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Human Science or a Human Face? Social History and the “Two Cultures” Controversy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Guy Ortolano
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , October 2004 , pp. 482 - 505
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2004

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References

1 Snow's correspondence with Laslett is held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin (hereafter HRC), Snow 132.3. Laslett first solicited Snow's assistance 18 May 1963.

2 Snow to Laslett, 5 March 1964, HRC, Snow 132.3.

3 Snow: “I was struck by the closing paragraph of your Chapter I when you talk about a life surrounded by the ‘loved familiar faces.’ This phrase seems to me to pre-judge the emotional experience.” Snow to Laslett, 4 March 1964, HRC, Snow 132.3.

4 On the “two cultures” (chronologically): Trilling, Lionel, “Science, Literature, and Culture: A Comment on the Leavis-Snow Controversy,” Commentary 33 (June 1962): 461–77Google Scholar; Lepenies, Wolf, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar; Stefan Collini, introduction to Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roy Porter, “The Two Cultures Revisited,” Cambridge Review (November 1994), pp. 74–80; Hollinger, David, “Science as a Weapon in Kulturkämpfe in the United States During and After World War II,” Isis 86 (1995): 440–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacKillop, Ian, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism (New York, 1995), chap. 9Google Scholar; Burnett, D. Graham, “A View from the Bridge: The Two Cultures Debate, Its Legacy, and the History of Science,” Daedalus 128 (Spring 1999): 193–218Google Scholar; David Edgerton, “C. P. Snow as Anti-historian of British Science” (lecture delivered at the British Association for the Advancement of Science [BAAS] meeting, Leeds, 1997 [included in Edgerton's forthcoming The Warfare State]). On new developments in historiography: Wilson, Adrian, “A Critical Portrait of Social History,” in Rethinking Social History: English Society, 1570–1920 (Manchester, 1993), pp. 9–58Google Scholar; Taylor, Miles, “The Beginnings of Modern British Social History?” History Workshop Journal 43 (Spring 1997): 155–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Obelkevich, Jim, “New Developments in History in the 1950s and 1960s,” Contemporary British History 14 (Winter 2000): 125–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, published together with the transcript of a witness seminar on the same theme held at the Institute of Historical Research 29 April 1998; Sewell, William H., Jr., “Whatever Happened to the ‘Social’ in Social History?” in Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science, ed. Scott, Joan W. and Keates, Debra (Princeton, N.J., 2001), pp. 209–26Google Scholar; Cannadine, David, “Historians in ‘The Liberal Hour’: Lawrence Stone and J. H. Plumb Re-Visited,” Historical Research 75 (August 2002): 316–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hobsbawm, E. J., Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002), chap. 17Google Scholar; John Brewer, “New Ways in History, or Talking about My Generation,” Historein (2003): 27–46. David Cannadine discusses both social history and the “two cultures” in “The Age of Todd, Plumb, and Snow: Christ’s, the ‘Two Cultures,’ and the ‘Corridors of Power’” (seminar paper, Institute of Historical Research, March 2003 [forthcoming in a volume on the history of Christ's College]). I am grateful to Professor Cannadine for providing advance copies of that paper and “Historians in ‘The Liberal Hour.’”

5 Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1959)Google Scholar. The finest account placing Snow and Leavis in the tradition of Huxley and Arnold remains Trilling, “Science, Literature, and Culture.” This perspective informed a contemporary anthology for use in schools: Cornelius, David K. and St. Vincent, Edwin, eds., Cultures in Conflict: Perspectives on the Snow-Leavis Controversy (Chicago, 1964)Google Scholar; and it continues to shape historical treatments: see, e.g., Lepenies, Between Literature and Science; de la Mothe, John, C. P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity (Austin, Tex., 1992)Google Scholar; and Collini, introduction to Two Cultures. By no means do I intend to deny the analytical utility of that perspective—indeed, I have made use of it myself in “Two Cultures, One University: The Institutional Origins of the ‘Two Cultures’ Controversy,” Albion 34 (Winter 2002): 606–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But in its effort to escape Snow's terms this article is in the company of MacKillop, F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism; and Edgerton, “C. P. Snow as Anti-historian of British Science.”

6 The commentary on the debate is enormous. For a handle on it see Boytinck, Paul, C. P. Snow: A Reference Guide (Boston, 1980)Google Scholar. Collini explores the context that charged the debate in his introduction to the reprint.

