Alternative Historiography: History from Below and Its Modernization Paradoxes

The tendencies of grand narrative and modernization theory did not dominate historical writing unchallenged. A significant counter-current emphasized the conscious and unconscious activities of people over impersonal laws and structures, even as these alternatives struggled to emancipate themselves fully from ambient notions of progress. In 1953, the founding of the journal Past and Present marked the academic entry of British Marxist historiography, led by left-leaning historians who rejected both Stalinist dogma and ‘bourgeois’ social science. They pioneered a form of ‘history from below’, focusing on the rationality of ordinary people, their acquisition of self-knowledge through collective action, and their genuine influence on historical change.

George Rudé directly challenged Gustave Le Bon’s psychological interpretation of the crowd as an irrational mob. Through meticulous research into social composition, ideas, and objectives, Rudé demonstrated that crowd participants were often respected community members, not individuals disproportionately affected by anomie. Similarly, E. P. Thompson’s seminal work, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), argued that workers were not mere reactors to economic modes but active agents who responded as ‘free-born Englishmen’. Thompson’s main target was determinist Marxism, but his critique also extended to the static nature of Durkheimian anthropology and, later in The Poverty of Theory (1978), to Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism for its debt to functionalist sociology.

Advocates of history from below productively borrowed methods from symbolic anthropology. Thompson did so in his essay on the moral economy, and Robert Darnton in his study of ‘The Great Cat Massacre’. These historians shared Clifford Geertz’s critique of functionalism and his emphasis on uncovering the meanings of rituals. However, they criticized anthropology’s unhistorical nature, selectively employing techniques like ‘reading against the grain’ and ‘thick description’ to interpret subaltern groups who left few conventional sources, without necessarily adopting anthropological theory wholesale.

Despite their suspicions of social science, Marxist historians found certain of its assumptions difficult to root out, as Marxism itself shared some notions with the sociological canon. Thompson’s narrative, for instance, framed the achievement of working-class consciousness as the triumph of male reason over feminine religious revivalism, echoing gendered hierarchies present in collective psychology. Furthermore, his labour movement was portrayed as a synthesis of Irish excitability and English method. As Gareth Stedman Jones noted, the Marxist misuse of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony sometimes rendered it indistinguishable from the internalized deference discussed in mainstream social science.

The national-modernization narrative also persisted within Marxist historiography. Gramsci viewed the Italian Risorgimento as a failed bourgeois revolution—a ‘passive revolution’ that neglected to integrate the peasantry and create a genuinely democratic society. In the 1970s, historians systematized Gramsci’s notes into an interpretation resembling the German Sonderweg thesis. Gramsci urged the working class to complete this stalled bourgeois revolution, a theme mirrored in Thompson’s argument that the English bourgeoisie had ‘betrayed’ the progressive cause, which subsequently fell to the working class.

A similar ambivalence characterized the work of sociologically-trained historian Charles Tilly. While styling himself a Marxist and challenging collective psychology, he did not entirely abandon modernization frameworks. Tilly rejected the liberal view of the Vendée insurrection as a backward population manipulated by elites, arguing instead that protagonists chose from ‘repertoires of collective action’ shaped by changing contexts. Yet, modernization theory survived in his model of a historical shift from reactive to proactive crowd behaviour, linked to the growth of reason, and in his treatment of urbanization and state growth as irresistible forces prompting increasingly organized responses.

Some advocates of history from below openly engaged with the modernization model while cautioning against linearity. Sir Keith Thomas’s work on witchcraft accepted Bronisław Malinowski’s view that magic met explanatory needs but rejected the idea that technology caused its decline. Thomas argued that belief in human solutions spread among elites before technical efficacy, with magic still providing the irrational aspirations guiding scientific research—a dynamic echoing the elite-mass relationship in collective psychology. He posited a growing gulf between elite and mass mentalities, with the latter accepting science through conformism and deference, much as it had once accepted magic.