Writing Political History

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32661, 17 July 1971, Page 10

Writing Political History

Political History: Principles and Practice. By G. R. Elton. Allen Lane. The Penguin Press. 179 pp. Index. Dr Elton, Professor of English Constitutional History at Cambridge University, has distilled the experience of 30 years as an historian into an attractive collection of reflections on the methods, purposes and possibilities of writing political history. Dr Elton examines the categories of political history, which he defines as the ways of looking at the activities of men living together in societies; he offers a valuable critical analysis of the use of historical evidence; and he moves skilfully through the tangled thickets of the nature of cause and explanation in history. “Political History” is a determined defence of the writing of narrative histories and an attempt to expose the limitations of the more modem, and

more fashionable, Analytical approach. He appeals to historians: "Let them once again tell stories, real stories, though far from simple stories.” For history, as the study of mankind’s fortunes through the ages, must be told as a coherent story or it is no longer history. Analysis remains an essential part of the historian’s task, successful narrative histories come to depend more and more on the work of analytic historians for their raw material, but an historian has not fulfilled his purpose unless he has also assimilated his knowledge of the past into a tale that is worth the telling, and the reading. "We may be at the point where it is better to write a flawed narrative than a successful collection of analytical chapters," writes Dr Elton. Many scholars might not agree, but the skill with which Dr Elton argues his case deserves more than a passing glance.