This is the twelfth significant review of the Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving book The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History (Bull Ant Press, St. Peters, 2021). It comes as the hard copy print run of the book is almost exhausted, and our decision to make a pdf of the book available freely online in the near future. We are honoured to receive this piece by Dr Hannah Forsyth, a historian we have long followed and who has variously engaged with our work over the years. Hannah is an Associate Professor at the Australian Catholic University with a focus on the histories of work, education and capitalism. Widely published within and outside the academy and with a significant record of public engagement, she is author of A History of the Modern Australian University (NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2014), and forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, Virtue Capitalism: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870-2008.
Rowan Cahill & Terry Irving
21 April 2023
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It was a
little while coming. I received the brand-new book in the mail a while ago.
Excitedly, I read the first few chapters. Then I had to stop reading. Pressures
had mounted and I set the book aside while I wrote many tens of thousands of
words of history, economics, and politics.
When I stopped writing, finally, I was left politically disillusioned. The world is pretty shit right now, and it only got worse while I had my head down.
I was
exhausted and now looked at my work with some despair. In this world, which is
in desperate need of radical transformation, all I had achieved – at least, so
it seemed in my tiredness – was an imminent addition to the piles of cut-down
trees sitting on bedside tables.
And then I
picked up The Barber Who Read History, again.
First, I
read of my own world, of academic publishing, making multinational publishers
rich, nibbling at the edges of academic freedom, establishing expectations that
wear us out, but which also ensure our work fails to change the world.
All that
effort was freshly worn on my exhausted mind and body. We are pushed by
neoliberal managers who demand quality, measured in absurd metrics, but with a
regularity that keeps our minds and hearts on their stupid demands. We forget
the reasons to write history.
This didn’t
cheer me up yet, but I did feel seen.
The book
does not stay in these doldrums, and nor did I. Instead, Cahill and Irving look
to the history of thinking and writing history in Australia.
Sometimes,
as in certain moments in the 1960s and 1970s, knowledge, history, and thinking
has been freed from stupid, institutional constraints. These moments have
produced work that is authentically excellent: such a contrast to the empty,
purposeless way neoliberal universities pursue abstract, but endlessly audited,
‘excellence’.
More, in
such times, such intellectual work was performed by those mindful of what
excellence was for – building a better world. For Cahill and Irving, this meant
understanding the structures that exploit most, to benefit the few, as little
as the ‘one percent’.
To show us
what they mean, The Barber Who Read History recounts some highlights
from Australian historical scholarship. This reminded me that good, important
purpose is embedded in the tradition in which it is my honour to work.
See, I was
starting to feel better.
Australian
historians did not always get things right – and to be honest I felt some old
disputes were a little tiresomely re-hashed in segments of this book. But it
nevertheless reminded me that history has done some real, tangible good in the
world.
Doing
history, Cahill and Irving show, is not always comfortable. Take the history of
violence in Australia. This history highlights unpleasant realities about the
violent relationship between those with power and those without it. This
violence was not merely existential, though it was that too. It is not only
historical, either, confined comfortably to the past. Violence, they remind us,
is structured into capitalist power – and violence has sometimes also been
demanded of those who opposed it. Historians, Cahill and Irving suggest, need
to remember that delegitimizing violence is also ‘the view of state officials
and those complicit in their ruling-class project’ (p.113). Theirs is a
position, I admit, that makes me deeply uncomfortable – though I also have an
uneasy feeling that Cahill and Irving are probably right, at least under
certain circumstances.
But the
purpose of history, as Cahill and Irving reminded me, is not primarily to
provoke, as violence does, but to inspire. And the chapter from which the book
draws its title explains exactly why.
There was,
on the outer metropole, a redneck barber with noisy conservative, racist
politics. Rather than dismissing his views, this book offers a sensitive
account of what led to them. And this was all about history.
The things
the barber who read history had read, seen, heard, and understood about the way
the world was made around him led to his politics. This history – alongside
systems that those of us who disagree with his conclusions, will nevertheless
agree are unfair – was what forged his views.
History
infects us all, one way or another. Our stories about ourselves, whether
society is on our side or against us, is made by ‘reading’ – knowing, hearing,
understanding – history. What is known as ‘historical consciousness’ is
therefore not only important in academic writing, but it also matters in the
world.
So, the
sorts of histories that are brought into the world also matter. ‘Instead of the
mainstream top-down version, with the systemic exploitations, iniquities,
dissemblings and silences of ruling-class power’, Cahill and Irving invite us
to ‘imagine history from the bottom-up, to recognize and realise the labour and
productivity and creativity of the anonymous mass, the common people, the
source of the “greatness” and “achievement” traditionally attributed to a few
at the top’ (p.15).
By the time
I finished reading The Barber Who Read History I was inspired. On the
one hand, I felt inspired to see that my work is less than my
university’s metrics. Like the shelf-stacking and haircuts and musical
compositions, the book I recently finished just one piece of work among so
many. A tiny contribution to the wondrousness that is the labour and
productivity and creativity of us all, collectively. This is comforting.
But also,
on the other hand, my work more than my university can ever measure. In my
case, it is history – and history, so this book helped me to remember, really
matters.
Hannah Forsyth
Australian Catholic University
[Published 21 April 2023]
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