The histories of Raphael Samuel : a portrait of a people's historian

Abstract

Most historians become known for advancing a particular historical argument or for pioneering a distinctive methodology. The British historian Raphael Samuel (1934-1996) is remarkable, however, for the way he practised history. Samuel was the moving force behind a movement, the History Workshop, which took its initial stance on the democratisation of history making, becoming synonymous with vivid histories of working-class life and culture. Later, Samuel became a founding editor of a periodical, the History Workshop Journal (1976-). He was best known as a public intellectual, being a prominent voice in the British history wars of the mid-1980s. The author of over a dozen monographs, his best known work is Theatres of Memory (1994), a pioneering book exploring the relationship between social memory and public history which was described "as a compendium of enthusiasms". This is the first concentrated biographical account of Samuel's thought and practice. It offers a sustained and rigorous engagement with Samuel's political philosophy and contribution as a post-war public intellectual. Practice was always equally important as theory to Samuel. He has to be judged as much as by what he did as what he wrote. I argue that, in this sense, Samuel was a communist rather than a Marxist historian. Rather than being the last comrade of the old New Left: populist, romantic and sentimental, he was distinctive from the start, later falling back upon his communist childhood and his skills as an organiser and facilitator after he broke with the party and subsequently with Marxism. Drawing on a close reading of his texts and activities for their performative qualities in conjunction with previously unpublished material from the Raphael Samuel Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute, London, and a range of oral interviews with his contemporaries, this thesis reconstructs Samuel's intellectual and political development. As a critical biography, it stresses his achievement as an instigator and enabler of history making. Samuel used history as a form of social critique, accommodating plurality in history. As an individual, he presents a stark challenge to the ways in which we conceive of the social role of the historian, making a distinct shift from the historian as an authority about the past to the historian as a facilitator of history making.