Change and Continuity in History and Sociology: The Case of Industrial Paternalism

Abstract

To some extent this chapter is a challenge to L. P. Hartley’s dictum, cited above. It is, of course, quite true that people behaved differently in the past and that they acted under different meanings and motivations. This is, in part, what makes the study of history so exciting; at times the historian feels much the same way as a social anthropologist confronted with a new civilisation and its (as yet quite incomprehensible) culture. However, it is also the case that people do things the same in the past. This is not to make claims for the existence of any underlying structure of human motivation or universal meanings-system; it is simply to imply that forms of behaving and thinking are passed on from generation to generation, embedded in the culture and built into the structures of institutions. It is for this reason that the sociologist can enter the terrain of history; and it is for this reason, too, that she must do so if she is to comprehend fully the persistence of these culturally embedded and structurally inbuilt forms of behaviour and thought.

‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’