history and social sciences

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History and the Social Sciences: The Longue DuréeAuthor(s): Fernand Braudel and Immanuel WallersteinSource: Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 32, No. 2, COMMEMORATING THE LONGUEDURÉE (2009), pp. 171-203Published by: Research Foundation of SUNY for and on behalf of the Fernand Braudel CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40647704 .

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History and the Social Sciences

The Longue Durée

Fernand BraudeV

There is a general crisis in the human sciences. They are all

overwhelmed by their successes, if only because of the accu- mulation of new knowledge. But it is also because they now need to work collectively, and how to organize intelligently such collective work has yet to be determined. Whether they wish it or not, they are all affected, directly or indirectly, by the progress of the most quick-witted among them. But they remain nonetheless in the grip of a humanism that is retrograde and insidious, one that can no longer serve as a framework for scholarship. All of them, with varying degrees of lucidity, are concerned about their place in the monstrous array of old and new modes of research, whose necessary convergence seems to be in process.

Faced with these difficulties, will the human sciences try to resolve them by an additional effort to define themselves or by becoming still more cranky? Perhaps they have the illusion that such an additional effort can succeed. For they are more than ever preoccupied with defining their particular goals, methods, and merits- running the risk of churning up old formulas and false problems. They are engaged in bickering endlessly about the borders that separate them, fully or partially, from neighboring disciplines. For each of them seems in fact to dream of remaining where it is or to return to where it was. A few isolated scholars try to suggest linkages. Claude Lévi-Strauss1 pushes "structural" anthropology in the direction of the techniques of linguistics, the horizons of "unconscious" history, and the juvenile imperialism of "qualitative" mathematics. He is trying to establish a science that would bring together anthropology, political economy, and

* Translated by Immanuel Wallerstein. 1 Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Pion, 1958, passim, and especially page 329.

review, xxxii, 2, 2009, 171-203 171



172 Fernand Braudel

linguistics under the label of the science of communications. But is there anyone ready to cross these borders and enter these new groupings? For the mere toss of a coin, even geography would be prepared to divorce history!

But let us not be unfair. There is good reason for these quar- rels and these refusals. The wish to distinguish oneself from others is bound to result in widening one's curiosity. To deny the other is already to know the other. Even more, without intending it ex- plicitly, the social sciences impose themselves on each other. Each one tries to grasp the social in its "totality." Each one encroaches on the other, believing that it is remaining in its corner. Econom- ics discovers the sociology that surrounds it. History, perhaps the least structured of the human sciences, accepts lessons from all its multiple neighbors and tries to absorb them. So, despite the reticence, the oppositions, the quiet ignorance, the outline of a "common market" is beginning to come into existence. It would be worth pursuing this path in the coming years even if, eventually, each discipline might find it again useful, for a while, to resume a more strictly particular path.

But the first thing we urgently need to do is to come nearer to each other. In the United States, this has taken the form of collective research on cultural zones in the contemporary world. This is called "area studies" and consists of the study by a team of social scientists of the political monsters of the contemporary world: Chi- na, India, Russia, Latin America, the United States. To understand them is a question of survival! Furthermore, in this coming together of techniques and different kinds of knowledge, the participants cannot remain tethered to their particular research problem, deaf and blind, as they used to be, to what the others are saying, writing, and thinking! In addition, the bringing together of the social sciences must be all-inclusive. One should not neglect older disciplines in favor of newer ones that seem to be so much more promis- ing, when this in fact may not turn out to be the case. For example, the place given to geography in these American efforts is virtually non-existent, and that offered to history very slender. And indeed one has to ask, what sort of history is included?

The other social sciences are rather ill-informed about the crisis through which history has been going for the last twenty or thirty years. They tend to misunderstand it and not to be acquainted with the work of historians. They do not know the part of social reality



HISTORY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 173

of which history is the faithful servant, if not always a skilled advo- cate. These are the social continuities, the multiple and contradictory temporalities of human lives, which constitute not only the substance of the past but the stuff of present-day social life. This is one more reason to underline vigorously, amidst the debate that is going on among all the human sciences, how important, how useful history is. Or rather how important and useful it is to understand the dialectic of continuities, which emerge from the work of the historian's repeated observations. Nothing is more important, in our opinion, than this living, intimate, infinitely repeated op- position between the instantaneous and the time that flows slowly. Whether we are dealing with the past or the present, an aware- ness of the plurality of temporalities is indispensable to a common methodology of the human sciences.

I shall dwell on history, on the temporalities of history. I do this less for the readers of Annales, who know these works, than for those in neighboring disciplines- economists, ethnographers, ethnologists (or anthropologists), sociologists, psychologists, linguists, demographers, geographers, even social mathematicians or statis- ticians. They are all neighbors whose experiments and research we have followed for many years because it seemed to us (still seems to us) that, in their wake or by contact with them, history is furnished a new vision. Perhaps we have something to offer them in return. The recent researches of historians have offered us- consciously or not, willingly or not- an ever more precise idea of the multiplic- ity of temporalities and of the exceptional importance of the long term. This last concept, more than history itself- history with a hundred faces- is sure to be of interest to our neighbors, the social sciences.

I. HISTORY AND CONTINUITIES

All historical writing periodizes the past, and makes choices among chronological realities, based on positive or negative pref- erences that are more or less conscious. Traditional history, which is oriented to brief time spans, to the individual, to the event, has long accustomed us to an account that is precipitate, dramatic, and breathless.



174 Fernand Braudel

The new economic and social history has made cyclical shifts central to its analysis and argues primarily about their duration. It has been fascinated by the mirage and by the realities of the cyclical rise and fall of prices. It has placed beside the narrative (or traditional "recitative") a recitative of the cyclical phase that divides the past into large slices of 10, 20, or 50 years. Well beyond this second recitative lies a history of even more sustained breadth, this time of secular length: the history of long, even very long, duration (longue durée). This formula, for good or ill, has become a standard term for me, to designate the opposite of what François Simiand, one of the earliest to follow the usage of Paul Lacombe, called episodic history (histoire événementielle). No matter the desig- nations, we shall center our discussion on these two poles of time, the instantaneous and the long-term.

Not that these terms have a definitive meaning. Take the word "event." I would like to limit it, to imprison it in the short term. An event is an explosion, something that has "the sound of newness" (nouvelle sonnante) as they said in the sixteenth century. Amid its deceptive smoke, it fills the conscious domain of today's people, but it doesn't last long, disappearing almost as soon as one sees its flame.

The philosophers probably would say that I am emptying the word "event" of a good part of its content. An event, at the very least, may include a series of meanings and relationships. Some- times it may provide the evidence of very major changes. And by the perhaps contrived game of "causes" and "effects" dear to historians in the past, it can include a period far longer than its own occurrence. Infinitely stretchable, the event becomes linked, by de- sign or by chance, to a whole chain of events, of underlying realities that then become impossible, it seems, to disentangle, one from the other. By such an arithmetical game, Benedetto Croce is able to claim that within every event all of history, all of humankind is contained, and thus can be rediscovered at will. On condition, to be sure, that we add to this fragment what is not in it at first sight and therefore to discern what is or is not admissible to include in it. It is this clever and dangerous game that we find in the recent articles of Jean-Paul Sartre.2

2 Jean-Paul Sartre, "Questions de méthode," Les Temps Modernes, nos. 139 & 140, 1957.




So let us try to use clearer language, replacing "event" with "short term"- which is on the scale of the individual, of daily life, of our illusions, of our momentary awarenesses. It is the preferred time of the chronicler and the journalist. Now, let us then observe that a chronicle or a newspaper offers us, in addition to great, so- called historical events, the trivial happenings of ordinary life- a fire, a train accident, the price of wheat, a crime, a theatrical per- formance, a flood. Everyone thus realizes that there exists a short term in every sphere of life- the economic, social, literary, institu- tional, religious, even the geographic (a gust of wind, a tempest- as well as in the political.

