Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T13:52:02.213Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter Sixteen - Being Human as a Method and Research Finding in Social Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2022

Get access

Summary

One of the things that makes a human life go well is the recognition by the person who lives it that he is fully human, and the social forms in which that recognition is expressed.

To ‘recognize’ individuals or groups is to ascribe to them some positive status […] Failure to give someone due recognition is translated here as ‘disrespect’ […] [it includes] humiliation, degradation, insult, and disenfranchisement.

In spite of the huge differences between cultures, all that we know about human behaviour shows that it can be understood only by reference to people's own thoughts, dreams, hopes, fears and other feelings. This is not something invented by a particular culture. It is universal.

During one of our early encounters as friends and colleagues at Trinity Hall, Jonathan Steinberg introduced Alison Liebling to his dinner guest: a Hungarian. ‘Are you an historian?’ she asked. ‘I am a human being’, he replied. Of course he did. He was Jonathan's friend. We are all human beings in his company. We are all the more so because of his inquiries about our work and its relationship to our lives, and the power, incisiveness and warmth of his interest. He affirms our investigations. By finding answers to small questions, we might illuminate the larger questions: How can injustices happen? Why in this place? By exploring what ‘a few good men did in an evil time’, we understand more clearly. The act of understanding is of value.

Jonathan is, as he is for many others, Alison's intellectual soul mate or ‘alter ego’ in these respects. Their connection began in a conversation about interviewing research participants. His were survivors of the Holocaust. Hers were prisoners. These were largely different worlds and disciplines, but she knew in an instant that here was a man who grasped her work, who knew his territory like no one else. He got close to others in dialogue, and he understood personal complexity and struggle. None of this threatened scholarship but underpinned it. As Mary Midgley wrote:

Plays and novels exist because this inner strife continually insists on being reported. We know that our individual unity is not a state fully attained but an enterprise, an effort, an aspiration that is central to our lives, all the more central because we are so much troubled by the clashes.

Type
Chapter
Information
People, Nations and Traditions in a Comparative Frame
Thinking about the Past with Jonathan Steinberg
, pp. 241 - 258
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×