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

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