ABSTRACT
To future historians of disciplinarity these times of ours will no doubt appear obsessed with the diagnosis of endings, crises and renewals. This is as true of the discipline of history as it is of anything else. Whilst it may be that a state of crisis is itself endemic to progress in the historical disciplines – certainly, it is difficult to think of a time when the discipline of history has not been perceived to have been in crisis – there are some issues that are worth addressing with regard to the current disciplinary conjuncture: in particular, the specific question of the status of social history ‘after the social’ and the question of the threats that postmodernism, social theory and the ‘linguistic turn’ may be said to pose to history as a discipline. At least insofar as the discipline of history is concerned, my aims in discussing these issues are deflationary: there are interesting things going on, but the only crisis worthy of the name is in the realm of theory, not history.
