Why is Constitutional History Back in Fashion?
Constitutional history dominated university history departments in Britain until the 1960s. It's making a comeback.
Readers of Stubbs’ History know that this is the spirit which animates the book. Far from expressing aboriginally English insularity, the migration of the Angles and Saxons from the Continent is both the determinative historical fact for its argument and a metaphor for the modern German thought which lies at that argument’s heart. Stubbs wrote with a luminous intelligence on countries other than England and over an enormous chronological range.
He was no intellectual Little Englander. Though he differentiated between ancient and modern history, he remained, as a trained classicist, steeped in the former while writing about the latter. He must have been well aware of Aristotle’s analysis of the varieties of constitutional change, and of the first surviving work of constitutional history, Polybius’ Histories of the Roman republic.
Polybius explained the unique success of Rome in the republican period in terms of the balancing of conflicting forces through its mixed constitutional structure, which proved adaptable. This balance staved off constitutional change for centuries. But the process would start almost immediately after the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC, of which Polybius was an eyewitness. He records that Scipio Africanus, the Roman general, clasped his hand and wept as they both looked on, and Scipio predicted the dire consequences for Rome. Polybius considered cyclical constitutional change – anacyclosis – inevitable in the long run.
He does not say that anacyclosis could also be a feature of the types of subject on which historians choose to focus. The recent reappearance of constitutional history suggests that that might nevertheless be the case: there is no constitutional ‘turn’, but a return. That reappearance addresses widespread interest in the political which too many historians have been inclined for too long to disparage as superannuated.
George Garnett is Professor of Medieval History at Oxford University, Fellow of St Hugh’s College and the author of The Norman Conquest in English History: Volume I: A Broken Chain? (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Why is Constitutional History Back in Fashion?
Constitutional history dominated university history departments in Britain until the 1960s. It's making a comeback.
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