Raphael
Samuel, the son of Jewish parents, was born in London
in 1934. He was educated at King's Alfred's School and at Balliol
College, Oxford, where he was taught
by Christopher Hill.
Samuel,
a Marxist, became a member of the Communist
Party. He also joined the Communist Party Historians' Group, an
created after the Second World War by E.
P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney
Hilton, Eric
Hobsbawn,
George Rudé, John Saville, Dorothy
Thompson, Edmund Dell, Victor Kiernan and Maurice Dobb.
In
1952 members of the Communist Party Historians' Group founded the
journal, Past and Present. Over
the next few years the journal pioneered the study of working-class
history.
Samuel
became a tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford,
and in 1967 established the History Workshop movement. He also played
a major role in the life of the History Workshop
Journal that began publication in 1975.
Books
published by Samuel include Village Life
and Labour (1975), Miners, Quarrymen
and Saltworkers (1977), People's
History and Socialist Theory (1981),
East End Underworld (1981), Culture,
Ideology and Politics (1983), Theatres
of the Left: 1880-1935 (1985), The
Lost World of Communism (1986), The
Enemy Within: The Miners' Strike of 1984 (1987), Patriotism:
The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (1989),
Patriotsm: Minorities and Outsiders
(1989), The Myths We Live By (1990),
Theatres of Memory (1996) and
Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (1997).
Raphael
Samuel died of cancer
on 9th December 1996.
(1)
Carolyn Steedman, Radical
Philosophy (March, 1997)
Raphael Samuel's lasting memorials will be the work he inspired
in the generations of students he taught at Ruskin College, Oxford,
from 1962 to 1996, and History Workshop, in its protean forms of annual
conferences, local networks and federations - which spread across
Europe and Scandinavia - and its eponymous journal. A loose coalition
of worker-historians and full-time socialist researchers was what
he called it...
The standard charge against
the history Samuel inspired was of a fanatical empiricism and a romantic
merging of historians and their subjects in crowded narratives, in
which each hard-won detail of working lives, wrenched from the cold
indifference of posterity, is piled upon another, in a relentless
rescue of the past. When he was himself subject to these charges,
it was presumably his fine and immensely detailed accounts of the
labour process that critics had in mind. But it was meaning rather
than minutiae that he cared about. If, as Gareth Stedman-Jones suggested
in his Independent obituary, Raphael Samuel charted better
than anyone else the desperate increase of hard labour in every branch
of industry and manufacture brought about by Victorian industrial
capitalism (on the land as much as in the factory), then it was because
the details inscribed the meaning of that toil, those lives, to those
who lived them.
(2)
Keith Flett, Socialist
Review (January, 1997)
Raphael Samuel was one of the most prominent historians in the
country to support history from below the attempt to actively
recover the history of ordinary people and their movements. In many
ways this was a step forward from the sometimes rather rigid orthodoxies
of more mechanical Marxist histories. It fed in directly, too, to
the resurgence of socialist ideas after 1968 and to the birth of the
women's movement in which the History Workshop Conference of November
1968 played a central organising role.
Samuel could be fiercely
critical of socialists with whom he disagreed. Debate has raged, for
example, about whether a series of articles he wrote about the Communist
Party in the 1940s and 1950s in New Left Review under the title
'The Lost World of British Communism' was an attempt to write an affectionate
history from below of what it had been like to be a CP member before
1956 or an attack on any kind of left wing political activism.
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