the history of everyday life may 1995

[...]... Workers and the Politics of Everyday Life, ” International Review of Social History, supplement, 38 (1993): 39–84 This page intentionally left blank THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE This page intentionally left blank 1 INTRODUCTION WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE AND WHO ARE ITS PRACTITIONERS? Alf Lüdtke W HAT Alltagsgeschichte the history of everyday life is and the uses it serves remains a matter of spirited... for the future In doing the history of everyday life, attention is focused not just on the deeds (and misdeeds) and pageantry of the great, the masters of church and state Rather, central to the thrust of everyday 4 ALF LÜDTKE historical analysis is the life and survival of those who have remained largely anonymous in history the “nameless” multitudes in their workaday trials and tribulations, their... much of their persuasiveness There is another side, methodological and theoretical, to the coin of these doubts: does the image of the “grand contours” of historical life actually accord with the concrete experience of the many”? It becomes necessary 8 ALF LÜDTKE to historicize the very assumption of the “shaping power of supraindividual forces,” that is, “societal structures and processes.”15 Are they... was placed on the “structure” of social forms and configurations.7 In keeping with such a static conception, its more recent variant, associated with the history of everyday life, presupposes a clear-cut separation between the spheres of everyday life and the noneveryday At the same time, an explicit hierarchy is assumed: everyday life is the preschool, as it were, for the sphere of noneveryday eventfulness... (in the sense of Weber’s “disenchantment” of the world) do not attain the necessary degree of multilayeredness requisite here The Habermasian thesis of the “colonization of the life world” is more subtle but also neglects the fundamental ambivalences of historical social praxis.37 The specific horizons of life world” are not simply dissolved as a result of “colonization” by functional “imperatives” of. .. “imperatives” of the total societal system Instead, there is a “mediatization of the life world in and with the structures of the life world.” The “reproductional constraints” of the total societal “system” and the “purposive activities” associated with this conception “hide themselves, as it were, in the pores of communicative action.”38 The relatively permanent complaisance (Hinnahme) on the part of the disadvantaged... only refer to the colonized nations In these centers, the strange and alien element of “one’s own Otherness” remains hidden and uncharted territory as well: the history of the dependent and dominated, largely mute to date, still beckons to be disclosed What is at issue is the “other half” of a process encompassing all of society: the history of how the expansion of commodity production, the state, and... often based on faulty reasoning The historiography of everyday life wishes to illuminate the forms of mediation—and the discrepancies—between orientational patterns (“mode of life ) and the forms of daily behavior and experiencing ( everyday life ) A stricter separation of the structure Lebensweise from its subjective experience “in everyday life should sharpen one’s sights for “historical forms of. .. on the mechanisms of historical change: this view posits that nothing but a “select few personalities” are granted the privilege to “cross over” into the realm of the noneveryday Yet these select few are the only ones “able to bring about further development in the quotidian basis of everyday life. ” Such development necessitates action by persons “outside of the sphere of Alltag.” A second set of. .. “knowledge of how things interconnect.”33 Associated with this is the charge that the approach is undertheorized—or even has an animosity toward theory Undoubtedly, the history of everyday life demands the systematic decentering of analysis and interpretation One can also discern the begin- 16 ALF LÜDTKE nings here of a new outlook on theory The classification of individual phenomena and their systematization . and pageantry of the great, the masters of church and state.” 9 In the first in- stance, therefore, the history of everyday life involves the marking out of a particular empirical terrain. Second, there. for the future. In doing the history of everyday life, attention is focused not just on the deeds (and misdeeds) and pageantry of the great, the masters of church and state. Rather, central to the. / POWER / HISTORY THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE RECONSTRUCTING HISTORICAL EXPERIENCES AND WAYS OF LIFE Edited by Alf Ludtke Translated by William Templer PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON,