Jacques Revel

History and the Social Sciences

History plus the social sciences: This has been a common formula for more than a century. It has produced extensive discussions and an enormous literature, often quite repetitive, seeking to explain what the relationship between history and the social sciences should be, could be, and cannot be. Still, the terms of the debate have not stabilized. At once epistemological and methodological, the debate also involves power struggles among disciplines and the social representations that they nourish and reflect. For this reason, experiences differ from one country to another. This essay will concentrate on three principal experiences, those in Germany, France, and the United States. THE PROBLEM POSED Despite some distant precedents, the problem was not attacked directly until the period when the social sciences were recognized as autonomous disciplines and institutionalized in academia. This was the period from the 1870s to the 1880s – the American Gilded Age – For the sciences of politics and economics and to a lesser degree for sociology, and from 1880 to 1900 in France’s Third Republic, where university reforms opened the way for the scientific disciplines of geography, sociology, psychology, and economics. In both America and France, these new sciences embodied the demands for objectivity, method, and positive knowledge, and they expressed the dominant ideologies of progress. The German disciplines provided models for many other countries, but the German social sciences developed in the Humboldtian university within a cultural system built around philosophy, and their ascent appeared threatened at the end of the nineteenth century by the unity of the ideal of Bildung , or cultivation.

Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History

If the frequency of specific key words in book titles, series or journal editions are an indicator of the shift within a discipline, transnational history has certainly arrived. Next to other key terms that have marked methodological shifts during specific periods in the past such as social history since the 1950s, micro history during the 1970s and 1980s, or more loosely the ubiquitous dominance of cultural history from the 1980s onward, transnational history could mark such a shift. One could certainly argue that forms of transnational history have existed for a long time. Since the early 1990s and even more significantly since the early 2000s, however, the rising frequency of the term transnational – alongside global – history indicates that something within history and neighbouring disciplines has and is still happening. It does not have to be yet another turn, revision or even less a change of paradigm in the sense Thomas Kuhn understands it. But the publication of the rather monumental ‘Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History’ by Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier might indicate the transition from earlier, partly unconnected roots via debate and programmatic pleas to a firm establishment of transnational history – at least in some scholarly communities such as the US, Britain, Germany or France. When, rather simultaneously albeit stemming from different impulses and interests, something such as transnational history emerges in different places and in different intellectual contexts and milieus, arguably most importantly in the US, in Germany and France but also elsewhere, there is good reason to treat it seriously. The detached but almost contemporaneous debates among American scholars on the internationalisation of US history since the early 1990s and the intense discussions among German and French historians about comparative history and the concept of transferts culturels since the late 1980s, or more recently histoire croisée, have certainly fuelled the growing interest in transnational perspectives. Time will have to tell if, and if so what, transnational history or history in a transnational perspective can add to our current understanding of the world and to particular nations and nation states within this world. As some pundits argue transnational history is not new. This is true. But that is not a reason to dismiss it altogether. Transnational history can actually be seen as an umbrella perspective that encompasses a number of well-established tools and perspectives such as historical comparison, (cultural) transfers, connections, circulations, entangled or shared history as well as a modern form of international history. All of these stem from different and earlier contexts and debates but all share the conviction that historical and social processes cannot be apprehended and understood exclusively The International History Review Vol. 33, No. 4, December 2011, 573–584

Micro-história, macro-história: o que as variações de escala ajudam a pensar em um mundo globalizado

Nowadays, social scientists oppose micro and macro analysis in terms of topics, challenges and research strategies. In past decades, historians also debated and compared the advantages of micro history, with different versions of the history of the macro, transnational or global. This essay suggests, as an alternative, paying attention to the importance of the variation principle in the scales of observation, in critical and heuristic terms. It sketches an analytic model that leads one to think that it is on every level, from the most local to the most global, that socio-historical processes are preserved. Therefore, they can only be understood as the result of a multiplicity of individual and collective determinations, projects, obligations, strategies and tactics.

Lucien Febvre et les sciences sociales

NC en 1878, Lucien Febvre est, avant tout, I’homme d’une gCnCration, celle qui eut vingt ans au tournant du sikcle. Si cette date reprksente pour la penste espagnole une prise de conscience dtcisive, exprimte A travers les auteurs de la “generacih del Noventa y Ocho”, elle signifie pour l’histoire en France I’emprise presque sans partage d‘une conception historique bientbt designte comme positiviste. En 1898, en effet, parait la premikre Cdition de l’lntroduction nux Etudes historiques de Langlois et Seignobos, manuel destint h inculquer aux apprentis historiens “les principes de la mtthode des sciences historiques”’. Souvent L. Febvre stigmatisera les dommages causts par un tel enseignement, qui rtgnait en maitre sur I’UniversitC; ainsi en 1933 dans sa leqon inaugurale au Collkge de France: “Dans le domaine des Ctudes modernes, les jeunes hommes faGonnCs intellectuellement par une culture a base unique de textes, d’Ctudes de textes, d’explications de textes, passaient, sans rupture d’habitudes, des lyctes oh leurs aptitudes de textuaires les avaient seules classts, a 1’Ecole Normale, h la Sorbonne, aux FacultCs oh le mEme travail d’ittudes de textes, d‘explications de textes leur Ctait proposC.”2 Comment ne pas reconnaitre, A travers ce diagnostic collectif, I’itindraire personnel de Febvre, du Lycte de Nancy h la Khigne de Louis-le-Grand, puis h la rue d’Ulm? En ces anndes de formation, I’histoire “historisante” faillit d’ailleurs tuer sa passion pour I’histoire. Entr6 A I’Ecole Normale SupCrieure en 1897, il choisit de s’inscrire dans la section des lettres: “C’Ctait une trahison: j’avais depuis ma plus tendre enfance une vocation d’historien chevillte au corps. Mais elle n’avait pu rtsister A deux annCes de rhttorique supCrieure A Louis-le-Grand, a deux annCes de ressassage du Manuel de politique ktrangbe d’Emile Bourgeois”3. I1 est donc nkcessaire, pour comprendre comment la rencontre avec d’autres disciplines remit Febvre sur le chemin de I’histoire, de caractkriser tout d’abord cette histoire qui ne fut pas la sienne.

