1. The Making of Modernity V:
Lecture 7
The Making of Modernity V:
The French Annales School and 'Total History' (1920s-1970s) (and a bit of Weber)

2. Max Weber ( )
One of the founders of sociology – the scientific study of society
But he had a different idea how ‘sociology’ should be done than his more positivistic colleagues in France
‘Sociology’ was defined by Weber as:
the understanding of the togetherness of people

3. Weber starts off as a political economist’ (a profession that does not exist any longer)
The study of production and trade, and their relations with law, customs, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth. As a discipline its originated in moral philosophy in the 18th century and sought to explore the administration of states' wealth (e.g. Adam Smith) Only in the 20th century the term economy replaces that of political economy.

4. Weber claimed that the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences or humanities do different things and thus require different methods:
Natural sciences ‘explain’ (erklären) the laws of nature
Humanities or Human sciences ‘understand’ (verstehen) human nature

5. Wissenschaft(en) = science(s)
Geisteswissenschaft(en) (human sciences) Naturwissenschaft(en) (natural sciences)
‘understand’ (verstehen) human behavior Explain (erklären) laws of nature
Note: more positivistic inclined sociologist at the time aimed use the methods of the natural sciences also for the study of society.

6. Weber believes that the ideal of ‘scientific objectivity’ is impossible to achieve in regard to the study of human society
Definition of ‘objectivity’ opposed by Weber if it comes to study of society:
‘Objective’ accounts are attempts to capture the nature of the object studied in a way that does not depend on any features of the particular subject who studies it. An objective account is, in this sense, impartial, one, which could ideally be accepted by any subject, because it does not draw on any assumptions, prejudices, or values of particular subjects’.
Stephen Gaukroger, in: N. J. Smelse and P. B. Baltes, P. B. (eds.) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Oxford, 2001), p
Weber’s view:
‘There is no absolutely “objective” scientific analysis of culture… All knowledge of cultural reality… is always knowledge from particular points of view. … an “objective” analysis of cultural events, which proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of science is the reduction of empirical reality to “laws,” is meaningless… [because]… the knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social reality but is rather one of the various aids used by our minds for attaining this end.’
Max Weber, “Objectivity” in Social Science, 1897.

7. Weber’s Verstehenssoziologie (sociology of understanding)
‘…the science which attempts the interpretative understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a casual explanation of its course and effects.’
(Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p.1)
Involves empathetic liaison of the observer with the observed – intuition
Note: relies on the tenets of historicism and idealism BUT uses numbers, and statistics to make it more ‘real’ (sounds contradictory for our understanding)
Weber’s Verstehenssoziologie (sociology of understanding)

8. Central to Verstehensoziologie:
1. Focus on the individual (like Herder, Humboldt or Ranke/ in contrast to more positivistically inclined sociologists who look at collectives)
‘for sociological purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality, which ‘acts’. When reference is made in a sociological context to a state, a nation, a corporation, a family or army corps, or to similar collectives, what it means is … only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social action of individual persons.’
(Weber, Economy and Society, p. 13)
The sociologist, according to Weber, aims to penetrate the subjective understandings of the individual, in order to at the motives for communal social action.

9. 2. The conceptual tool of the ‘Ideal type’
Weber believed that the task of sociologists is to invent conceptual tools to be then used to analyse social reality
‘An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct...’
‘The Ideal typical concept will develop our skill in imputation in research. It is not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description.’
Just as an ideal model is constructed by the natural scientists as an instrument and means for knowing nature, so the social scientist creates ‘Ideal types’ as a tool for systematizing and comprehending individual facts, against which the investigator can measure reality. It is because of its separation from empirical reality and difference from it.
Note: The ‘ideal type of an early modern capitalist in the Protestant Ethics is Franklin