At first glance, the past is this mass of detailed facts, some spec- tacular, others obscure and constantly repeated, the kind of facts which these days are the regular quarry of the microsociologist or sociometrists (and of the microhistorian as well). But this massive array does not constitute the whole thick reality of history that we may subject to careful scientific reflection. Social science feels almost repelled by the event. And not without cause. The short term is the most capricious, the most deceptive of time periods.

This is the explanation why some of us historians have come to be very wary of traditional, so-called episodic history, a label that overlaps, perhaps unjustly, with that of political history. For political history is neither necessarily nor inevitably episodic. But nonetheless it is a fact that, except for the artificial summary statements with which it fills its pages (statements that usually lack any temporal breadth)3 and except for the occasional long-term explanations that are included, almost all of political history of the last hundred years has been focused on "great events" and has confined itself to writing about the short term.

This was perhaps the price it paid for its great accomplishments during this time- acquiring scientific tools of work and rigorous methods. The massive discovery of documents led historians to believe that the whole of truth was located in authentic documents. Only recently was Louis Halphen still writing4 that "it suffices to allow oneself in some sense to be carried along by the documents, read in sequence, such as we find them, to see the chain of events reveal themselves to us almost automatically." This ideal, "history

3 "Europe in 1500," "The world in 1880," "Germany on the eve of the Reforma- tion."

4 Introduction à l'Histoire, Paris: P.U.F., 1946, p. 50.



176 Fernand Braudel

in the making," culminated at the end of the nineteenth century in producing chronicles of a new style, ones whose ambition for precision led to recording episodic history step by step as seen through reading the correspondence of ambassadors or the parliamentary debates.

It was quite different for historians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who had been attentive to the perspectives of the longue durée, on the basis of which the great historians- Michelet, Ranke, Jacob Burckhardt, Fustel- could piece together the larger picture. If one believes that such going beyond the short term was the most precious, albeit the rarest, achievement of the last hundred years, one will appreciate the outstanding role of the historiography of institutions, of religions, of civilizations, and thanks to archaeology (which necessarily deals with vast time periods), of the avant-garde role of the historiography of classical Antiquity. These historians were the salvation of our craft.

The recent break with traditional forms of nineteenth-century historiography has not been a total break with the short term. There has been a movement, as we know, toward economic and social history at the expense of political history. This upheaval has brought about a veritable renewal, inevitably involving meth- odological changes, displacement of the centers of interest, along with an increase of quantitative history, all of which has certainly not exhausted its impact.

But, most of all, there has been a shift of traditional histo- riographical temporality. A day, a year might seem appropriate lengths of time for a political historian. Time was the sum of days. But if one wanted to measure a price curve, a demographic pro- gression, wage trends, variations in interest rates, the study of pro- duction (more hoped for than achieved), a close analysis of trade, it required much longer measures of time.

A new mode of historical narrative is emerging. Let us call it the "recitative" of the cyclical phase {conjoncture), the cycle, even the "intercycle," which offered us time lengths of a dozen years, a quarter of a century, and the longest, the half-century of the classical Kondratieff cycle. For example, leaving aside brief ups and downs, prices rose in Europe from 1791 to 1817, and went down from 1817 to 1852. This slow twofold rise and fall was a complete intercycle throughout Europe and just about the entire world.




No doubt these chronological periods have no absolute value. Using different kinds of measures- growth of the economy and of national income and national product- François Perroux5 would come up with different time markers, which are perhaps more useful. But we should not allow ourselves to get bogged down in such discussions! It is surely the case that the historian now has at his disposal a new temporality, which has become a mode of explanation by means of which history can be periodized in as yet unknown ways, using these curves and their oscillations.

So it is that Ernest Labrousse and his students have set to work on a vast research project in social history, using quantitative methods, about which they told us in their manifesto at the recent His- torical Congress in Rome (1955). I am not being unjust to their project in saying that this research must necessarily culminate in determining the boundaries of social cyclical phases (perhaps even of social structures). We cannot know in advance whether such social temporalities will be as fast or as slow as economic temporalities.

Furthermore, these two enormous personas, social cycles and economic cycles, ought not to make us lose sight of other actors, whose movements will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine, in the absence of any precise measures. Science, technology, political institutions, mental constructs, civilizations (to use this convenient word), all similarly have their life and growth rhythms. The new cyclical history will only reach maturity when it has as- sembled the entire orchestra.

Logically, this recitative, by the simple process of going beyond its temporal limits, should have led us to the longue durée. But, for many reasons, this logical next step was not taken, and a return to the short term is going on before our very eyes. Perhaps it has been thought more necessary (or more urgent) to reconcile "cyclical" history with traditional short-term history than to proceed forward into the unknown. Using military language, we might speak of consolidating our advances. Ernest Labrousse's first great work in 1933 was a study of the general movement of prices in France in the eighteenth century, a secular movement.6 In his book published in 1943, the greatest work of history published in France in the last

5 Cf. his Théorie générale du progrès économique, Cahiers de l'I. S. E. A., 1957. 6 Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vol., Pans,

Dalloz, 1933.



178 Fernand Braudel

twenty-five years, the same Ernest Labrousse gave in to a need to return to a less burdensome temporality in order to locate in the very depths of the 1774-1791 depression one of the major causes of the French Revolution, indeed its launching-pad. Even so, he was still utilizing a demi-intercycle. And then he went further. In his paper at the international congress in Paris in 1948, "Comment naissent les révolutions?" he sought this time to link a short-term economic drama (new style) to short-term political pathos (very old style), that of the revolutionary days. Here we are back into the short term, and up to our necks in it. To be sure, the attempt was permissible and useful. But how symptomatic it was! The historian enjoys being the stage director. How could he ever give up the drama of the short term, the best tricks of a very old trade?

Longer than cycles and intercycles, there is what economists call, without always studying them, secular trends. But very few economists are interested in them. Their views on structural crises, which have not been subject to the test of historical verification, take the form of rough sketches or hypotheses, based on at most the recent past, say to 1929, at most to 1870.7 Nonetheless, they provide a useful introduction to the story of the longue durée. They are a first key.

The second key, far more useful, is the term "structure." For good or ill, it pervades the discussion of the longue durée. By "structure," social observers imply an organization, a degree of coherence, rather fixed relations between realities and social masses. For us historians, a structure is certainly an assemblage, an architecture, but even more it is a reality that time can only slowly erode, one that goes on for a long time. Certain structures, in their long life, become the stable elements of an infinity of generations. They encumber history and restrict it, and hence control its flow. Other structures crumble more quickly. But all structures are simultaneously pillars and obstacles. As obstacles, they provide limitations (what mathematicians call envelopes) from which man and his ex- periences cannot liberate themselves. Think of how difficult it is to break through certain geographical frameworks, certain biological realities, certain limits to productivity, even one or another spiri-

7 Explained in detail by René Clemens, Prolégomènes d'une théorie de la structure éco- nomique, Paris, Domat-Montchrestien, 1952; see also Johann Akerman, "Cycle et structure," Revue économique, no. 1, 1952.




tual constraint. Mental frameworks are also prisons of the longue durée.

The most accessible example is still that of geographical constraint. Man is a prisoner for long centuries of climates, of vegeta- tions, of animal populations, of types of crop, of slowly constructed equilibria, which he cannot transform without the risk of endan- gering everything. Take the role of transhumance in mountain life, or the persistence of certain sectors of maritime life, rooted in privileged shoreline locales. Look at the endurance of roads and trade routes, and the surprising unchangeability of the geographical boundaries of civilizations.