7 In this sense, examination of the “two cultures” episode offers a window onto British intellectual life in the 1960s along the lines of Collini's account of another controversy at another time: “One of those great moral earthquakes of … public life whose fault-lines are so revealing of those subterranean affinities and antipathies of the educated classes which the historian's normal aerial survey of the surface cannot detect.” Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991), p. 144Google Scholar.

8 This episode is thus one instance in the longer tradition of analyzing the Industrial Revolution in light of contemporary concerns: David Cannadine, “The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880–1980,” Past and Present, no. 103 (May 1984): 131–72.

9 On “science” as a rhetorical resource in wider political arguments, see Hollinger, “Science as a Weapon in Kulturkämpfe in the United States During and After World War II.”

10 E. J. Hobsbawm, “Growth of an Audience,” Times Literary Supplement (7 April 1966), p. 283; Robbins, Lionel, Higher Education, Cmnd. 2154 (London, 1963)Google Scholar.

11 David Cannadine, “The State of British History,” Times Literary Supplement (10 October 1986), p. 1139.

12 On the history of historiography, see Iggers, Georg G., New Directions in European Historiography (Middletown, Conn., 1975)Google Scholar, and Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, 1997)Google Scholar; in the United States, Kammen, Michael, ed., The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980)Google Scholar; in Britain, Dworkin, Dennis, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C., 1997), chap. 1Google Scholar. Taylor points to a non-Marxist heritage of social history in “The Beginnings of Modern British Social History?”; E. J. Hobsbawm recounts the history of the Historians’ Group in “The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party,” Rebels and Their Causes, ed. Cornforth, Maurice (London, 1978), pp. 21–47Google Scholar.

13 Wilson traces the tradition of social history from the nineteenth century in “A Critical Portrait of Social History;” E. J. Hobsbawm points out the three trends that fed the field in the 1950s in “From Social History to the History of Society,” Daedalus 100 (Winter 1971): 20–45, esp. 21–22Google Scholar.

14 Keith Thomas, “The Tools and the Job,” Times Literary Supplement (7 April 1966), p. 276. The assertion regarding the position of social history in 1960 is that of Stone, Lawrence in The Past and the Present Revisited (London, 1987), p. 12Google Scholar.

15 Brewer, “New Ways in History, or Talking about My Generation.”

16 Trevelyan, G. M., English Social History (New York, 1942)Google Scholar.

17 E. P. Thompson, “History from Below,” Times Literary Supplement (6 April 1966), pp. 279–80.

18 Hugh Trevor-Roper quoted in Thomas, “The Tools and the Job,” p. 276; Geoffrey Elton quoted in Arnstein, Walter, ed., Recent Historians of Great Britain: Essays on the Post-1945 Generation (Ames, Iowa, 1990), p. 7Google Scholar.

19 Robbins, Higher Education, pp. 259, 279, 284.

20 C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures,” New Statesman and Nation (10 October 1956), pp. 413–14.

21 Ibid., p. 413.

22 Cannadine discusses their relationship in “The Age of Todd, Plumb, and Snow.” In this article I primarily explore their relationship through the correspondence held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas; further insights will surely be forthcoming from Plumb's papers, recently made available at the University Library in Cambridge.

23 Plumb, J. H., ed., Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan (London, 1955)Google Scholar. Plumb on the promise of social history is on p. xiv. On Plumb see David Cannadine, “Sir John Plumb,” History Today (February 2002), pp. 26–28, in addition to “Historians in ‘The Liberal Hour.’”

24 At the dawn of the 1960s Plumb's politics were thus situated between his more radical youthful stance of the 1930s and the ardent Thatcherism of the 1980s. Snow's journey was similar (if less extreme), and both are typical of the rightward drift of many liberals when confronted with the radicalism of the later 1960s—a phenomenon referred to as “neo-conservatism” in the American context, and one that I intend to explore in more detail in the larger work of which this article is a part.

25 Plumb, J. H., Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (London, 1956)Google Scholar.

26 Cannadine notes the influence of Namier on Plumb's early work, especially his dissertation: Plumb, J. H., “Elections to the House of Commons in the Reign of William III” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1936)Google Scholar. Cannadine, “The Age of Todd, Plumb, and Snow.”

27 Plumb to Snow, 19 and 28 April 1956, HRC, Snow 166.6.

28 For an overview of the subsequent commentary see Boytinck, C. P. Snow: A Reference Guide.

29 Snow, The Two Cultures (1959), pp. 27, 29.

30 Ibid., pp. 8, 23, 26, 29. Snow attributed the implication regarding Auschwitz to an unnamed scientific colleague, to which he indicated his agreement by stating that he could not defend the indefensible.

