Authors: Malcolm Bradbury

The History Man (37 page)

The Sixties Revolution was itself a confused radical paradox: Marxist utopian dreams were somehow to be financed by endless bourgeois wealth. It was never consistent, and both succeeded and failed. The great sociological syntheses of the 1950s and 1960s lost their inclusiveness and certainty. Society ceased to be the great wonderland and became, simply, the mess we're in.

Popular radical sociology was an episode. It gave us much, not least the enquiring, relativistic spirit in which we now perceive our âmembership' in society. Despite the many claims it made, it did little to deepen or enrich the sense of society or social existence. The atomized, random, value-free, self-creating, hedonistic self of the Nineties is just as much the product of all that radical sociology as it is of some Thatcherite distrust of the very idea of society.

Like most Enlightenment projects, the great enterprise became lost in its own ironies. The idea that our cultural understanding needed to spread democratically from elite to popular culture has turned, in the hands of the media-makers and programme-controllers, into the great Nineties dumbing-down. The ideological scepticism of the 1960s about the institution of the bourgeois family has given us the aimless modern household and the erosion of the ethical and self-responsible individual. In short, the radical, Marxizing, counter-cultural sociology of the sixties has largely provided much of the ideological and moral framework of postmodern consumer capitalism.

Ian Christie suggests the time is ripe for a return to sociology, and proposes that the âdefeat' of the 1970s is being reversed. I hope he's right. It is one of the paradoxes of our time that a society that is heavy with social self-description and self-documentation is so bad at defining the larger level of its moral, familial and community dilemmas.

In a number of recent books â he mentions
Conversations with Anthony Giddens
â Christie sees a return to serious debate about the nature and the workings of society. Yet he also notes we do not yet have the equivalent among contemporary sociologists to a Richard Dawkins or a Stephen Jay Gould, the large-thinking figures who construct a significant relationship with theory and practice for an entire discipline.

As Christie sees, if sociology is to make its return, it will have to swim outside the thinktanks, and recover some of that grand intellectual energy that delighted us thirty years ago â when the likes of David Riesman, Talcott Parsons, Richard Titmuss and JÃ¼rgen Habermas could make us understand the power and wonder of the idea of society, the mysteriousness of history.

Howard Kirk was a rogue of rogues, but at least he believed that. No doubt in 1979 he would have voted for Thatcher, and in 1997 for Blair. He would be enjoying his vice-chancellorship at Batley Canalside University, and the life peerage has been a source of the greatest pleasure. But at least Howard believed â even if it was chiefly for his own advantage â in all the things that still do matter. He believed in history, society, philosophy, ideas, human progress, mental discovery, all that's left of the Enlightenment Project.

As for his recent books,
The Prospects for the ECU, Or How Europe Got Rich
has done well this Christmas, and so has his
Brief History of Football
. The history men are not often sociologists these days. As for me, the ones I read are the Linda Colleys, the Norman Davies, or the new theorists in genetics or earth science. The fact remains that, if Ian Christie can find the published evidence that can persuade me, I shall be as delighted to hail the revival of sociology as I was sad to attend its fall.

About the Author

Malcolm Bradbury (1932â2000) was a well-known novelist, critic, and academic, as well as founder of the creative writing department at the University of East Anglia. He was the author of seven novels, including
The History Man
and
Rates of Exchange
, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He was knighted in 2000 for services to literature and died the same year.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

âWelcome Back to
The History Man
' Â© 1998 by Malcolm Bradbury

Cover design by Mauricio DÃaz

ISBN: 978-1-5040-0776-4

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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