International Congress of the Historical Sciences

Abstract

On August 22-29 there met in San Francisco the International Congress of the Historical Sciences, the fourteenth of these every-five-year gatherings held under the auspices of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, a body run by a multi-national bureau and managed by a secretary-general whose office is in Paris. Never before had one of these congresses been held outside Continental Europe, a fact that may account for the smaller than usual attendance figure — around 1400, but a fact that may also explain the participation by delegates from the largest ever number of countries around 60. Despite a program that promised some sessions of particular interest to the historian of European labor and working class history three afternoons, for example, devoted to the question of reform and revolution in 20th-century labor movements the congress itself was a disappointment. On the purely mechanical side, the prescribed format for these congresses inhibited both flexibility in program-planning and spontaneity in discussion. Thus, the fifteen-minute oral summaries of papers the texts of which one had rarely been able to read beforehand, the often extended commentaries by the "experts" on the program, and the succession of mini-commentaries from the floor for which each speaker registered his name all these created a rather stilted, discontinuous exchange. But the substantive side of the sessions was more distressing than the mechanical, for in very short order they became frankly politicized and were marked by overt east-west conflict reminiscent of the 1950's. In one instance, an interestingly entitled session on "Economic Aspects of Societies Undergoing Industrial Development (XVIII-XIX Centuries)" became a battle over the current relevance of the doctrine-according-to-Lenin and the loaded question of the U.S.S.R. today as a major imperialist power because of a straight-forward, scholarly paper on "European Finance-Imperialism before 1914." In general, attendance at the sessions tended to be on the thin side, although the discussion generated by a French team's hundred pages of collected essays on the "Rights of Man" held many attenders against competition in the same time slot from an ensemble of the San Francisco Symphony playing in ultra-modern St. Mary's Cathedral. The single paper of most immediate interest to members of the Study Group was that of E. J. Hobsbawm, simply called "Revolution," explicitly concerned with "...revolutions as incidents in macro-historical change, i.e. as 'breaking-points' in systems under growing tension, and with the consequences of this particular form of rupture... " (pp 2-3.) Stimulating though Hobsbawm's summarizing remarks made at the congress were and no limiting him to fifteen minutes! it is to the printed text of the paper, with its seven pages of references that one must turn fully to appreciate his contribution. At the congress's end the consensus seemed to be that much of its value had been on the fringes in talking shop with colleagues from near and far. And happily, now that the congress-as-event is over, there remain the thousands of pages written by eminent and not so eminent historians synthesizing recent scholarship to be examined in tranquility.