We find the same degree of endurance and survival in the im- mense domain of culture. The magnificent book of Ernst Robert Curtius,8 at last translated into French, is the study of the cultural system that sustained the Latin civilization of the Late Empire right up to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the birth of national literatures, albeit selectively deforming the system as it came to be overwhelmed by its heavy heritage. The culture of the intellectual elites is the same story. It lived by the same themes, comparisons, maxims, and hackneyed tales. Similarly, the study by Lucien Febvre, Rabelais et le problème de l'incroyance au XVIe siècle,9 sought to delineate the mental tools of French thought at the time of Rabelais, the collection of concepts that, long before and long after him, determined the arts of living, thinking, and believing, and which strongly constrained from the outset the intellectual ad- ventures of even the freest spirits. The subject treated by Alphonse Dupront10 is another example of the recent research of the French historical school. In it, the idea of the crusade in the West is analyzed far beyond the fourteenth century, that is, far beyond the "true" crusades, as a continuous attitude of longue durée, which, in endless repetition, traversed the most diverse societies, worlds, and psychologies, and found its last expression among the men of the nineteenth century. In a neighboring field, the book of Pierre Francastel, Peinture et Société,11 points to the persistence, beginning

8 Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, Berne, 1948; French translation: La littérature européenne et le Moyen Age latin, Paris, P.U.F., 1956.

9 Paris, Albin Michel, 1943; 3rd ed., 1969. 10 Le mythe de Croisade. Essai de sociologie religieuse, thèse dactylographiée, Sor-

bonne. 11 Peinture et Société. Naissance et destruction d'une espace plastique, de la Renaissance au

cubisme, Lyon, Audin, 1951.



180 Fernand Braudel

with the Florentine renaissance, of a "geometric" cultural space that was unchanged up to cubism and the intellectual painting of the beginning of our century. The history of the sciences is also composed of constructed universes that constitute somewhat im- perfect explanatory models, but which have been regularly agreed upon for centuries. They have been Rejected only after long service. The Aristotelian universe persisted virtually without dissent up to Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. It gave way then to a profoundly geometrical universe which gave way in turn, centuries later, to the Einsteinian revolutions.12

The problem, in what is only seemingly a paradox, is to uncover the longue durée in the domain in which historical research has been undeniably most successful, that of the economy. Cycles, intercycles, structural crises may mask the regularities and continuities of systems (some would call them cultures)13- that is, of old habits of thought and action, of frameworks that strenuously resist dying, however illogical.

Let us illustrate this with one easily analyzed example. Right here in Europe, there was an economic system with rather clear rules, which can be characterized in a few lines. It was operative more or less from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, or to be safe, up to 1750. For long centuries, economic activity depend- ed on demographically fragile populations, as may be seen in the great decline of 1350-1450 and no doubt also that of 1650-1730. 14 For long centuries, circulation required primarily water and ships, since every land barrier constituted an obstacle and therefore was less desirable for transport. European economic expansions were located in coastal zones, with a few exceptions that confirm the rule (the Champagne fairs which were already declining at the beginning of this period, the Leipzig fairs in the eighteenth century). A further characteristic of this system was the predominant role of merchants and the prominent role of the precious metals (gold,

12 Additionally, I refer the reader to the following articles that make similar arguments: Otto Brunner on the social history of Europe, Historische Zeitschrift, CLXXVII, 3; R. Bultmann on humanism, ibid., CLXXVI, 1; Georges Lefebvre, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, No. 114, 1949; F. Härtung on enlightened despotism, Histo- rische Zeitschrift, CLXXX, 1.

13 René Courtin, La Civilisation économique du Brésil, Paris, Librairie de Médicis, 1941.

14 This is true for France. In Spain, demographic decline began at the end of the sixteenth century.




silver, even copper). The conflicts among the metals were only brought to a partial end with the decisive development of credit towards the end of the sixteenth century. In addition, there was the repeated damage wrought by seasonal agricultural crises, the fragility of the very base of economic life. And finally, there was the apparently disproportionate role of one or two principal external trade circuits: Levantine trade from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries and colonial trade in the eighteenth.

I have thus defined, or rather invoked, a widespread view of the traits of merchant capitalism in western Europe, a longue durée stage. Despite all the obvious changes over this period, these four or five centuries show a certain coherence that lasted until the upheavals of the eighteenth century and of the industrial revolution in which we still find ourselves. Some characteristics were constant and remained unchanged while all around them, amidst other continuities, a thousand ruptures and upheavals were transforming the face of the world.

Among the different historical temporalities, the longue durée stands out as a troublesome, complicated, often surprising figure. To admit it into the very heart of our work will not be an easy task, a mere enlargement of fields of study and exotic interests. Nor will it be a simple decision in its favor alone. For the historian, to include it would be to accept a change of style and attitude, an up- ending of ways of thinking, a new concept of the social. It requires getting to know slower temporalities, almost immobile ones. Only when that happens, and not before- I shall return to this- will it be legitimate to free oneself from the inexorable march of historical time, to leave it behind, and then to return to it with new eyes, with new uncertainties, with new questions. In any case, on the basis of these layers of slow history, one can rethink the totality of history, as though it were located atop an infrastructure. All the stages, all the thousands of stages, all the thousands of explosions of historical time can be understood from these depths, from this semi-immobility. Everything gravitates around it.

I do not claim, in what I have said, to have defined the profession of the historian, but rather one conception of this profession. Happy, and rather naive, is he who would think, after the storms of recent years, that we have discovered the true principles, the clear



182 Fernand Braudel

boundaries, the right School. What is true is that all the various social sciences have endlessly been transforming themselves, both as a result of their individual internal developments and by virtue of the movement of the whole. History is no exception. Calm is not in sight and the hour of the disciples has not struck. The moment between the time of Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos and that of Marc Bloch was long. But ever since Marc Bloch, the wheel has not ceased turning. For me, history is the sum of all possible histories- a set of multiple skills and points of view, those of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

The only mistake, in my view, would be to choose one of these histories to the exclusion of all the others. This would be to repeat the historicist error. It will not be easy, as we know, to persuade all historians of this, and even less all social scientists, given the many relentless efforts to return us to history as it used to be written. It will take much time and effort to get them to accept all these changes and novelties as integral to the old label of history. And yet a new historical "science" has been born, one that continues to reflect upon and transform itself. In France, it goes back to 1900 with the Revue de synthèse historique and since 1929 to Annales. The new historians have tried to pay attention to all the human sciences. That is what is giving our profession such strange frontiers and such exotic qualities. Let us then no longer think that the differences of yesterday still form the barrier they did between the historian and the social science observer. All the social sciences, including history, have mutually contaminated each other. They are speaking, or can speak, the same language.

Whether one is writing about 1558 or the year of Our Lord 1958, if one wants to understand the world, one has to determine the hierarchy of forces, currents, and individual movements, and then put them together to form an overall constellation. Through- out, one must distinguish between long-term movements and momentary pressures, finding the immediate sources of the latter and the long-term thrust of the former. The world of 1558, so bleak in France, was not produced just out of the events of that charmless year. The same is true for this difficult year of 1958 in France. Each "current reality" is the conjoining of movements with different ori- gins and rhythms. The time of today is composed simultaneously of the time of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, and of bygone days.




II. THE QUARREL ABOUT THE SHORT-TERM

To be sure, these verities are platitudes. Nonetheless, the social sciences have seldom been tempted to write about lost time {temps perdu). Not that one can formally accuse them, and say they are guilty of not accepting history or duration as necessary dimensions of their work. They do in fact seem to welcome us. "Diachronie" analysis, which restores the historical element, is never omitted from their theoretical preoccupations.

