Arthur Marwick

Arthur John Brereton Marwick (29 February 1936 – 27 September 2006) was a professor in history. Born in Edinburgh, he was a graduate of Edinburgh University and later studied at Balliol College, Oxford.

Marwick was appointed the first Professor of History at the Open University in 1969, after lecturing at Edinburgh for ten years. He held visiting professorships at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Stanford University, Rhodes College and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He was a left-wing social and cultural historian but critical of Marxism and other approaches to history that he believed stressed the importance of metanarrative over archival research. He was also a critic of postmodernism, seeing it as a "menace to serious historical study". It was also the methodology of the postmodernists to which he was opposed, "the techniques to deconstruction or discourse analysis have little value compared with the sophisticated methods historians have been developing over years".

One of his most influential books, "The Deluge", dealt with the transformations in British society brought about by the First World War. Published in 1965, its main thesis, a provocative one at the time, was that the war had brought about positive and lasting social changes (in the rôle of women, in the acceptability of state intervention for social reasons, and so on). Despite its terrible tragedies, Marwick believed that the sum result of the war was that Britain was a better place to live in the twenties than in the period before the war.

In putting forward this thesis, he was scathing about many previous histories of the war; he accused many of them of being infected with "naivety of analysis", or coming down simply to "patriotic polemic".

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