Having lurker for a while, I'd like to offer some ideas about the Aries
on childhood question.
Aries' work, like Lawrence Stone's on the European family, has been
seminal work, in the sense that he helped establish a particular field of
inquiry, raised questions, constituted terms and categories, and wrote an
historical narrative which has been well marketed, esp outside the
specific specialty of social history. Like Stone's, Aries' work has been
cited regularly by people doing 'historical criticism' in literature,
medieval/ren studies, and cultural studies. And miscited.
One of the effects of Aries' work has been to prompt other scholars and
cultural critics, like those of us on this list, to reconsider his
particular evidence, his grand narrative(s), and his assumptions about
how the 'modern' reads the 'past.' And I agree that a lot of recent work on
ideas of childhood, families, and childrearing has substantially
challenged not only Aries' individual analyses but also his grand
narrative that the M.A didn't have a 'true' concept of childhood and
didn't 'like' children. His work has been important partly bec/ it has
prompted others to rethink his evidence and to replace him.
So why, John Arnold asks, does Aries continue to hold sway in many
academic quarters when the revisions and challenges have been so
persistent? Marketing only partly answers the question. At
least as important are conservative
social politics about how 'benevolent' the modern state is toward the
child (think of how much US politics revolves around ideological
disputes about how we treat children). Keeping the M.A. primitive and
brutal and unsentimental, but always superstititous, seems to be part of
the way historical scholarship is imbued with a particular politics of
difference, a politics which applies equally I think to both the left and
the right. These days, lots of people legitimate their social programs
on the basis of whether they benefit and care for the truly needy and
children. Maybe Aries was right in a certain sense, though I don't agree
with all he says, esp about the later M.A. -- the emergence of the modern
state coincides with a PARTICULAR (not the only) view of the child and
childhood, esp. I would say, the idea that children are truly educable.
In that respect, contra Aries, humanism and conservative politics of
education have a lot in common.
Mark Amsler
English
U of Delaware
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