31 Williams to Snow, 3 December 1959, HRC, Snow 210.1 (inferred from Williams's reply, as a copy of Snow's letter is not included in the file). I must stress that this account of the New Left is that of Snow himself. My aim here is not to argue with Snow's reading of the New Left (or the “two cultures,” or national decline, etc.), but to capture that reading and consider its origins, politics, and consequences. For historical accounts of the New Left, see Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain; and Kenny, Michael, The First New Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

32 Podhoretz, of course, would soon embark on the rightward journey that established him as a leading American neoconservative. See Podhoretz, Norman, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York, 1979)Google Scholar.

33 Snow to Podhoretz, 2 February 1960, HRC, Snow 165.10.

34 Snow to Podhoretz, 9 March 1960, HRC, Snow 165.10.

35 “Williams and Hoggart are perfectly serious characters, but as you have perceived, most of their kind of socialism derives from Morris and Ruskin seen through the eyes of F. R. Le[a]vis. This means the practical relevance is pretty small. (Williams is a more complex case. He contrived to be a Leavisite and a Marxist at the same time. This gave him a nervous breakdown.)” Snow to Podhoretz, 2 February 1960, HRC, Snow 165.10. Snow eventually dropped the article completely in January 1961. Snow to Podhoretz, 24 January 1961, HRC, Snow 165.11.

36 Leavis, F. R., Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (London, 1962), pp. 16, 10, 24, 19, 26Google Scholar.

37 Snow to Plumb, 7 March 1962, HRC, Snow 226.12. The Spectator printed Leavis's text on 9 March 1962, and over the next three weeks its correspondence columns were dominated by the debate.

38 J. H. Plumb, Spectator (30 March 1962), p. 396.

39 Snow to Plumb, 4 July 1962, HRC, Snow 166.9.

40 Plumb to Snow, 7 December 1962, HRC, Snow 166.9.

41 Plumb to Snow, 1 July 1962, HRC, Snow 166.9.

42 Plumb, Spectator (30 March 1962), p. 396.

43 Snow to Podhoretz, 25 May 1962, HRC, Snow 165.12.

44 C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures: A Second Look,” Times Literary Supplement (25 October 1963), pp. 839–44.

45 I differ mildly with Collini's characterization of the attention Snow devoted to the social sciences as “a rather feeble attempt to remedy an obvious omission in the original lecture.” In the context of Snow's private efforts, the references to the social sciences in “A Second Look” appear more like a deliberate effort to invoke their authority and enlist their support in his wider campaign.

46 Snow, “A Second Look,” p. 840.

47 Ibid., p. 844.

48 Ibid., p. 842.

49 Ibid., p. 843.

50 Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, UK Branch, London, Annual Report for 1964, entry 43.

51 Snow to Steiner, 7 February 1963, HRC, Snow 191.4.

52 Snow to Laslett, 20 May 1963, HRC, Snow 132.3.

53 Ibid.; Laslett to Snow, 27 May 1963, HRC, Snow 132.3.

54 Laslett to Snow, 28 February 1964, HRC, Snow 132.3.

55 Snow to Laslett, 5 March 1964, HRC, Snow 132.3.

56 Snow to Laslett, 20 May 1963, HRC, Snow 132.3.

57 Snow to Laslett, 5 March 1964, HRC, Snow 132.3.

58 Laslett to Snow, 4 June 1964, HRC, Snow 132.3.

59 Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost (London, 1965)Google Scholar. Laslett stated in the introduction that the book was not a publication of the Cambridge Group, but the identification of the book with the work of the Cambridge Group was unavoidable. See, e.g., the review in the Times Literary Supplement (9 December 1965) (discussed below).

60 Peter Laslett, “Engels as Historian,” Encounter (May 1958), pp. 85–86.

61 Laslett, The World We Have Lost, p. 168.

62 Ibid., p. 82.

63 Ibid., p. 239.

64 Ibid., p. 3.

65 Ibid., pp. 126, 94, 45.

66 Snow to Laslett, 5 March 1964, HRC, Snow 132.3.

67 “The Book of Numbers,” Times Literary Supplement (9 December 1965), pp. 1117–18.

68 Ibid., p. 1117.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., p. 1118.

71 TLS, the Times Literary Supplement Centenary Archive, http://www.tls.psmedia.com/. Not surprisingly, given Thompson's distinctive prose, E. A. Wrigley recalls that the identity of the author of the review was soon common knowledge. I am grateful to Professor Wrigley for the assistance he provided regarding Laslett and the early history of the Cambridge Group (although the responsibility for any errors of fact or interpretation is mine).