But putting these curtsies aside, one has to say that the social sciences- by taste, by deep instinct, or possibly by training- tend always to shy away from historical explanations. They avoid them, in two virtually opposite ways. They may deal excessively with "events," or if you will, they "presentize" social research, thanks to an em- pirical sociology that disdains any kind of history and limits itself to short-term data, to on-the-spot surveys. Or they dispense with time altogether by inventing, via a "science of communications," a mathematical formula for virtually timeless structures. This latter method, the latest one, is obviously the only one that might be of great interest to us. But the one centering on events has enough partisans that we ought to examine each option successively.

We have indicated our skepticism about a purely episodic historiography. To be fair, if such a vice exists, although history is the favorite target of the critics, it is not the only guilty party. All the social sciences participate in this error. Economists, demographers, and geographers are split (although perhaps unevenly split) between those working on the past and those working on the present. If they were wise, they would balance their attention. This is easy and necessary for the demographer. It is almost automatic with geographers (especially for those in France who are brought up in the tradition of Vidal de la Blache). It only rarely happens, on the other hand, with economists, who are imprisoned in a very short present. They seldom go further back than 1945, and they go forward in terms of plans and forecasts into an immediate future of several months, several years at the very most. I suggest that all economic thought is trapped in this time bind. They tell the historians that it is their task to study periods earlier than 1945, in search of ancient economies. But in this way they deprive themselves of a marvelous field for observation, abandoning it of their



184 Fernand Braudel

own volition, while not denying its value. The economist has fallen into the groove of running after analysis of the present on behalf of governments.

The outlook of ethnographers and ethnologists is neither as clear cut nor as worrisome. Some of them, it is true, have insisted upon the impossibility and futility of history within the kind of work they do (although it should be said that an intellectual is called upon to do the impossible). This authoritarian rejection of history has ill served Malinowski and his disciples. In truth, how can anthropology be disinterested in history? It is the same adventure of the mind, as Claude Lévi-Strauss likes to say.15 There is no society, however unsophisticated, which cannot be seen to have felt the "claws of the event," nor is there any society whose history has been entirely lost. It would be wrong to complain about this matter, or to discuss it further.

On the other hand, on the question of the short term, we have strong differences with the sociology that engages in surveys, surveys that deal with a thousand different topics in the domains of sociology, psychology, and economics. They are springing up in France, as elsewhere. They represent a sort of constant gamble on the irreplaceable value of the present, its "volcanic" heat, its im- mense richness. What point is there in turning to historical time- impoverished, simplified, devastated by its silences, reconstructed? The word to be underlined here is reconstructed. But is the past really so dead, as reconstructed as one claims? To be sure, the historian is too ready to discern what is essential in time gone by. As Henri Pirenne said, he easily decides which are the "important events," meaning "those which have had consequences." This is an obvious and dangerous simplification. But what would the voyager in the present not give to be able to have some distance from the present, to see it from a future point in time? He might then un- mask or simplify present-day happenings that are confused, un- readable because too encumbered by gestures and minor features. Claude Lévi-Strauss claims that an hour's conversation with one of Plato's contemporaries would tell him more than all our lectures on the classics about the coherence, or incoherence, of the culture of Greek Antiquity.16 I entirely agree. But that is because he has been listening for many, many years to all those Greek voices

15 Anthropologie structurelle, op. cit., p. 31 16 "Diogene couché," Les Temps Modernes, no. 195, p. 17.




saved from oblivion. The historian prepared his trip. One hour in the Greece of today would teach him nothing, or next to nothing, about present-day coherences or incoherences.

What is more, the researcher working on the present will only be able to get to the "precise" framework of the existing structures if he too reconstructs, suggests explanatory hypotheses, refuses to accept at face value the reality he perceives but rather truncates it, transcends it, in order to get a handle on it- all ways of reconstruct- ing it. I don't believe that a sociological photograph of the present is "truer" than a historical portrayal of the past, especially to the degree that it distances itself from reconstruction.

Philippe Aries17 has stressed the importance of unfamiliarity, of the unexpected in historical explanation. In studying the sixteenth century, one comes up against something strange, strange to you, a man of the twentieth century. The question before you is how to explain this difference. But I would suggest that surprise, unfamiliarity, remoteness- these great ways of knowing- are no less necessary to understand that which surrounds you, that which is so close that you cannot perceive it clearly. Live in London for a year and you will not know much about England. But, by making the comparisons, you will suddenly come to understand some of the deepest, most specific characteristics of France, those which you never knew precisely because you knew them. So, too, the past is the unfamiliar by means of which one can understand the present.

So historians and social scientists can eternally pass the ball back and forth between the dead document and the too living tes- timony, between the distant past and the too close present. I do not think this is the fundamental question. The present and the past can be better seen in their reciprocal lights. And if one observes them only in the immediate present, one's attention will be drawn to that which moves quickly, which glitters whether valuable or not, or which has just changed or made noise or is easily discovered. A whole episodic explanation, as tedious as any offered by historians, can ensnare the observer in a hurry- the ethnographer who spends three months with a small Polynesian people, the industrial sociologist who offers us the clichés of his latest survey, or who thinks that, with a clever questionnaire and cross-tabulations using per-

17 Les Temps de Vhistoire, Paris, Plon, 1954, esp. p. 298 ff.



186 Fernand Braudel

forated cards, he can capture perfectly a social mechanism. The social is more cunning prey than that.

To be truthful, why should we human scientists be interested in the results of a vast and well-done survey on the region of Paris,18 which detailed the route of a young girl from her home in the 16th arrondissement to her music teacher and to Sciences-Po? We get a pretty map out of it. But had she been a student of agronomy or an adept of water-skiing these triangular trips would have been quite different. I am delighted to see a map showing the distribution of the homes of the employees of a large firm. But if I don't have a map of their previous distribution, and if the time between the two surveys is not sufficiently great to allow one to see this as part of a large change, what is the question we are asking, without which the survey is a waste of time? Surveys for the sake of surveys serve at most to accumulate some data. We don't even know that ipso facto these data will be useful for future research. Let us beware of art for art's sake.

Similarly, I doubt that a study of a city, no matter which one, can be the object of a sociological enquiry, as was done for Auxerre19 or Vienne in Dauphiné,20 without inserting it in the historical long- term. Any city- a society with conflicts, with its crises, its ruptures, its breakdowns, its inevitable scheming- has to be placed within the context of the countryside that surrounds it, and also within those archipelagos of neighboring cities, which the historian Richard Häpke was one of the first to describe. It may thus be inscribed in the underlying movements, often over more or less long periods of time, which gave life to this complex. Does it make no difference, is it not rather essential, to discern whether a particular urban- rural exchange, a particular industrial or commercial competition is something very new in the fullness of its bloom or something beginning to wither, whether it is a resurgence of the distant past or a monotonous return to the usual pattern?

Let us conclude with a maxim that Lucien Febvre, during the last ten years of his life, repeated all the time: "History, science of

18 P. Chombart de Lauwe, Paris et V agglomération parisienne, Paris, P.U.F., 1952, I, 106.

19 Suzenne Frère & Charles Bettelheim, Une ville française moyenne. Auxerre en 1950. Paris, Armand Colin, Cahiers des Sciences Politiques, No. 17, 1951.

20 Pierre Clément & Natalie Xydias, Vienne-sur-l-Rhône. Sociologie d'une ville française. Paris, Armand Colin, Cahiers des Sciences Politiques, No. 71, 1955.




the past, science of the present." Is not history, the dialectic of temporalities, an explanation in its way of the social in all its reality? And therefore of the present? Its lesson in this domain is to warn us about the event: Do not think only in the short term. Do not believe that only those actors who make noise are the most authentic. There are others who matter but who are silent. But did we not all know this already?

HI. COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL MATHEMATICS

It was perhaps an error to spend so much time on the agitated frontier of the short term. To tell the truth, the debate going on there does not have much importance, or at least proceeds without any useful novel idea. The critical debate lies elsewhere- among our neighbors who are swept away by the newest experiments of the social sciences, under the double label of "communication" and mathematics.