Une condition marrane

En présentant ce nouveau livre, Nathan Wachtel suggère qu’on peut y voir, trente ans après La vision des vaincus, dix ans après Le retour des ancêtres, «le dernier volet d’une trilogie dont le fil conducteur serait celui d’une “histoire souterraine” des Amériques, entre mémoire et oubli». La piste n’est qu’indiquée, et il convient sans doute de ne pas forcer ici l’interprétation. Elle mérite pourtant d’être signalée. D’un livre à l’autre, ce sont bien des histoires de vaincus auxquelles N. Wachtel s’est attaché: vaincus de la colonisation espagnole, dans un premier moment; vaincus des vaincus, avec les Chipayas de l’altiplano bolivien, survivants obstinés d’un monde plusieurs fois disparu; vaincus des vainqueurs aujourd’hui, avec l’archipel marrane, la face cachée, déniée de la société coloniale. Ce que, par delà leurs différences, ces histoires ont en commun, c’est de traiter d’expériences qui ont été contraintes et qui étaient promises à disparaître; elles ne nous sont connues qu’à travers des sources indirectes, morcelées, le plus souvent hostiles. Ce qu’elles attestent, en second lieu, c’est une résistance à l’érosion, à l’effacement, dans laquelle le travail de la mémoire joue un rôle central, quels qu’en soient les supports et les formes sociales. D’où le choix d’une stratégie de recherche, qui se retrouve de livre en livre et choisit de confronter un présent aux passés dont il est issu, et dont il se souvient.

Diskordanz der Zeiten

Wahrscheinlich konnen sich nicht viele der hier Anwesenden an jene Episode erinnern, die zu Beginn der 1980er Jahre in Frankreich eine Saison lang die Gemuter erregte. Das ist naturlich eine Frage der Generationen und der Grenzen. Damals entdeckte man plotzlich, oder man tat zumindest so, dass die jungen Franzosen die Geschichte ihres Landes nicht mehr kennen. Der Befund war eindeutig und das Urteil pauschal. Und auch unwiderrufl ich, denn es erging von den hochsten Spitzen des Staates. Der franzosische Staatsprasident selbst – damals Francois Mitterrand – hatte erkannt, welche Gefahr damit der nationalen Identitat drohte. Er brachte seine Sorge und seine Unzufriedenheit daruber offentlich zum Ausdruck. Daraufhin auserten in hierarchischer Reihenfolge, wie es sich gehort, zunachst die Minister ihr Empfinden, danach die Abgeordneten und dann das gesamte Politikervolk hintendrein. Die Meinungspresse mischte sich ein und sorgte mit dicken Schlagzeilen dafur, dass die Diskussion auf das angemessene Ausmas anschwoll. Am Ende kam man sogar auf die Idee, die Lehrer um ihre Meinung zu bitten, deren Beruf es immerhin ist, Geschichte zu unterrichten, und die bei diesem Thema eine gewisse direkte Erfahrung aufweisen durften.

Micro historia, macro historia: lo que las variaciones de escala ayudan a pensar en un mundo globalizado

Nowadays, social scientists oppose micro and macro analysis in terms of topics, challenges and research strategies. In past decades, historians also debated and compared the advantages of micro history, with different versions of the history of the macro, transnational or global. This essay suggests, as an alternative, paying attention to the importance of the variation principle in the scales of observation, in critical and heuristic terms. It sketches an analytic model that leads one to think that it is on every level, from the most local to the most global, that socio-historical processes are preserved. Therefore, they can only be understood as the result of a multiplicity of individual and collective determinations, projects, obligations, strategies and tactics.

Micro history, macro history: what the variations in scale help to think in a globalized world

Nowadays, social scientists oppose micro and macro analysis in terms of topics, challenges and research strategies. In past decades, historians also debated and compared the advantages of micro history, with different versions of the history of the macro, transnational or global. This essay suggests, as an alternative, paying attention to the importance of the variation principle in the scales of observation, in critical and heuristic terms. It sketches an analytic model that leads one to think that it is on every level, from the most local to the most global, that socio-historical processes are preserved. Therefore, they can only be understood as the result of a multiplicity of individual and collective determinations, projects, obligations, strategies and tactics.