10. Protestant Ethics puts forward a different understanding of human behavior (economic behavior in particular) than available at his time:
A structural Marxism: does not deal with individual motivations at all; human collective behaviour understood as related to the forces and relations of production; religion is part of the superstructure
Positivism: search of physical laws in human behaviour
Rise of psychoanalysis (Freud!’s): human behaviour and character are structured by childhood experiences which persist as determinants of all sorts of behaviour in adult life
Weber sees these as reductionist and not able to explain modern rational capitalism
Problem which Weber addresses in the Protestant Ethics
How does consensus occur in a society across classes?
Why do people things although they are not asked to do them?
Weber’s thesis: He argues that specific religious dogma (back in history) contribute to it the rise of rational capitalism. He aims to show the inherent logic of these doctrines and of the daily life advice based upon then both directly and indirectly encouraged planning and self-denial the pursuit of economic gain

11. The aim of Protestant Ethics in Weber’s words
….whether and at what points certain ‘elective affinities’ are discernible between particular types of religious beliefs and the ethics of work-a-day life.
By virtue of such affinities the religious movements have influenced the development of material culture, and (an analysis of these affinities) will clarify as far as possible the manner and the general direction (of that influence)…We are interested in ascertaining those psychological impulses which originated in religious belief and the practice of religion, gave direction to the individual’s everyday way of life and prompted to adhere to it’.
Aim is the understand ‘rational capitalism’

12. Protestant ethics explains modern capitalism at the core of which stands: rationalization
Rationalization according to Weber:
‘…a set of interrelated social processes
by which the modern world had been
systematically transformed.’
‘The fate of our times is characterised by
rationalisation and intellectualisation and,
above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’
In sum: rationalisation refers to a process in which an increasing number of social actions become based on considerations of economic efficiency or rational calculation rather than on motivations derived from morality, custom or tradition or religion.
Rational capitalism: accumulation of capital for its own sake

13. Weber’s ongoing concern about the power of rational capitalism:
‘How is it at all possible to salvage any remnants of 'individual' freedom of movement in any sense given this all-powerful trend?’

14. ‘How is it at all possible to salvage any remnants of 'individual' freedom of movement in any sense given this all-powerful trend?’

15. ‘How is it at all possible to salvage any remnants of 'individual' freedom of movement in any sense given this all-powerful trend?’

16. Les Annales

17. Oportet haeresse esse -- it is important to be a heretic (motto of Bloch/Febre)
Marc Bloch,
Lucien Febre,

18. Both influenced by the French sociologists David Émile Durkheim, a follower of Comte
Focus on groups and collectives first; less the individual; sociology following natural scientific methods
The Rules of Sociological Method (1895)
Suicide (1897): a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)
David Émile Durkheim, 1858 – 1917)

19. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch, 1924
Marc Bloch and his history
long view
‘problem’ focused
‘history of mentalities’: study of systems of belief; modes of feelings and thoughts
comparative history
Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch, 1924

20. ‘invention’ of regressive method
Influenced by Paul Vidal de la Blache,
Founder of French school of geopolitics
Tableau de la Geographie de la France((1903) which links geography with human history (influnenced by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel who became central to Nazi historiography)

21. 1942/3
1939/40
1940

22. Bloch’s dilemma:
‘In the vast drag of submarine swells, so cosmic as to appear irreversible, of what avail were the struggles of a few shipwrecked sailors? To think otherwise would be to falsify history’.
Belief in ‘scientific’ history (in the natural science sense NOT the German sense); retains belief in some sort of positivism
Historian should understand not judge – but what about the politics of one’s own time, should the historian ignore it)
Marginalisation of political history in favour of long views (how to explain Nazism?)
Denial of individual agency in favour of the mass (due to reliance on Durckheim)
Bloch questions the relevance of
History and his methodology in the face of Nazism

23. François Rabelais (?-1553)
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel
1937

24. 2nd generation of Annales
Dominates the entire field for
Decades until the 1970s
Fernand Braudel,

25. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age
of Philip II ( )
New notion of space: large-scale, ‘global’
Interdisciplinary
Radical new notion of time

26. The Three Durées Time of long duration (l’histoire de la longue durée)
Deep time
Time of conjunctures
the time taken by broader movements of economies, social structures, political institutions and civilisations
Time of events (l’histoire événementielle)
‘their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night
with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails’ .