It's not going to be easy to plead the case that no social analysis can avoid historical time when we're dealing with efforts that, apparently at least, situate themselves completely outside of time.

In any case, if the reader wishes to follow our argument in this discussion (whether in agreement or not), he would be well advised to be ready to weigh for himself each of the terms of a vocabulary that, although certainly not entirely new, has been reworked in the discussions taking place at this moment. We have nothing we need to repeat, of course, about "events" or the "longue durée," nor much to say about "structures," although the word and the concept is not untouched by uncertainties and current discussions.21 Nor would it be useful to linger too long over the words "synchrony" and "diachrony." Their meaning is clear, although their role in any concrete social analysis is less easy to establish than it might seem. In effect, in the language of history (as I understand it), there may never be perfect synchrony. An instantaneous moment of time, in which all temporalities are suspended, is a virtual absurdity or, which is almost the same, extremely contrived. And which is almost the same thing, there can be no simple descent down the slopes of time. The

21 See the Colloque sur les Structures, Vie Section de l'École pratique des Hautes Études, typewritten résumé, 1958.



188 Fernand Braudel

only conceivable thing is to make a series of descents, following the multiple and innumerable rivers of time.

These few reminders and warnings will suffice for the moment. But we need to be more explicit about the concepts of "unconscious history," "models," and "social mathematics." These necessary remarks are linked, or rather will be linked, in a problematic common to all the social sciences.

"Unconscious history" is, of course, the history of the unconscious parts of social reality. "Men make their history, but they do not make it as they wish."22 This formula of Marx clarifies, but does not explain, the problem. In fact, under a new name, it is once again the problem of the short term, of "microtime," of the episodic that is being posed here. Men have always had the impression, in living their lives, that they understand what is happening day by day. Is this conscious and clear account badly mistaken, as so many historians have for a long time asserted? Linguistics once thought it could derive everything from words. History thought it could derive it all from events. More than one contemporary commentator has been ready to believe that all is explained by the Yalta or Pots- dam agreements, by the accidents of Dien-Bien-Phu or Sakiet-Sidi- Youssef, or by the launching of the sputnik, another kind of event, equally important in its way. Let us thus admit that there exists at a certain distance a social unconscious. Let us furthermore con- cede for the time being that this unconscious be considered scientifically richer than the shimmering surface to which our eyes are used. Scientifically richer means simpler, with wider implications, if harder to uncover. But the distinction between clear surface and obscure depths, between noise and silence, is difficult to draw and uncertain. Let us add that "unconscious" history- which half the time concerns cyclical phases but is par excellence about structural time- is clearly perceived more frequently than one is ready to admit. Each of us has the sense that, beyond his own life, there lies a massive historical past whose power and thrusts he recognizes better, it must be said, than its laws and direction. And this history did not start just yesterday (in economic history for example), even if what is happening today is more vivid to us. The revolution, for it is a revolution of the mind, has consisted in confronting this half-

22 Cited by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurelle, op. cit., pp. 30-31.'




darkness, of giving it an ever larger role beside, even in place of, the event.

History is not the only discipline pursuing these new ways. On the contrary, it has been merely following in the path of the social sciences, adapting for its use the new instruments of knowledge and research that have been constructed. Illustrating this point are the "models," sometimes more or less perfected, sometimes still artisanal. Models are nothing but hypotheses, explanatory systems firmly linked in the form of an equation or a function: x=y, or x causes y. A never occurs without B accompanying it, and strict, constant relations exist between the two. Once we have a carefully established model, one can apply it across time and space to other social spheres similar to the one that has been studied and on the basis of which the model was created. This gives the model a recur- ring validity.

These explanatory systems vary infinitely, reflecting the temper- ament, the calculations, or the objectives of the researcher- qual- itative or quantitative, simple or complex, mechanical or statistical. This last distinction I owe to Lévi-Strauss. He calls mechanical a model drawn from directly observed reality, small-scale reality dealing with small human groups (such as those created by ethnologists about primitive societies). For vast societies, with large populations, we are obliged to find averages, and therefore we use statistical methods. But these sometimes dubious definitions matter little!

The crucial point for me, before we may establish a common program for the social sciences, is to spell out the role and the limits of models, which some users tend to inflate excessively. We must therefore once again invoke the idea of multiple temporalities, in relation this time to models; for the significance and the explanatory value of models depends rather closely on the duration to which they refer.

To illustrate this more clearly, let us look at some particular historical models,23- that is, models invented by historians, crude and rudimentary models, seldom developed rigorously by true scientific methods and never expected to achieve a revolutionary mathematical language- still and all, models of a sort.

23 1 am tempted to look at some "models" that economists have been using and that we have been imitating.



190 Fernand Braudel

We mentioned above commercial capitalism between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. This is one of the models that one finds in Marx's writings. It's really only completely valid for a given family of societies, over a particular time period, even if it opens the door to all sorts of extrapolations.

A somewhat different model is sketched in my book,24 about a cycle of economic development in Italian cities between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which were successively centers of commerce, of "industries," and then specialized in banking. This last activity was the slowest to come into full bloom and the slowest to disappear. This model was more limited in scope than the one dealing with all of commercial capitalism, but it was therefore perhaps easier to extend it to other moments of time and space. It notes a phenomenon (some might call it a dynamic structure, but all historical structures are to some degree dynamic) that can recur in many different situations, and is easy to recognize. Perhaps this is also true of the model suggested by Frank Spooner and me25 concerning the history (before, during, and after the sixteenth century) of the precious metals- gold, silver, and copper- and credit, that flexible substitute for the metals. They are all players in the market, the "strategy" of one affecting the "strategy" of each of the others. It would not be difficult to apply this model beyond the privileged and exceptionally turbulent sixteenth century that we analyzed. Have not some economists already tried after a fashion to verify the old quantitative theory of money for contemporary underdeveloped countries?26

But the possibilities of extension in time of all these models are small indeed compared to the one conceived by the young Ameri- can historical sociologist, Sigmund Diamond.27 He was struck by the double language of the dominant class of great American fi- nanciers in the epoch of Pierpont Morgan. There was one language used within the class and another outside it. This latter was in fact an apologia vis-à-vis public opinion, justifying the success of the fi- nancier as the typical triumph of the self-made man, the necessary

24 La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à V époque de Philippe II, Paris, Armand Colin, 1949, p. 264 ff. ¿b Les Métaux monétaires et l économie du XVIe siècle. Rapports au Congrès international de Rome, 1955, IV, 233-264.

26 Alexandre Chabert, Structure économique et théorie monétaire, Paris, Armand Colin, Pubi, du Centre d'Études économiques, 1956.

27 The Regulation of the American Businessman, Cambridge, MA, 1955.




condition of the country's prosperity. He saw in this double language the habitual reaction of any dominant class that sees assaults on its prestige and threats to its privileges. To defend themselves, they seek to identify their fate with that of the society or the nation, their private interest with the public interest. Diamond would similarly explain the evolution of the idea of dynasty or empire, of the British dynasty or the Roman Empire. This kind of model is clearly applicable across the centuries. It presumes certain specific social conditions, but history is full of them. It is true over a much longer time-period than the other models I have discussed, but at the same time it deals with more precise, more specific realities.

At the limit, as the mathematicians would put it, this kind of model is close to that of those popular models, the almost timeless ones of the social mathematicians. To say they are almost timeless means in fact that they move along the dark and unexplored path- ways of the v ery longue durée.

The various accounts we have given are a quite inadequate introduction to the science and theory of models. In this field, historians are not at all in the avant-garde. Their models are at best bundles of explanations. Our colleagues are much more am- bitious and advanced in their research, trying to make use of the language of information, communication, and qualitative mathematics. Their merit- which is considerable- is to welcome into their field the subtle language of mathematics, a language however that, given even a moment's inattention, can escape our control and run away with itself, God knows where! Information, communication, and qualitative mathematics all can be placed under the rather wide umbrella of the term, "social mathematics." So it is there that we must shine our lantern, to the degree that we can.

