Post-War Historiography and the Persistence of Modernization Theory

After 1945, Western historians and sociologists extensively employed grand narratives to explain the origins of the contemporary world, forecast the future, and guide historical development onto a perceived correct path. The defeat of Nazism restored for many a faith in the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy. In response, British and American scholars crafted optimistic narratives of their national histories. Concurrently, French, German, and Italian academics revived or invented narratives that framed the Vichy, Nazi, and fascist periods as aberrant parentheses, caused by a traumatic resurgence of traditionalism within the national psyche. These interpretations shared profound affinities with modernization theory, then dominant in development studies, which attributed decolonization to the diffusion of progress from West to East, assuming rebellious colonies would eventually return to the Western model.

The implicit influence of social theory is exemplified by G. R. Elton, a champion of history's focus on the unique. He accepted the use of ‘modest’ generalizations, such as the idea that discontent requires a traumatic catalyst rather than continuous misery to spark revolution. This generalization was, in fact, intrinsic to the social science of his era. In his historical work, Elton narrated England’s development from the ‘traditional’ monarchy of Henry VII to modern nationhood under Henry VIII, presenting it as the realization of a felicitous balance between liberty and authority inherent in the English character. He described Thomas Cromwell’s creation of a modern bureaucracy in terms compatible with Max Weber’s rationalization, implicitly contrasting him with figures like Perkin Warbeck, who futilely resisted history’s "manifest direction."

Elton’s focus on political history was itself theoretically justified; he argued that history is change, politics is the active pursuit of change, and thus politics is history’s true form. For him, political history was essentially social history, as government ensured society functioned as a properly structured organism. This perspective unwittingly echoed collective psychologists like Gustave Le Bon, for whom the formless crowd-organism required elite guidance. Similarly conservative ideas influenced early British social history, as seen in George Kitson Clark’s interpretation of Victorian society as in transition, where "promiscuity, animalism, brutality and grossness" created vulnerabilities exploited by utopian movements, contrasted with the manufacturing class’s "reasonable common sense."

This intellectual climate brings us to the sociologist Talcott Parsons, who synthesized the work of Weber and Émile Durkheim with psychoanalysis into a coherent system. Though sometimes accused of ahistorical thinking, Parsons’s work was fundamentally structured by the notion of progress from traditional to modern society. His post-war structural sociology emerged alongside his explanation for National Socialism, arguing that overly rapid German modernization destroyed traditional bonds, creating anomie. The elite then directed romantic urges toward utopian nationalism, while the anomic masses became vulnerable to the Nazi racial utopia.

Parsons’s thesis, echoing earlier thinkers like Weber and Eckart Kehr, provided a template for the influential Sonderweg ("special path") thesis among German historians. This model argued that Germany’s "unification from above" prevented genuine liberal development, forcing a desperate old elite to preserve its status through increasingly radical means, culminating in the world wars and the rise of Nazism. Historians like Fritz Fischer applied this, arguing the aristocratic elite risked war in 1914 to maintain its beleaguered position. The concept was applied so widely it raised questions about the existence of a "normal" path.

Methodologically, post-war historiography was shaped by three key trends borrowed from social science. First, the use of quantification and statistics reached its apogee, exemplified by debates on the English Revolution where both Marxist historians and their critics used economic data to measure the power of contending groups, assuming objective laws could be discerned. Scholars like Lawrence Stone advocated this to overcome the "shoddiness" of selective evidence, endorsing theories like Ted Gurr’s J-curve of suddenly disappointed expectations.

Second, historians embraced comparative history, as launched by the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History in 1958. Rejecting the notion of absolute uniqueness, comparativists treated national societies as discrete cases obedient to general laws, aiming to identify common responses to the "objective" process of modernization. Third, historians adopted the concept of the "model," drawing from Weber’s ideal types or seeking common elements across cases to construct heuristic frameworks. This was particularly prevalent in fascist studies, though consensus proved elusive due to challenges in defining "essential" characteristics and isolating national cases for comparison.

(References: 19Q7X 155—76; Hamilton, P., Talcott Parsons (Chichester, 1983); Taylor, M., insights on early British social history.)