Lawrence Stone

Stone's supposed thesis that the British political elite was relatively "closed" to new members was widely accepted and popularized in works like Simon Schama's survey of the French Revolution, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. It has recently been challenged by Ellis Wasson's Born to Rule: British Political Elites (2000) which argues that the ruling class was open to new members throughout the early modern period. In fact, Stone never argued to the contrary, and the difference appears to be one of degree.

Stone died on 16 June 1999 in Princeton, New Jersey, aged 79. He had been living with Parkinson's disease.

According to Stone, narrative is the main rhetorical device traditionally used by historians. In 1979, at a time when Social History of the previous generation was demanding a social-science model of analysis, Stone detected a revival in historiography of the narrative. Stone defined narrative as follows: it is organized chronologically; it is focused on a single coherent story; it is descriptive rather than analytical; it is concerned with people not abstract circumstances; and it deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical. He reported that, "More and more of the 'new historians' are now trying to discover what was going on inside people's heads in the past, and what it was like to live in the past, questions which inevitably lead back to the use of narrative."

Stone in 1970 summed up the causes of the English Revolution by stressing three factors: the Crown's failure to gain an army or a bureaucracy; the relative rise of the gentry in terms of status, wealth, education, administrative experience, group identity, and political self-confidence; and the spread of Puritanism. Rabb notes that "few contemporary Stuart historians would argue with Stone's assessment."

In 1963, Stone left Oxford and joined Princeton University as Dodge Professor of History. He served as chairman of the Department of History from 1967 to 1970, and in 1968 became the founding director of the Davis Center for Historical Studies, which was established to promote innovative methods of historical research. He retired in 1990.

A 1948 article was Stone's earliest venture in the quantitative study of the rise of the gentry and decline of the aristocracy along the lines that his mentor R.H. Tawney had suggested in 1941. He concluded there was a major economic crisis for the nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries. Stone's argument was marred by methodological mistakes and he came under heavy attack from Hugh Trevor-Roper and others. Christopher Thompson, for example, showed that the peerage's real income was higher in 1602 than in 1534 and grew substantially by 1641. Many other scholars entered the fray and the so-called storm over the gentry became a central theme of English historiography for some time.

After graduating, he remained at the University of Oxford. From 1946 to 1947, he was a Bryce Research Student. He then worked as a lecturer at University College, Oxford between 1947 and 1950. In 1950, he was elected a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. As such, he was a college tutor in history, and moved specialising in medieval history to Tudor history. For two years, from 1960 to 1961, he was also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968 and the American Philosophical Society in 1970.

Lawrence Stone (4 December 1919 – 16 June 1999) was an English historian of early modern Britain, after a start to his career as an art historian of English medieval art. He is noted for his work on the English Civil War and the history of marriage, families and the aristocracy.

Stone was born on 4 December 1919 in Epsom, Surrey, England. He was educated at Charterhouse School, an all-boys public school (i.e., an independent boarding school). He studied for a time at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1938. He then studied modern history at Christ Church, Oxford from 1938 to 1940. His university studies were interrupted by service during the Second World War as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He returned to Oxford after demobilisation in 1945, and after a further year of study, graduated with a first-class Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1946. His BA degree was promoted to a Master of Arts (MA Oxon) degree in accordance with the regulations of the university.

Some of his suggestions have been qualified by historians. Stone's suggestion that "affective individualism" did not become widely characteristic of marriage until the 18th century was questioned by medievalists who pointed to evidence of loving marriages before 1700. However, it was never Stone's position that love in marriage did not exist before the 18th century, and his book does not, in fact, say this.