Social mathematics28 is at least three different languages which may be combined, and there may be others. Mathematicians have not yet exhausted their imagination. In any case, there does not exist a single mathematics, or at least this is the claim. "One cannot speak of algebra or geometry, but an algebra, a geometry" (Th. Guilbaud), which does not simplify our task, or theirs. Three languages then: that of necessary facts (something is given, something

28 See especially Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bulletin International des Sciences Sociales, UNESCO, VI, 4, and more generally the entire highly interesting issue, titled: "Math- ematics and the Social Sciences."



192 Fernand Braudel

else follows from it), which is the domain of traditional mathematics; that of random facts (since Pascal), which is the domain of probabilities; and finally that of conditional facts, neither determined nor random, but subject to certain constraints, to rules of the game, such as the game "strategy" of Von Neumann and Morgenstern,29 this winning strategy which has developed beyond the bold initial principles of its founders. Game strategy, by utilizing sets, groups, calculations of probabilities, opens the way to "qualitative" mathematics. It becomes possible to proceed from observations to mathematical formulas without having to go via the difficult path of measurements and long statistical calculations. One can proceed directly from social analysis to mathematical formulas, shall we say to a calculating machine.

Of course, we have to prepare the task of our machine which cannot accept or manipulate everything that may be fed into it. It is indeed because of real machines, of the rules by which they function to permit communications in the most material sense of the word, that a science of information was invented and developed. The author of this article is by no means a specialist in this difficult domain. The search going on to construct a translation machine, which he has followed with interest, if distantly, throws him, as it does others, into the depths of reflection. Nonetheless, two facts seem clear: (1) such machines, such mathematical possibilities, do exist; and (2) we have to prepare the social part of social mathematics, which are no longer only our older traditional mathematics- curves of prices, wages, and birthrates.

So, if the new mathematical operations are often too difficult for us, the preparation of social reality for this use- how parts are linked together, how they are separated- is something that requires our close attention. The prior treatment heretofore has almost always been the same: choose a restricted unit of observation, such as a "primitive" tribe or a single demographic case, so that we can examine almost everything at first hand. Then we proceed to find the correlations between the elements we have singled out, all their possible interactions. Such rigorously determined relations offer us the very equations from which the mathematicians then draw their conclusions and possible extension into a model that summa- rizes everything, or rather takes account of everything.

29 The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton, 1944. See the brilliant review by Jean Fourastié, Critique, No. 51, Oct. 1951.




A thousand different research questions are thus opened up. One example will be more useful than a long exposition. Claude Lévi-Strauss offers himself as an excellent guide, whom we should follow. Let us look at one sector of his research, that of the science of communication.30

"In every society, communications operate at three different levels"- women, goods and services, and messages.31 Let us grant that there exist at these different levels different languages, but languages all the same. So should we not have the right to treat them as languages, or even as the language, and hence to utilize in their analysis the amazing progress of linguistics, or more precisely, of phonemics, which "cannot fail to play the same renovating role vis-à-vis the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played in the field of the exact sciences?"32 That is a big statement, but sometimes such statements are justified. Like history that was trapped by the event, linguistics was trapped by words (the relation of words to the object, the historical evolution of words) but could escape via the phonological revolution. Beneath the word, linguistics attached itself to the sound element we call the phoneme, which was indifferent to meaning but attentive to location, to the sounds surrounding it, to the grouping of words, to infra- phonemic structures, to the entire reality of language that was un- derneath, that was unconscious. On the basis of the several dozens of phonemes that we then find in all the world's languages, the new mathematical task took form. At that point, linguistics, or at least a part of linguistics, escaped over the past twenty years the world of the social sciences to cross over the "mountain pass into the exact sciences."

To extend the concept of language to the elementary structures of kinship, of myths, of ceremonies, of economic exchanges, that is, to locate this difficult but salutary mountain pass, is the minor miracle achieved by Claude Lévi-Strauss. He did this first of all for matrimonial exchange, that primal language essential for human communications, to the point that there exists no society, primitive or not, in which incest, marriage within the narrow family unit, is not forbidden. Ergo, a language. In this language, he sought to

30 This entire discussion is drawn from his recent book, Anthropologie structurale, op. cit. 31 Ibid., p. 326.

™ Ibid., p. 39.



194 Fernand Braudel

find a basic element corresponding to the phoneme, this "atomic" element of kinship, which our guide uncovered in his doctoral dis- sertation in 1949.33 This unit in its simplest form is the man, the wife, the child, and the maternal uncle of the child. On the basis of this quadrangular unit, and looking at all the known systems of marriage among primitive peoples (and they are numerous), the mathematicians can calculate the possible combinations and results. With the assistance of the mathematician André Weill, Lévi-Strauss succeeded in translating into mathematical terms the anthropologist's observations. The derived model has to test the validity, the stability of the system, and indicate the solutions that the latter implies.

It is clear what the objective was in this research-to go beyond surface observation to reach the realm of unconscious or barely conscious elements, to reduce such reality into small units, small identical brush strokes, whose exact relations one could analyze with precision. "It is at this [I would call it myself a certain kind of] microsociological level that one may hope to perceive the most general laws of structure, as the linguist discovers his at the infra- phonemic level and the physicist at the inframolecular level, that is at the level of the atom."34 This game can be played, of course, in many different directions. So, what is more didactic than to see Lévi-Strauss pursue it, this time, with myths and, amusingly, with cuisine (another language). Indeed, he reduces myths to a series of elementary cells, the mythemes, and reduces the language of cook- books (light-heartedly) into gustemes. In each case, he is in search of deep, unconscious levels. I am not aware, when I am speaking, of the phonemes I am using. Neither am I normally conscious, when I am at the dinner table, of "gustemes," if such things exist. But each time, this game of subtle, exact relations keeps me company. Would the last word of sociological research then be to locate these simple mysterious relations in every language, to translate them into a Morse code, that is, the universal mathematical language? That seems to be the ambition of the new social mathematics. But may I say, without smiling, that this is an entirely different story/ history?

33 Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris, P.U.F., 1949. See Anthropologie structurale, pp. 47-62. 34 Anthropologie structurale, op. cit., pp. 42-43.




Let us now reintroduce duration. I have said that models have a varying life-span: they are valid for the time of the reality they are talking about. And, for the social observer, this time is primordial, for even more important than the deep structures of life are its moments of rupture, its brusque or slow deterioration under the impact of contradictory pressures.

I have compared models to ships. Once the ship is built, what interests me is to launch it, to see if it floats, then to make it sail, as I wish, up and down the waters of time. A shipwreck always consti- tutes the most significant moment. For example, the explanation that Frank Spooner and I gave about the relations between the various precious metals does not seem to work before the fifteenth century. Before that time, the competition between the metals seems to have been so violent that what happened in later periods did not seem to occur then. Well, in that case, we needed to find out why. Similarly, it is necessary to understand why, this time going forward in time to the eighteenth century, navigation with our too simple ship becomes first difficult, then impossible, given the abnormal expansion of credit. I believe that research must cease- lessly move from social reality to the model, then back again, and so on, by a series of alterations, of patiently renewed voyages. The model is thus successively a way to explain the structure, and an in- strument to test, compare, and verify the solidity and durability of a given structure. If I were to create a model based on the present day, I would check it immediately against this reality, then push it backwards in time, if possible to its moment of birth. Once this is done, I could estimate its probable life-span up to the next rupture, in terms of the concomitant movement of other social realities. Un- less, using it as a way of making comparisons, I circulated it across time and space, looking for other realities that I could illuminate thanks to using the model.

