SOURCE: Coser, Lewis A. Review of The New History and the Old, by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Contemporary Sociology 17, no. 3 (May 1988): 311-12.

In the following review, Coser is highly critical of The New History and the Old, asserting that it “has hardly any redeeming intellectual significance.”

A specter haunts these pages: the specter of Social History. In her passionate and dyspeptic book, [The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals] Gertrude Himmelfarb, the distinguished historian, is obsessed with the alleged dangers of the new social history, psychohistory, and economic history which, in her view, “devaluate not only political history but reason itself, reason in history and politics” (p. 18). Whether it be the French Annales school of Fernand Braudel and his successors, the work of E. P. Thompson and his disciples in England, or the writings of historical demographers such as Peter Laslett, all of them, Himmelfarb argues, are...