« back to search

"He thinks that discourses are 'established conventions' and that language is a resource which constrains what can be said – as if words were ill-fitting clothes within which thoughts are confined."

— Wootton, David

Author

Wootton, David

Work Title

Happiness and the Historian [from The Times Literary Supplement]

Date

Februrary 25, 2009

Metaphor

"He thinks that discourses are 'established conventions' and that language is a resource which constrains what can be said – as if words were ill-fitting clothes within which thoughts are confined."

Metaphor in Context

Let us be clear, though, that Thomas has made a series of fundamental choices, and that those choices place him at odds with the main trends in historical scholarship over the past forty years (trends he himself summarized very fairly in an article in the TLS, October 13, 2006). He is, in language invented by J. H. Hexter in the course of a famous assault on Thomas's graduate supervisor, Christopher Hill, a “lumper” not a “splitter”. Where other historians have embraced microhistory and aspired to see the universe in a grain of sand, Thomas brings you the beach and announces that it is made of sand through and through. Where others have tried to reconstruct in detail the life of a single village, Thomas treats England as if it were one community, not many contrasting communities (Contrasting Communities is the title of an influential book by a Cambridge historian, Margaret Spufford, published in 1974). Where others have insisted that the main route to the study of a foreign culture is through the study of language and the identification of different discourses, Thomas frankly acknowledges that this is not his approach. Indeed he gives an outsider's account of what the study of discourse is all about. He thinks that discourses are "established conventions" and that language is a resource which constrains what can be said – as if words were ill-fitting clothes within which thoughts are confined. While of course the claim is that language and thought are so inseparable that we can never see how our language constrains our thought, and cannot ever step outside the conventions that do not confine us because they define us. In the years between the publication of Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World, many historians (and literary critics too) turned from Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson to Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Clifford Geertz – Natalie Zemon Davis is an obvious and admirable example. Thomas largely abandoned R. H. Tawney, Hill and Thompson, but he did not set out to emulate Foucault, Ladurie, or Geertz.