Am I wrong to think that the models of qualitative mathematics, such as we have seen up to now,35 would not lend themselves to such voyages in time, because they travel along a single one of the innumerable temporalities, that of the very longue durée, which knows no chance occurrences, no cyclical phases, no ruptures? I turn once again to Lévi-Strauss, because his usages in this domain

35 1 am speaking specifically of qualitative mathematics, such as used in game strategy. I would have to discuss differently the kind of classical models that economists elaborate.



196 Fernand Braudel

seem to me the most intelligent, the clearest, the most deeply rooted in social experience, from which all analysis must start and then return. Let us note that he repeatedly discusses phenomena that move extremely slowly, if at all. All kinship systems persist because human life is not possible over a certain level of consanguinity, and thus it requires small groups to open themselves to the outside world in order to survive. Hence, the incest taboo is a constant of the longue durée. Myths, which develop slowly, also correspond to structures that have an extreme longevity. In collecting the Oedipus myths, one doesn't have to decide which is the oldest, since the problem is to look at the range of variation and therewith to illuminate the underlying deep articulations that govern them. But let us suppose that our colleague would be interested not in a myth but in the images and successive interpretations of "Machiavellian- ism," that he was interested in the basic elements of a rather simple doctrine, which was widespread following its initial expression in the sixteenth century. In this case, he would be faced with ruptures and upheavals in the very structure of Machiavellianism, since this system does not have the quasi-eternal theatrical solidity of a myth. It reacted to the events and the twists, the multiple vicissitudes of history. In a word, it did not find itself on the tranquil and monotonous roads of the longue durée. The procedure that Lévi-Strauss suggests of looking for mathematized structures is not located only at the microsociological level, but also at the meeting-point of the infinitely small and the very longue durée.

In point of fact, is revolutionary qualitative mathematics con- demned to follow only the paths of the very longue durée} If so, we shall find that this restricted game limits us to truths that are a bit those of eternal man. Elementary truths, aphorisms of popular wisdom, malcontents might call them. We might reply that they are essential truths, truths that illuminate once again the very bases of social life. But that is not the whole matter under discussion.

I do not in fact believe that such attempts, or analogous ones, cannot be conducted outside the very longue durée. The data for qualitative social mathematics are not numbers but relationships, relations that have to be rather rigorously defined to be able to as- sign them a mathematical sign, so that one can study all the mathematical possibilities of these signs, forgetting about the social realities they represent. The value of the conclusions depends on the value of the initial observation, the choices that isolate the es-




sential elements of the observed phenomenon and determine their relations within this phenomenon. It becomes understandable why social mathematics prefers the kind of models Lévi-Strauss calls mechanical, that is, derived from small groups in which each individual is, so to speak, directly observable and in which a very homogeneous social life allows one to define with certainty the human relations, which are simple and concrete, and do not vary much.

So-called statistical models, on the other hand, deal with large, complex societies in which observations can be made only by means of averages, that is, using traditional mathematics. But once one establishes these averages, nothing then prevents the observer from establishing, at the level of groups rather than of individuals, the basic relations to which we referred and which are necessary for the elaboration of qualitative mathematics. To my knowledge, there have been no attempts of this kind. But we are at the early stages of this kind of work. For the moment, whether in psychology, economics, or anthropology, everyone has been working in the ways I defined with reference to Lévi-Strauss. But qualitative social mathematics will not have shown its mettle until it has been used to analyze a modern society, with its tangled problems and multiple rhythms of life. Let's suppose that this adventure will tempt one of our mathematical sociologists. Let us suppose further that it brings about a necessary revision of the methods hitherto used by the new mathematics, that they no longer limit themselves to what I shall call this time the too longue durée. They would have to rediscover the diversity of life, all its movements, all its temporalities, all its ruptures, all its variations.

IV. THE HISTORIAN'S TIME, THE SOCIOLOGIST'S TIME

After a foray into the land of timeless social mathematics, I return to time, to duration. And as an incorrigible historian, I remain astonished that sociologists have been able to escape it. But it is because their time is not my time: it is much less imperious, also less concrete, and never at the heart of their problems and their reflections.

The historian in fact never departs from historical time. Time sticks to his thought like soil to the gardener's spade. Of course



198 Fernand Braudel

he may dream of escaping it. Amidst the anguish of 1940, Gaston Roupnel36 wrote some words which make every historian wince. A similar thought is to be found earlier in the writings of Paul Lacombe, a first-rate historian: "Time is nothing in itself; objec- tively, it is merely an idea of ours."37 But are these really escapes? I myself, during my rather gloomy captivity, struggled mightily to escape the chronicle of those difficult years (1940-1945). Refus- ing events and the time of those events was a way of moving to the margins, to shelter, to look at things from further away, judge them better, and not believe too much in them. One could move from the short term to the somewhat less short term and finally to very long time (if this exists, it must be the time of the sages). Then when you get there, you can stop and look at everything once again and reconstruct, seeing everything turning around yourself. Such an operation has what it takes to tempt a historian.

But these successive shifts in perspective do not truly move one outside the time of the world, the time of history, imperious because irreversible and because it flows at the very rhythm of the ro- tation of the earth. In fact, the temporalities that we differentiate are bound together. It is not so much duration that is the creation of our mind, but the splitting up of this duration. And yet these fragments come together again at the end of our work. The longue durée, cyclical phases {conjoncture), and events fit together easily, for they all are measurements on the same scale. Hence, to enter men- tally into one of these temporalities is to be part of all of them. The philosopher, who pays attention to the subjective element internal to the concept of time, never feels the weight of historical time, a concrete, universal time such as the time of the cyclical phases that Ernest Labrousse lays out in the beginning of his book.38 He is like a voyager, always true to himself, who travels the whole world and insists on the same constraints, whatever be the country in which he has landed, or the political régime and social order to which he is submitted.

For the historian, everything begins and ends in time, a mathematical time, a demiurge, easy to mock, time that is external to men, "exogenous" as the economists would say, a time that push-

36 Histoire et destin, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1943, passim, esp. p. 169. 37 Revue de synthèse historique, 1900, p. 32. 38 La crise de l'économie française à la veille de la Révolution française, Paris, P.U.F.,

1944, Introduction.




es us forward, constrains us, sweeps away our individual times of many varieties- yes, the world's imperious time.

The sociologists, of course, do not accept this too simple concept. They are much closer to the "dialectic of duration" as ex- pounded by Gaston Bachelard.39 Social time is simply one dimen- sion of the social reality one is studying. It is internal to this reality as it might be to an individual, one sign among others that it util- izes, one more property that marks it out as a particular reality. The sociologist is not the least limited by this manipulable time, which he can divide up, freeze, allow to flow again, as he wishes. Historical time lends itself much less well, as I previously said, to a flexible double game of synchrony and diachrony. It does not really allow one to think of life as a mechanism one can freeze in order to present, as one wishes, an immobile picture.

This disagreement is more fundamental than it may seem. The sociologist's time is simply not ours. The deep structure of our profession is averse to it. Our time is a measure, like the economist's time. When a sociologist tells us that a structure continually de- stroys itself only to be reconstructed, we readily accept the explanation which historical observation in fact confirms. But we want to know, in line with our customary demands, the exact duration of these positive and negative movements. Economic cycles, the ebb and flow of material life, are measurable. A social structural crisis must also be placed in time, through time, and situate itself both absolutely and within the context of concomitant structural movements. What is of most interest to the historian is the criss- crossing of these movements, their interaction, and the moments when they break down. These are all things that can only be established within the uniform time of the historians, the general measure of all these phenomena, and not in multitudinous social times particular to each of these phenomena.

