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Agency and Ideology in Modern British Social History

There is perhaps no more maddeningly diffuse and elusive term than "social history." Lord Briggs once claimed with some justice that social history was self-evidently the history of society and thus "nothing is irrelevant to it." Yet the very universality of this claim has often led to the definition of social history by negation: it is not economic, political, military, ecclesiastical, or constitutional history, although none of these traditional areas is excluded from its ken. Moreover, the seemingly unbounded terrain of social history has contributed to several of its less flattering characteristics as both an academic discipline and an intellectual endeavor. In particular, these are social history's apparent lack of established orthodoxy, its unfocused research agenda, and its heterogeneous, some might say chaotic, methodologies. Nonetheless, perhaps the principal element underlying social history has always been the paradox of human agency. Philip Abrams expressed the nature of this dilemma as lucidly as any when he wrote that "the problem of agency is the problem of finding a way of accounting for human experience which recognises simultaneously and in equal measure that history and society are made by constant and more or less purposeful individual action and that individual action, however purposeful, is made by history and society." The enormity of this