Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 A politics of emergency in the reign of Elizabeth I
- Chapter 2 Richard Overton and radicalism: the new intertext of the civic ethos in mid seventeenth-century England
- Chapter 3 Radicalism and the English Revolution
- Chapter 4 ‘That kind of people’: late Stuart radicals and their manifestoes, a functional approach
- Chapter 5 The divine creature and the female citizen: manners, religion, and the two rights strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications
- Chapter 6 On not inventing the English Revolution: the radical failure of the 1790s as linguistic non-performance
- Chapter 7 Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s
- Chapter 8 Henry Hunt's Peep into a Prison: the radical discontinuities of imprisonment for debt
- Chapter 9 Jeremy Bentham's radicalism
- Chapter 10 Religion and the origins of radicalism in nineteenth-century Britain
- Chapter 11 Joseph Hume and the reformation of India, 1819–33
- AFTERWORDS
- Afterword: Radicalism revisited
- Afterword: Reassessing radicalism in a traditional society: two questions
- Index
Afterword: Radicalism revisited
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 June 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 A politics of emergency in the reign of Elizabeth I
- Chapter 2 Richard Overton and radicalism: the new intertext of the civic ethos in mid seventeenth-century England
- Chapter 3 Radicalism and the English Revolution
- Chapter 4 ‘That kind of people’: late Stuart radicals and their manifestoes, a functional approach
- Chapter 5 The divine creature and the female citizen: manners, religion, and the two rights strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications
- Chapter 6 On not inventing the English Revolution: the radical failure of the 1790s as linguistic non-performance
- Chapter 7 Disconcerting ideas: explaining popular radicalism and popular loyalism in the 1790s
- Chapter 8 Henry Hunt's Peep into a Prison: the radical discontinuities of imprisonment for debt
- Chapter 9 Jeremy Bentham's radicalism
- Chapter 10 Religion and the origins of radicalism in nineteenth-century Britain
- Chapter 11 Joseph Hume and the reformation of India, 1819–33
- AFTERWORDS
- Afterword: Radicalism revisited
- Afterword: Reassessing radicalism in a traditional society: two questions
- Index
Summary
Nothing expresses the precarious modality of historiography more than worries about the historian's vocabulary. What might seem to be matters of ‘mere’ semantics, housekeeping, sectarian infighting or signs of intellectual under-employment, may be much more than any of these. Although historians do not enjoy a specialized and insulating vocabulary, they do have a variable sense of being engaged in a distinctive activity. This means that while they can borrow from elsewhere to enrich their work, by doing so they risk eroding or reforming their awareness of disciplinarity.
One can identify two problematic sets of relationship for historiography: the discourse of neighbouring academic disciplines and subject areas, such as anthropology, economics and psychology, and the forms of discourse of daily moral and social commitments. The history of historiography may be seen as an interplay between these webs of association. None of them are totally entrapping, or amenable to neat patterns of change, but they make it difficult to see any static essence of intellectual integrity to which all historians adhere, or towards which they have struggled. Certainly a concern with anachronism provides a robust thread of continuity, but it remains an underdetermined criterion of judgment and demarcation. Additionally, its saliency is more clearly tied to the narrative and descriptive functions of historiography than to the explanatory. As these are easily entangled the results can be decidedly messy: little wonder that when evoked in criticism, accusations of anachronism can seem suggestive of double standards or lack of reflexivity.
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- Information
- English Radicalism, 1550–1850 , pp. 311 - 337Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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