Why do historians like to write alone? In this blog article, Camilo Erlichman reflects on the reluctance of historians to engage in collaborative forms of writing, tracing the reasons to the development of the discipline in the 19th century. In doing so, he argues that while mono-authorship will remain a key pillar of the discipline, historians need to embrace more emphatically collective forms of writing: not to succumb to the logics of marketisation, but to diversify their sources and widen their intellectual horizons.
Over the past decade, much has been written about the need of academic historians to change their entrenched habits. Often these debates have gravitated around practices known as ‘public engagement’, ‘dissemination’, or what in the Dutch academic context is called ‘valorisation’: ‘The act or fact of fixing the value or price of some commercial commodity’, to quote the rather revealing definition from the Oxford English Dictionary. But beyond the familiar discussion on how and why historians should engage with non-academic audiences, History also faces demands from within academia to change its modes of operation. ‘Fixing the value’ of historians is now primarily done in terms of their quantitative publication output.
This prompts the question of why, with ever-growing workload pressures in academia and less time for research, historians do not, in a pragmatic manner, join forces and jump on the bandwagon of producing multi-authored pieces, a well-established, often productive, not to mention particularly ‘cost-efficient’ practice in the social sciences. In other words, why are historians generally reluctant to write together?
The answer lies, in many respects, in the modern gestation of the historical discipline. Throughout the nineteenth century, and well before most of the social sciences had seen the light of day, history established itself as one of the key disciplines within the university curricula of European universities. History, both as an analytical tool and as a subject matter, had, of course, a much longer lineage. In the wake of the French Revolution, however, and through the gradual rise of the nation-state, it acquired a new and immediate urgency: as both dynastic states and new nation-states sought to justify their existence, they had to tell a plausible story about their presumably organic and natural growth since times immemorial. Historians, in conjunction with scholars of literature, religion, and geography, had a key role to play in this exercise in self-legitimation: they provided the intellectual rationale needed to justify, to use Ernest Gellner’s famous phrase, why the boundaries of the ‘political and the national unit should be congruent’.
By present-day disciplinary standards, the outcome of this was often rather bad History: Rankean good intentions about reconstructing ‘how it really was’ notwithstanding, what mattered was not so much to follow the primary sources wherever they might lead, but rather to press the sources into a pre-conceived box of assumptions, which often involved a fair amount of violent handling of the empirical material. To merely reduce the historical profession of the nineteenth century to the role of eloquent court jests would, however, do it gross injustice.
Apart from leading to a significant process of reflection on the methodology that historians should employ, most notably resulting in foundational work on source criticism, this was a moment in which historians started to storm the archives. The amount of energy devoted to exploring the history of nation states did, therefore, lead to fundamental scholarship on the political history of European states. Some of the primary source collections that resulted from this era, such as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, are still key for historical research today. In many other cases, they provided the model for similar projects that were to follow in their footsteps in subsequent decades.
This attempt at a comprehensive survey of the primary sources or, to use Max Weber’s terminology, at ‘disenchanting’ history, had significant consequences for the driving rationales of the discipline. Most notably, the ambition of subduing the vast collections of hitherto uncharted primary sources was intrinsically bound to the person of the scholar. As a result, historians were publicly constructed as what one might describe as ‘embodied encyclopaedias’ on a subject and in doing so achieved social distinction from other groups.
Their societal recognition was based on the claim of possessing intimate and unparalleled familiarity with the source materials after having invested long periods of hard labour digging in the archives to achieve a comprehensive understanding of their subject matter. Ranke in Prussia, Macauley in Britain, and Michelet in France all thrived on building their reputation on the claim of having achieved exclusive mastery over a historical period. Not only did they write, to use a much-abused phrase, about ‘great men’, the idea was to become ‘great men’ themselves through the reputation that was achieved by writing a ‘magnum opus’, or better, several of them.
A single-authored monograph therefore became the unquestioned gold standard of the profession: it was a way of demonstrating deep learning and, above all, a singular command over the primary sources. This also implied that professional and societal distinction was achieved not through the writing of a paradigm-shifting essay. Conversely, careers were built on empirical diligence and perseverance: the more volumes a history of Germany, Britain, or France had, the better. It was not in the logic of this system to reward collaborations: working together ultimately diluted the work of a scholar and rendered their hard work invisible to the outside world.
This construction of the scholar as a lone authority, working valiantly and through much personal sacrifice to ‘conquer’ a subject, was, of course, not exclusive to History. Such notions characterised many of the academic disciplines of the era, with their extreme fixations on the creation of what one might describe as an ethos of scholarly heroism that reflected the broader Romantic sensitivities of the time. But the key methodologies of History tended to exacerbate this tendency: source criticism, interpretation, and above all, an emphasis on narrative structure all tended to draw heavily on the distinctive knowledge and literary skills of an individual scholar. As an emphatically ideational, rather than a nomothetical discipline, History relied on close empirical description and analysis, engagement with the specific rather than the general, and therefore, on many choices that were hard to disengage from a range of individual subjectivities.
