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INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW: SOCIAL INVESTIGATION IN HISTORY AND THEORY*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

MARY O. FURNER
MARY O. FURNER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
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Extract

Investigating investigations, inquiring into inquiries, surveying the results of earlier surveys: for well over a century historians have been digging into the mountains of data amassed by generations of social investigators, seeking evidence to use in reconstructing past economic relations and social conditions. Like Karl Marx hunched over parliamentary Blue Books in the British Museum, we have parsed the tables and decoded the responses, searching for the stuff of social and cultural life. All this intense scrutiny suggests something of the importance of the subject. For social historians seeking nonelite sources, for policy historians studying conditions to be addressed by state or communal action, for cultural historians recovering elusive past identities, for intellectual historians listening for points of contact between action and belief, the accumulated lore deposited in past social inquiries provides indispensable concrete evidence.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 147 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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