Arthur Marwick

Arthur John Brereton Marwick (29 February 1936 – 27 September 2006) was a professor in history. Born in Edinburgh, he was a graduate of Edinburgh University and later studied at Balliol College, Oxford.^[1]

Career

Marwick was appointed the first Professor of History at the Open University in 1969, after lecturing at Edinburgh for ten years. He held visiting professorships at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Stanford University, Rhodes College and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He was a left-wing social and cultural historian but critical of Marxism and other approaches to history that he believed stressed the importance of metanarrative over archival research. He was also a critic of postmodernism, seeing it as a "menace to serious historical study". It was also the methodology of the postmodernists to which he was opposed, "the techniques to deconstruction or discourse analysis have little value compared with the sophisticated methods historians have been developing over years".

One of his most influential books, "The Deluge", dealt with the transformations in British society brought about by the First World War. Published in 1965, its main thesis, a provocative one at the time, was that the war had brought about positive and lasting social changes (in the rôle of women, in the acceptability of state intervention for social reasons, and so on). Despite its terrible tragedies, Marwick believed that the sum result of the war was that Britain was a better place to live in the twenties than in the period before the war.

In putting forward this thesis, he was scathing about many previous histories of the war; he accused many of them of being infected with "naivety of analysis", or coming down simply to "patriotic polemic".

His books were particularly concerned with the changes in the lives of "ordinary people", and he felt it was important not to overgeneralize, but always to distinguish the effects of a social event on different social classes.

Total War and Social Changes

Marwick taught a particular theory in history named 'Marwicks Principle' which examined the social changes as a result of Total War. He points out that total war cause social changes in four different "dimensions" in his argument concerning the relationship between total war and social changes. These "dimensions" include:

• The first dimension exploits the "destructive and disruptive dimension" of war which urge people toward the reconstruction of society and sometimes to the building of a society better than that of the previous.
• The second dimension which explores "tests" in war. The military institutions directly related thereto, as well as other systems of society, economy, and politics, would be "tested" as to their suitability and survivability for the conduct of war.
• The third dimension defines conditions by means of "participation", which allow persons who, up to the time, have been deprived of the right and power to participate in various social activities, to finally participate in them.
• The final and fourth dimension implements a "psychological" sense of war that leads to a creation of something new, as a result of the suffering and strong shock of the war.

See also

• Unwitting testimony, term coined by Marwick

Bibliography

• The Explosion of British Society, republished as The Explosion of British Society 1914-1970 (1971)
• The Deluge, British Society and the First World War (1965)
• Britain in the Century of Total War (1968)
• The Nature of History (1970 1st Ed.)
• War and Social Change in the Twentieth century
• Total War and Historical Change, Europe 1914-1955
• British Society since 1945 with J.H. Plumb (1982)
• The New Nature of History (2001)
• Windows on the Sixties with A. Aldgate and J. Chapman
• A History of the Modern British Isles, 1914-1999
• The Arts in the West since 1945
• It: a History of Human Beauty
• Women At War, 1914-1918
• Europe on the Eve of War, 1900-1914
• World War II and its Consequences
• Class: Image and Reality
• Culture in Britain since 1945
• Princes and Peoples: Parliaments and Kings
• An Introduction to the Humanities
• Arts, Literature and Society
• Illustrated Dictionary of British History
• Britain in Our Century
• Class in the Twentieth Century
• Social Change in Britain, 1920-1970
• The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c. 1974 (1998)
• The Home Front - Britain and the Second World War

References

1. Obituary, The Guardian