Keith Thomas

David Wootton ( TLS , 2/27) offers a fascinating account of what happened to Keith Thomas who, in his latest book, effaces himself and his contemporaries in a way that places him “at odds with the main trends in historical scholarship over the past forty years.”

Wootton analyzes this as a divergence between Oxford and Cambridge historiography, and as a result of developments within anthropology, on which Thomas drew heavily in his early work:

“Fashionable historians in the 1970s (such as [Natalie Zemon] Davis, who moved to Princeton, where Geertz was based) went in one bound from soft Marxism to poststructuralism. But Oxford anthropology had an intellectual life of its own, and in the early 70s structural-functionalism [associated with Oxford and especially Evans-Pritchard] was supplanted by the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas. This structuralism appeared to be inimical to history - although Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons (1997) eventually showed that these appearances were deceptive. For Thomas, who was a decade older than Clark, the road forward, as far as methodology was concerned, appeared to be blocked. Cambridge historians, who had never read Evans-Pritchard or Levi-Strauss, but many of whom had read Wittgenstein and [Peter] Winch, entered the brave new world of discourse . . . ; Oxford historians did not. The Ends of Life , like Man and the Natural World before it, is the product of this intellectual blockage.”

As a result, Thomas, who began with a vision of history as a social science, “ends his career relying - or at least appearing to rely, if you stick with the text and ignore the endnotes - on the sort of untheoretical immersion in the sources that [Geoffrey] Elton advocated.”