The Postgraduate Seminar in Theory and Method

 Unlike those who attended university in the 1960s and (maybe) the 1970s, the students of the 1980s lack a mythology. In politics at large, it was a time of Thatcherism; in higher education a period of retrenchment.[1] The great age of academic expansion that followed the 1963 Robbins Report and the confident political radicalism that often accompanied it had hit the buffers. In some respects, this made both student politics and the larger academic climate more interesting; the 1980s proved to be a time of intellectual energy amongst historians. The assumptions that had governed a lot of historical research (about economic and materialist explanations for change) were tested and new ideas came forward. The creation of the Postgraduate Seminar in Theory and Method at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) in 1986 provides a lens through which to measure the forces that shaped historical inquiry in the Thatcher decade and assess the new generation of historians who emerged at that time.

This chapter explores the reasons why the Postgraduate Seminar was founded and the distinctive spirit that animated it. It is based on my memories of the seminar in its formative years as well as those of some others who participated in it. I have endeavoured in a minor way to write a cultural and intellectual history of this group. The seminar may no longer exist but it has left a legacy: it was a staging post for a number of historians who went on to have important academic careers and served as a precursor to the IHR’s current History Lab postgraduate seminar. I explore here the paradigms that the seminar concerned itself with. Some of these still inform academic discussion today, even though (as will become clear) the seminar was very much the product of its time.