A historian must formulate such contrarian remarks, rightly or wrongly, even when he reads the work of a sympathetic, almost fraternal sociologist such as Georges Gurvitch. Did not a philoso- pher40 recently define him as someone who "forced history upon sociology"? Yet, even in his work, an historian recognizes neither

39 Dialectique de la durée, Paris. P.U.F., 2nd ed., 1950. 40 Gilles Granger, Événement et structure dans les sciences de l'homme, Cahiers de

l'Institut de Science Economique Appliqué, Série M, No. 1, 41-42.



200 Fernand Braudel

his durations nor his temporalities. The vast social edifice (shall we call it the model) is organized by Gurvitch on five essential architectural pillars: social strata, small groups (sociabilités), social groups, global societies, times.41 This last scaffolding, that of temporalities, is the newest, and the last to be constructed, almost like an afterthought.

The temporalities of Georges Gurvitch are multiple. He de- scribes a whole series of them: the time of slow-moving longue du- rée, illusory time or the time of surprise, the time of irregular beat, time that is cyclical or running in place, the time that is behind itself, time that alternates between falling behind and getting ahead of itself, the time that is ahead of itself, explosive time.42 How can this be convincing to the historian? With such a wide range of colors, it becomes impossible to reconstitute unitary white light, which is indispensable to him. He realizes quickly as well that such chameleon-like time is one more way, one supplementary sign, to refer, without adding anything, to the categories previously out- lined. In the construct of our friend, time, the last category, simply locates itself among all the others. It adapts itself to each of these homes, to the requirements of the social strata, the small groups, the social groups, the global societies. It's a different way of writing, without any real changes, the same equations. Each social reality creates its times and its levels of time, like common mollusks. But what do we historians gain thereby? The whole architecture of this ideal city is static. History is absent from it. The world's time, historical time, is located in it like an Aeolian wind, imprisoned in a goatskin. It is not to history that the sociologists, consciously or not, are opposed, but to the times of history, this reality that remains violent, even when one wants to tame it, to diversify it. This constraint from which the historian never escapes is one from which the sociologists almost always escape. They evade it, either in the always present instantaneous moment, as though it were suspended in time, or in the repetitive phenomena which are not located in any particular time. Thus they go one of two opposite ways, to the strictest form of episodic time, or to the longest longue durée. Is such an evasion legitimate? That is the real debate be-

41 See my no doubt too polemical article, "Georges Gurvitch et la discontinuité du social," Annales E.S.C., No. 3, 1953, 347-361.

42 See Georges Gurvitch, Déterminismes sociaux et liberté humaine, Paris, P.U.F., 1955, 38-40 and passim.




tween historians and sociologists, even for historians of different outlooks.

I don't know if this article that is too outspoken, too supported by examples as is the custom of historians, will meet with the ap- proval of sociologists and our other neighbors. I suspect not. It would not be very useful in any case to repeat, as a sort of conclusion, its leitmotiv, which we have argued throughout. If history is called by nature to give a prime consideration to temporalities, to all the movements into which it can be distinguished, the longue durée seems to us the one among them that is most useful for common observation and reflection by all the social sciences. Is it asking too much of our neighbors that, when they think about how to proceed, they relate their assessments and their findings to this axis?

For historians, not all of whom agree with me, there would follow from this a complete change in orientation as well. Their in- stinctive preference is to engage in short-term history. This has the complicit accord of the sacrosanct curricula of the university. In recent articles, Jean-Paul Sartre43 reinforces this point of view when, in his protest against what is both too simple and too ponderous in Marxism, he makes an argument in favor of biographical detail and the rich reality of the episodic. One hasn't said everything once one has "situated" Flaubert as a bourgeois, or Tintoretto as a petty bourgeois. I completely agree. But each time, the study of the concrete case- Flaubert, Valéry, or the foreign policy of the Gironde- leads Sartre back to the deep structural context. His analysis moves from the surface to the depths of history and cor- responds to my own preoccupations. It would do so even more if the hourglass were overturned in two senses- from the event to the structure, then from structures and models to the event.

Marxism is a whole population of models. Sartre protests against the rigidity, the schematic arguments, the inadequacy of the model in the name of the particular and the individual. I would join his protest (with a few nuances)- not however against the model, but against the use one has made of it, the use one believes one has been authorized to make of it. The genius of Marx, the secret of his lasting power, is that he was the first to invent real social mod-

43 "Fragment d'un livre à paraître sur Tintoret," Les Temps Modernes, Nov. 1957, and the previously cited article.



202 Fernand Braudel

els, based on the historical longue durée. These models have been frozen in their simple form, by treating them as immutable laws, as a priori automatic explanations, universally applicable to all situations and all societies. Whereas if one allowed them to enter the changing rivers of time, their framework would be seen to be obvious, for it is a solid, well-knit model. It would be constantly applicable, but in nuanced forms, successively blurred or rekindled by the presence of other structures, also subject to rules, different ones, and hence to other models. How one has shackled the cre- ative power of the most powerful social analysis of the last century. It will only find its force and its youth once again by turning to the longue durée. Might I add that present-day Marxism seems to me to be the very portrait of the dangers in any social science that is too enamored of the pure model, of the model for the sake of the model.

In conclusion, what I would like to underline as well is that the longue durée is only one of the possibilities of common language with the social sciences. I have pointed out the pluses and minuses of the attempts of the new social mathematics. There are still others. The new mathematics are very seductive, but the old kind, whose success is so obvious in economics- the most advanced of the human sciences- does not deserve the cynical remarks sometimes made. Huge measurements may still be expected in this classical domain, but there are teams of calculators and calculating machines constantly being perfected. I believe in the utility of long statistical sequences, and in the need to push these measurements and the research ever further back in time. Many teams are already doing it for the eighteenth century, but they are also beginning to do it now for the seventeenth and even more the sixteenth centuries. Statistical measurements of unexpected historical length are now opening for us the depths of the Chinese past.44 No doubt statistics simplify things in order to understand them better. But all science proceeds from the complex to the simple.

However, let us not forget one last language, one last family of models, so to speak- the necessary reduction of all social reality to the space it occupies. We are speaking of geography and ecology, without tarrying on these differences in vocabulary. Geogra-

44 Otto Berkelbach, Van der Sprenkel, "Population Statistics of Ming China," B.S.O.A.S., 1951; Marianne Zinger, "Zur Finanz- und Agrargeschichte der Ming Dynas- tie, 1368-1643," Sinica, 1932.




phy too often thinks of itself as a world apart, and that is a pity. It should listen to Vidal de la Blache, who did his analyses not in terms of time and space, but rather in terms of space and social reality. That makes geography relevant to all of the social sciences. As for ecology, it seems to be a word that permits the sociologist to talk of geography without admitting it, and thus to indicate the issues that space poses for, or even more reveals by, attentive observation. Spatial models are maps wherein social reality is projected and partially explained, models valid for all the temporalities (but especially that of the longue durée) and for all social categories. But social science ignores them to an astonishing degree. I have often thought that one of the superiorities of French social sciences was the geographical school of Vidal de la Blache, whose spirit and lessons we deeply regret are today betrayed. All the social sciences should open themselves to that "ever greater geographical concept of humankind" that Vidal de la Blache called for already in 1903.45

In practice- for this article has a practical objective- I would hope that the social sciences would for the time being stop argu- ing so much about their reciprocal borders- what is or is not social science, what is or is not a structure. Let us rather try to find the common lines of our research, if such there be, which might orient a collective research program around themes that might permit us to reach an initial convergence. I personally think these common lines are mathematization, spatial specification, and longue durée. But I would be curious to hear what other specialists might pro- pose. For this article has been placed in Annales E.S.C., quite de- liberately, under the category of "Debates and Combats." It seeks to lay on the table, not resolve, some problems in which each of us unhappily, in terms of his special field, is exposed to obvious risks. These pages are a call for discussion.

45 Revue de synthèse historique, 1903, p. 239.



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