It would be quite absurd to claim that the same conditions still obtained today. Much did invariably change throughout the twentieth century, and many of the fundamental historiographical shifts and turns since at least the Annales School have been emphatically collective endeavours. Yet, it is striking that even amongst those who were most dedicated to forms of collective engagement there was often an enduring reluctance to try their luck in the business of collective writing. This even applied to those who got closest to the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s by pioneering novel forms of social history or ‘historical social science’.
To take one of the most prominent examples: Eric Hobsbawm was heavily committed to a vast number of collective projects, both politically and intellectually, but for most of his long career when it came to actual historical writing, he preferred to write alone. And so did almost all of his influential contemporaries. Of course, there have been those who have, over the years, produced textbooks, survey histories, and edited volumes in collaboration with others, but a quick evaluation of the recent issues of all leading historical journals will emphatically demonstrate that the number of co-authored articles continues to be minimal.
This remarkable resilience of mono-authorship suggests that there is something more fundamental about the practice of doing history that makes collaborative writing inherently difficult. There are many complex reasons for this. Most obviously perhaps, they include the way in which researching a historical subject necessitates extensive archival work that still requires a single scholar to have achieved a significant overview over the details of the source materials in order to put them together and form a coherent argument. But they are also related to the identity of history as a narrative discipline that relies heavily on the literary tastes and choices of individual authors. Solo-projects will, therefore, remain fundamental to the historical profession.
Above all, given that the historical record suggest that the discipline evidently cannot do without them, they need to be protected against the present-day trend of forcing historians to fit awkwardly into the clothes of other disciplines, which operate under other premises and conventions; rationales that are legitimate for them, but do not have to apply to other long-established fields. Most notably, the emphasis on measuring exclusively the worth of a historian’s work in terms of their quantitative output achieved in the form of journal articles, and assigning jobs and research funding on that basis, creates a perilous logic that works to the detriment of long-term historical projects and pioneering research monographs.
Any determined defence of the continued significance of individual writing projects must not signify, however, that such established forms of historical work cannot be combined productively with collaborative projects. Quite the contrary is true. Put briefly, History has become far too complex, diverse, and simply unwieldy to be done exclusively alone. The success of comparative and transnational history has reinforced this trend, making it patently clear that historians often have little choice but to team up if they are to address crucial and hitherto underexplored subjects in their respective fields.
Collaborative forms of writing have the obvious advantage that they allow to blend different types of expertise, multiplying the empirical and historiographical reach of any project. That wider intellectual perspective is not simply a welcome addition to any historical work, but a practical, perhaps even existential necessity. It reflects the simple reality that working together has become indispensable when writing about themes that are embedded within larger spatial, temporal, and conceptual frameworks. The historical literature has become so sophisticated and specialised over the last century that few historians can hope to become fluent in more than a few bodies of national historiography. Nor can many of them aspire to dominate the wealth of languages that are needed to write about many transnational or global subjects.
And so as the historical horizon keeps moving, so present-day historians will have to embrace forms of collective work more emphatically than they have done in the past. Doing so must not imply succumbing to the pervasive logics of the marketisation of the universities, with its obsession of rationalising and streamlining scholarship by making it more ‘efficient’ through the abandonment of individual research agendas.
Rather, working collectively should be seen as a means of widening our historical imagination and embracing a greater diversity of views and voices emanating from sources that have their origins in very different places. More than anything, however, as I have come to realise over the past years through my involvement in several collective projects, including most recently through producing a piece with two close colleagues at Maastricht, writing History together has another distinctive benefit: just as during the pandemic we have all learned that taking long walks alone can get very dreary, so doing History together is simply much greater fun.
Further reading:
M. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester, 1954);
D. Bloxham, Why History? A History (Oxford, 2020)
S. Berger and C. Lorenz, eds. Nationalizing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe (New York, 2010)
S. Collini, Speaking of Universities (London, 2017);
G.G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, Conn., 1983).
S. Macintyte, J. Maiguashca and A. Pók, eds. The Oxford History of Historical Writing Vol. 4: 1800-1945. Vol. 4 (Oxford, 2011)
J. Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History (6th edn., Hoboken, 2015).
D. Woolf, A Concise History of History: Global Historiography from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2019).
C. Erlichman publishes blog on collaboration in historical research | FASoS Weekly
[…] his latest contribution to the History Department Blog, Camilo Erlichman reflects on the reluctance of historians to engage in collaborative forms of […]