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Fernand Braudel - History and the Social Science: The Longue Durée

  • According to Braudel, there is a general crisis in the human sciences

  • All human sciences are concerned about their place in the numerous old and new modes of research

    • They all want to distinguish themselves from others

  • No one is ready to cross the borders of each discipline and enter new groupings

  • Area studies: a study by a team of social scientists from countries such as China, India, Russia, Latin America, and the US

    • We should implement those as a way of bringing together the social sciences in a way that is all-inclusive

  • Many social scientists misunderstand or are not acquainted with the work of historians

  • The recent research of historians has offered us an ever more precise idea of the multiplicity of temporalities and of the exceptional importance of the long-term

History and Continuities

  • Two types of history
    • Longue durée: history of long, even very long duration
    • It helps to piece together the larger picture
    • Episodic history: history of 10, 20, 50 years periods
    • Based on the scale of the individual, of daily life, of our illusions, of our momentary awareness
    • There exists a short term in every sphere of life
  • Episodic history doesn’t constitute the whole thick reality of history
  • Almost all of the political history of the last 100 years has been focused on great events and has confined itself to writing about the short term
  • New mode of historical narrative: recitative of the cyclical phase
    • Offers time lengths of a dozen years, a quarter of a century, and half a century
  • A return to using the short-term is going on right now!
  • Secular trends: are longer than cycles and inter-cycles
  • Structure: an organization, a degree of coherence, rather fixed relations between realities and social masses
    • All structures are simultaneously pillars and obstacles
  • History is the sum of all possible histories, a set of multiple skills and points of view, those of yesterday, today, and tomorrow
  • All the social sciences have mutually contaminated each other

The Quarrel About the Short-Term

  • Social sciences tend always to shy away from historical explanations
  • The economist has fallen into the groove of running after analysis of the present on behalf of governments
  • A researcher working on the present will only be able to get to the precise framework of the existing structures if he reconstructs
  • The past is the unfamiliar means by which one can understand the present

Communication and Social Mathematics

  • No social analysis can avoid historical time
  • Models: hypotheses, explanatory systems linked in the form of an equation or function
    • Mechanical model: model drawn from directly observed reality, small-scale reality dealing with small human groups
    • The significance and the explanatory value of models depend on the duration to which they refer
  • Social mathematics: information, communication, and qualitative mathematics
    • Necessary facts
    • Random facts
    • Conditional facts
  • We should focus on preparing the social reality to understand how parts are linked together and how they are separated
  • Research should ceaselessly move from social reality to the model, then back again, and so on
  • The very longue durée also includes looking for mathematical structures
  • Qualitative social mathematics should be used to analyze a modern society

The Historian’s Time, the Sociologist’s Time

  • The temporalities that we differentiate are bound together
  • The sociologist’s time is not ours
  • The longue durée is the most useful for common observation and reflection by all the social sciences
  • Marx: was the 1st to invent real social models, based on the longue durée
  • The longue durée is only one of the possibilities of common language with the social sciences
  • Spatial models: maps wherein social reality is projected and partially explained and are valid for all the temporalities and for all social categories

Conclusion

  • Social sciences should stop arguing so much about their reciprocal borders
  • Should try to find the common lines of our research
    • This might orient a collective research program around themes that might permit us to reach an initial convergence
  • The important common lines are mathematization, spatial specification, and longue durée