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The indulgence which social historians extend towards their subjects, and the desire to establish ’empathy’ – seeing the past in terms of its own values rather than those of today, can also serve to flatter our self-esteem, making history a field in which, at no great cost to ourselves, we can demonstrate our enlarged sympathies and benevolence. It also serves to rob history of all its terrors. The past is no longer another country when we find a rational core to seemingly irrational behaviour – e.g. that witchcraft accusations were a way of disburdening a village of superfluous old women; or that printers who massacred cats were engaging in a surrogate for a strike.The identifications which social history invites – one of its leading inspirations and appeals – also have the effect of purveying symbolic reassurance. It establishes a too easy familiarity, the illusion that we are losing ourselves in the past when in fact we are using it for the projection of idea selves. Recognising our kinship to people in the past, and tracing, or discovering, their likeness to our selves, we are flattered in the belief that as the subliminal message of a well-known advert has it, underneath we are all lovable; eccentric perhaps and even absurd, but large-hearted generous and frank. Our very prejudices turn out to be endearing – or a any rate harmless – when they are revealed as quintessentially English. The people of the past thus become mirror images – or primitive versions of our ideal selves: the freeborn Englishman, as individualist to the manner born, acknowledging no man as his master, truculent in face of authority; the companionate family, ‘a loved circle of familiar faces’, living in nuclear households; the indulgent and affectionate parents, solicitous only for the happiness and well-being of their young

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A much more promising way of bringing the different branches of history together into a single framework is to distinguish between different dimensions such as the political, the economic and the ideological. Then one tries to relate these different levels together. Marxist history is the best example of this kind of enterprise. But equally the tradition associated with Max Weber can lead in the same direction although with important differences. In both cases, however, the central concern is no longer with ‘society’ but rather with other concepts such as ‘mode of production’ or ‘types of legitimate domination’. It makes little sense to call these approaches examples of social or societal history. There may still be the assumption that the ultimate purpose is to understand ‘society as a whole’ or a ‘social formation’, but this assumption is not an essential element in these types of history. What is essential is how the different dimensions are defined and then related to the evidence and to one another.