Historians for the right to work: we demand a continuing supply of history

Levene, Mark (2009) Historians for the right to work: we demand a continuing supply of history. History Workshop Journal, 67 (1), 69-81. (doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn063).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Nearly thirty years on from the second heightened phase of the nuclear arms race, science is informing of us of a new self-induced threat to our very existence on this planet, this time through anthropogenic climate change. This article seeks to make a link between the two threats and the way they have been presented to a wider public by elite policy makers and opinion formers.

Back in 1980 Sir Michael Howard, a leading war historian, proposed that if the nuclear (weapons) ante was to be upped, greater civil defence was its necessary corollary. In our present moment Sir David King, formerly chief scientific adviser to Her Majesty’s Government, has proposed a ‘solution’ to the upping of carbon emissions, through more ‘big’ technology, especially in the form of ‘nuclear’ power.

In both instances it is significant that alternative ways of thinking – and with them lines of action – have been implicitly marginalized or ruled out of the equation, King going so far as to attack opponents to his position as Luddites. Deferring to ‘those who know best’ is the default position of modern society as it attempts to grapple with complex as well as frightening problems. But could looking at history, not least the history we associate with ‘Luddism’, offer us the basis for a lateral consideration of ‘the mess we are in’, indeed a critical and purposeful unravelling of how we arrived here? We propose our guide in this quest to be the late Edward (E. P.) Thompson, who would, we venture, were he today alive, have taken up the cudgels on behalf of grass-roots empowerment in the face of global warming, just as he did in his 1980 Protest and Survive riposte to Howard’s essential acceptance of the nuclear arms race. Underlying this argument are some basic questions which are fundamental to the future of home sapiens as we peer into a perilous future.

Who decides how society should respond to crisis? Must we always defer to the scientific keepers of the keys to the kingdom or might we be better served by looking back into a recent and indeed deeper history to find autonomous ways of living which can genuinely create the basis for a long-term, less violent survivability and resilient sustainability of the human Oikumene?

Fundamental to this argument is the premise that the post-Enlightenment mantras of those who remain wedded to a political economy of ‘business as usual’ can no longer suffice and that historians, and other students of the past, could have a significant role to play in offering alternatives from outside the conventional box. Whether this can be of benefit to policy makers needs discussion, always with a view to the needs of the commonweal. It is this which has motivated the creation of Rescue!

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