally different to the history of anthropology. I’ve left intellectual history behind to some extent and I’m moving on to social, economic and political history over a bigger timespan than my first book. But I’m still interested in the relationship between social science and historical writing. I guess I’m now trying to do some social science history rather than write about other people doing it.  

This interview was conducted by Hannah Proctor. It has been edited for clarity and length.