• 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