Contenu du sommaire : La longue durée en débat - Histoire des sciences

The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-American Perspective Since the 1970s, most historians in the anglophone world have worked on timescales of between five and fifty years. This narrow focus represented a retreat from the longer periods generally covered before the late twentieth century and served to cut them off from wider reading publics and to deprive them of the influence on public policy and global governance they had once had. This article surveys the causes and the consequences of this retreat and proposes a solution for the crisis of confidence and of relevance it has created. A return to what Fernand Braudel had classically termed the longue durée in the Annales in 1958 is now both imperative and feasible: imperative, in order to restore history's place as a critical social science; feasible, due to the increased availability of large amounts of historical data and the digital tools necessary to analyze them.

Does History Need a Reset? The arguments of David Armitage and Jo Guldi about the crisis of history depend on assertions that have little or no factual basis; they misread their own data. Since the nature of the crisis is in doubt, it follows that the authors' narrative of its causes must also come into question. They confuse microhistory with cultural history and mischaracterize the work of cultural historians. An alternative to their misreading and mischaracterization is to look at previous moments of perceived “crisis.” Historians have been worrying about similar issues for nearly a century. To understand the distinctiveness of the present crisis, it would be useful to consider the effects of the relentless democratization of higher education rather than to blame certain historians for pushing history off course.

E-Story and the New Hollywoodian Myth David Armitage and Jo Guldi's History Manifesto has sparked an important debate in the US. This article criticizes three specific aspects of their work. First, it takes issue with their description of a “moral crisis” of history, which they postulate without any discussion of serious epistemological and political issues. Second, it calls into question their enthusiasm for technological solutions, an ideological stance highlighted by their call for a return to long-term history and large-scale syntheses relying on the crunching of vast quantities of digitized data. Finally, it interrogates their conception of the utility of history, a notion that reveals serious confusion between research, teaching, and popularization and supports their unquestioning acceptance of the direction taken by institutions of higher learning. Although the scientism and positivism expressed in their manifesto illuminate their lack of attention to, and perhaps simply awareness of, the slow construction and transmission of accumulated knowledge, they do reflect the prevailing intellectual nonchalance and philosophical regression. The authors' vision would see the replacement of “history” by “e-story,” the dissolution of historicity and scholarly critiques and their substitution by techno-chronology and marketing.

A New Battle For History in the Twenty-First Century? This article engages with some of the questions raised by David Armitage and Jo Guldi's “The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-American Perspective” and their resonance among readers of the Annales. In particular, it challenges their classification of a variety of different historical studies of short periods of time under the rubric of “microhistory.” It also questions their argument that such studies are evidence of a “moral crisis,” which allegedly dominated anglophone historiography from the cultural revolution of 1968 to the global financial crisis of 2008. Furthermore, the article contrasts the less conventional meanings that Fernand Braudel originally attributed to the longue durée with the ways that Armitage and Guldi interpret this expression. Finally, it asks how, in practice, historians are supposed to follow Armitage and Guldi's invitation to move beyond specialized training and knowledge to produce sweeping new and original interpretations of millennia of human history.

A History Free of the Social Sciences? According to David Armitage and Jo Guldi, digitized sources and quantification almost naturally lead to the sort of longue durée history that they try to promote. This paper questions this assertion on the basis of the long tradition of quantitative history, open to exchanges with the social sciences and revived, not annihilated, by microhistory. The digitization of numerous historical sources does not call for less caution in our analyses—quite the contrary, as it creates new biases. More importantly, it does not solve the crucial question of controlled anachronism, i.e. the need for carefully constructed categories in any quantification based on the longue durée. The article also addresses the implications of choosing the longue durée as the exclusive basis for reflections on historical processes and causality. Is longue durée purely a scale for description? If not, can it avoid a simplistic vision, a mono-causal path dependency? To avoid such pitfalls, the author advocates taking into account the wider debates within all the social sciences on timescales and causality.

The Longue Durée and In-Depth Chronologies This short contribution aims to place David Armitage and Jo Guldi's article within a broader historiographical context, including that of Chinese history. From the outset, Fernand Braudel was careful to link his vision of the longue durée with the new “area studies” exploring international cultures. By studying social and economic history and more generally by using approaches drawn from the social sciences, European and American specialists of China have deconstructed the overly longue durée of Chinese history and shed light on its dynamism, previously hidden under the notion of a so-called “civilization.” This process facilitated a successful specialization, which can today be supported by the “big data” being compiled in circles close to the two authors.

Pour une “histoire ambitieuse”: A Reply to Our Critics This article responds to a variety of criticisms regarding our thesis that the longue durée is returning after a period of retreat, and that it should return, as a means to revive the discipline of history as a critical human science. We argue that the longue durée has different meanings in distinct historical traditions; that its importance for non-academic audiences will not be the same as for an academic readership; that the longue durée has to be combined with other historical timescales (including those covered by the field of microhistory); that this combination of scales can help us all better understand the present in light of the past and then orient ourselves towards the future; and, in sum, that the revenant longue durée can be one means, among others, to address the widespread “crisis of the humanities” discerned by scholars around the world.

Writing the History of Early Modern Science: Reflections on a Discipline in the Era of Globalization What kind of history is the history of science? To what extent does the academic research labeled as such delineate a homogeneous field? What are the current challenges that it faces? The recent translation of Simon Schaffer's works into French, along with the publication of his 2014 Marc Bloch Lecture in the Annales, provides the framework for this article's historiographical reflection on the profound changes that have taken place within the field over the last thirty years, particularly within a French context. The analysis is twofold. First, it aims to trace how new approaches to the sociology and anthropology of science have reconfigured the boundaries of the field. Second, it considers the effect of the abandonment of one of its major historiographical paradigms by most of the scholars currently working on early modern science: the scientific revolution as the rise of scientific modernity, underpinned by a Eurocentric vision of the production of knowledge. Although most research on the early modern period now strives to distance itself from this narrative, it must also face new challenges and questions—in particular the role of science in the processes of globalization and the multiplicity of sites and social configurations that participate in it. These challenges point towards new methods and styles in the history of science, and, more broadly, the social sciences.

Ceremonies of Measurement: Rethinking World Histories of Science The practices of measurement have long been taken as authoritative techniques that travel unusually well and easily across cultural boundaries, and as a sign and cause of the seeming dominance of Western modes of science. Attention to the rituals of measurement, and to the emergence of the forms of knowledge that accompanied measurement, notably the sciences of metrology, helps challenge these assumptions. Stories of the silent trade, often located in western Africa, and of the ritual origins of measurement, developed within anthropology and conjectural history, can be used to explore how measurement practices traveled and changed. In particular, the work of Marc Bloch as the preeminent historian of ceremony and power can help illuminate the relation between the historical geography of metrology and the scope of the sciences. His brilliant analysis of the royal ritual of cramp rings and its fate provides an important example and precedent for comparably ceremonial and culturally significant episodes in the long history of the science of measurement.