72 C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” Encounter (June 1959), pp. 17–24, and (July 1959), pp. 22–27; Walter Allen et al., “A Discussion of C. P. Snow's Views,” Encounter (August 1959), pp. 67–73; Michael Polanyi, “The Two Cultures,” Encounter (September 1959), pp. 61–64; Julian Symons, “ ‘Two Cultures,’ One Missing” (letter), Encounter (September 1959), pp. 83–84; C. H. Waddington, “Humanists and Scientists: A Last Comment on C. P. Snow,” Encounter (January 1960), pp. 72–73; C. P. Snow, “The ‘Two Cultures’ Controversy: Afterthoughts,” Encounter (February 1960), pp. 64–68; Julian Huxley, “The Two Cultures and Education” (letter), Encounter (June 1960), pp. 91–93; Kathleen Nott, “The Type to Which the Whole Creation Moves? Further Thoughts on the Snow Saga,” Encounter (February 1962), pp. 87–88, 94–97. The story of Encounter is brilliantly told by Saunders, Frances Stonor in Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 1999)Google Scholar.

73 Thompson, E. P., “Outside the Whale,” Out of Apathy (London, 1960), p. 157Google Scholar.

74 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963), p. 445Google Scholar.

75 Thompson, E. P., Making History: Writings on Politics and Culture (New York, 1994), p. 254Google Scholar. Fred Inglis recalls that Thompson once said of Leavis, “it would be good to have fought some of his battles alongside him”—the suggestion here is that, in the case of the “two cultures,” he did. Inglis, introduction to Thompson, E. P., Collected Poems (Newcastle, 1999), p. 15Google Scholar.

76 Leavis, F. R., “Sociology and Literature,” Scrutiny 13 (Spring 1945): 80Google Scholar.

77 Leavis, F. R. and Leavis, Q. D., Lectures in America (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Leavis, F. R., Nor Shall My Sword (London, 1972)Google Scholar.

78 F. R. Leavis, “Luddites? There Is Only One Culture,” in Nor Shall My Sword, p. 81.

79 Leavis, F. R., English Literature in Our Time and the University (London, 1969), pp. 170, 174Google Scholar, and “Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope,” in Nor Shall My Sword, p. 187.

80 Leavis, “Sociology and Literature,” pp. 74–81.

81 F. R. Leavis, “Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope,” and “Elites, Oligarchies and an Educated Public” (lectures delivered in 1970 and 1971, respectively, at the University of York and published in Nor Shall My Sword).

82 Perkin, Harold, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword, pp. 193–95.

83 Q. D. Leavis to D. F. Pocock, 10 August 1971, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 9.59.121.24.

84 Leavis, F. R., “Anna Karenina,” appearing originally in the first number of the Cambridge Quarterly in 1965 and reprinted in Anna Karenina and Other Essays (London, 1967)Google Scholar.

85 Leavis, Q. D., Fiction and the Reading Public (London, 1932)Google Scholar; MacKillop, Ian, We Were That Cambridge: F. R. Leavis and the “Anthropologico-Literary” Group (Austin, Tex., 1993)Google Scholar.

86 Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword, p. 17.

87 The menace of Robbins is a theme in Leavis, F. R., English Literature in Our Time and the University (London, 1969)Google Scholar, Nor Shall My Sword, and The Living Principle (London, 1975)Google Scholar.

88 C. P. Snow, “The Case of Leavis and the Serious Case,” Times Literary Supplement (9 July 1970), pp. 737–40.

89 C. P. Snow, “The Role of Personality in Science,” British Library, National Sound Archive, cassette 1CA0012643.

90 C. P. Snow, “Recent Thoughts on the Two Cultures,” address at Birkbeck College (London), 12 December 1961, British Library, WP 8944/39.

91 Undoubtedly the antiteleological and antifoundational aspects of the historiography of science in the subsequent three decades would have frustrated Snow yet again.

92 Although beyond the scope of this article, a similar argument might be considered in the context of American historiography—the revealing debate in that case being that which attended the publication of Fogel, Robert William and Engerman, Stanley L., Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974)Google Scholar.

93 Snow, C. P., “Meeting the Challenges of the Future: A Discussion between ‘The Two Cultures’” (symposium at the Royal Society [London], 13–14 May 2002)Google Scholar.

94 For example, Sokal, Alan and Bricmont, Jean, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York, 1998), pp. 183, 268, 276–77Google Scholar.