J. H. Hexter

Jack H. Hexter (May 25, 1910 – December 8, 1996) was an American historian, a specialist in Tudor and seventeenth century British history, and well known for his comments on historiography.

Hexter was born in Memphis, Tennessee and was awarded a BA by the University of Cincinnati in 1931. He received his MA (1933) and PhD (1937) from Harvard University. His research interests encompassed both political and intellectual history, as witnessed by his first two books, one a history of the parliamentary conflict leading up to the Civil War, and the other a nuanced textual interpretation of Thomas More's Utopia.

Hexter's scholarly reputation probably owes as much to his historiographical critiques as to his body of research. He is noted for his distinction between "splitters" and "lumpers" of historical material, and his 1975 attack on Christopher Hill (as a "lumper" of selectively read sources). More to Hexter's fancy was the "splitter" who saw his responsibility to the full range of particulars and the ambiguity of historical sources. "Lumping" was the tendency that, according to Hexter, threatened to bind historians to overreaching generalizations, of which he suggested Marxism was the most typical and intellectually pernicious. Nonetheless, his essay appeared to argue that both tendencies (analysis and synthesis) were intellectually necessary.

This attack continued from a position he had earlier assumed, in his response in the late 1950s to a debate between Lawrence Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Stone, along with R.H. Tawney, explained the origins of the English Civil War by positing that an increasingly well-off and ambitious gentry had, over the course of many years, destabilized the English state in which power had traditionally been divided between the aristocracy and the king. Trevor-Roper inverted this theory, arguing that in fact the Civil War was caused in part by court gentry who had fallen on bad times.

...
Wikipedia