Le portrait de l'homme -- Le Cabinet inestimable de la femme.

Résumé Ces pages dactylographiés ont été conçues par l’historien comme l’introduction d’un livre à écrire. Souvent ainsi, il traçait une ébauche qui tenait lieu ensuite d’introduction. Ici, il indique l’état d’une vaste enquête historiographique tout en récusant à la fois le tropisme historiographique et l’histoire des idées. Son attention au caractère concret des tâches des historiens, en leur temps, ouvre ici une perspective proprement épistémologique. Au passage il se démarque de la notion d’« outillage mental » tel qu’il l’avait employée (...) ailleurs dans les mêmes années. (shrink)

A história do livro é uma invenção alemã nascida das celebrações de Gutenberg, festejadas anualmente naquele país. No último terço do século XIX, em França, Durkheim desenvolveu uma escola sociológica influente que pretendeu anexar a história. Contra o que se opôs um dos seus companheiros da Escola superior normal, Henri Berr. Desde logo acompanhado pelo jovem Lucien Febvre, criou a Revue de synthèse que abriu caminho aos Annales e fundou a colecção da Evolution de L'Humanité, cujos cem volumes deveriam (...) estudar os grandes momentos da história humana. De entre os volumes previstos, figurava um dedicado à Apparition du Livre que demorou a surgir. Paralelamente Berr e Febvre organizaram um trabalho interdisciplinar fecundo, o primeiro com o Centre de Synthése, o segundo com a publicação de uma Encyclo­pédie française, o que renovou a escola histórica francesa. A Apparition du Livre, publicada em 1959, inscreve-se neste contexto, mas ficou de certa forma incompleta na medida em que se deveria ter inscrito, mais claramente, no quadro de uma história geral das comunicações que se começa hoje a desenvolver. (shrink)

Résumé Lucien Febvre proposait d’étudier comment se formait la raison des gens du XVIe siècle, notamment en langue, logique et mathématiques. Il se trouve que c’est autour de ces trois éléments que Jacques Peletier du Mans écrivit son L’algèbre en 1554 et René Descartes ses Regulae. J’avais montré ailleurs, par une étude lexicale, comment la notion de problème est cruciale dans les Regulae. Je mets ici en évidence les nombreuses correspondances entre les textes algébriques du XVIe siècle et les (...) propos de Descartes concernant la formulation de problèmes, où ils sont transformés en équations. Je montre aussi que, quand Peletier écrit « L’algèbre apprend à discourir », il explicite une posture épistémologique interne à l’algèbre abaciste qui prit consistance en Occident avec la réforme de la dialectique. L’algèbre en particulier et les mathématiques en général ont ainsi peu à peu pris la place de la dialectique comme un art de penser. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Myth of Renaissance Atheism and the French Tradition of Free Thought PAUL OSKAR KRISTELLER WITHIN THE VAST AND COMPLEX area of Renaissance philosophy, the thought of Pietro Pomponazzi and of the entire Italian school of Aristotelianism of which he is the best known representative has not yet been studied in all its aspects? Apart from a number of recent studies, mostly Italian or American, there is an important (...) body of French studies on the subject that are distinguished by their ample documentation and by a general and consistent tendency of interpretation and that have exercised a predominant influence in this field of research. The fountainhead of this French scholarship on Renaissance Aristotelianism is E. Renan's book on Averroes and Averroism, a remarkable achievement for its time, and a classical study still worth reading after more than a hundred years have passed since it was first published. 2 It is generally recognized that Renan's conclusions about Averroes himself and about the Latin Averroism of the thirteenth century have been superseded by the later studies of P. Mandonnet and others? It is less well known that, for the This paper was read many years ago at the New England Conference on the Renaissance at Brown University, and at the Universit~ de Fribourg. It was published as "El Mito del Ateismo Renacentista y la Tradici6n Francesa del Librepensamiento" in Notas y Estudios de Filoso]la, ed. Prof. Juan Adolfo Vazquez, IV, 13 (Tucums Argentina, 1953), pp. 1-14. The present version has been only slightly revised, and I hope to return to the subject on a later occasion. Among recent studies, I should like to mention G. Spini, Ricerca dei l.,ibertini (Rome, 1950) and D. C. Allen Doubt's Boundless Sea (Baltimore, 1964), who follow on the whole the view criticized in this paper, and L. Febvre, Le problhme del lincroyance au XVI ~ si~cle (Paris, 1947) and R. H. Popkin, "Skepticism and the Counter-Reformation in France," Archiv ]iir Re]ormationsgeschichte LI (1960), 58-88, who seem to concur with my view. See also a paper by Popkin~"Skepticism, Theology and the Scientific Method in the 17th century," in Problem8 in the Phdosophy o] Science, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1968). 1See now B. Nardi, Saggi sull'Aristotelismo Padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI (Florence, 1958) and Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi (Florence, 1965); J. H. Randall, The School o] Padua and the Emergence o] Modern Science (Padua, 1961); P. Pomponazzi, De ]ato, de libero arbitrio et de praedestinatione, ed. R. Lemay (Lugano, 1957); Tractatus de immortalitate animae, ed. G. Morra (Bologna, 1954); Corsi inediLi dell'insegnamento padovano I, Super libello de substantia orbis et quaestiones quattuor, ed. A. Poppi (Padua, 1966); P. O. Kristeller, "A New Manuscript Source for Pomponazzi's Theory of the Soul from his Paduan Period," Revue Internationale de Philosophie, V: 2 (16, 1951), 144-157,and "Two Unpublished Questions on the Soul by Pietro Pomponazzi," Medievalia et Humanistica, IX (1955), 76-101,and X (1956), 151. See also: G. Di Napoli, L'immortalit~ dell'anima nel Rinascimento (Turin, 1963); E. GiN ~L,, 3 son, Autour de Pomponazzi, Archives d histoire doctrinale et litt~raire du Moyen Age, c,,,, LXIII (1961, pub. 1962), 163-279and Laffaire de limmortalit~ de ls ~ Venise au debut 9,, du XVI si~cle, in Umanesimo europeo e umanesimo veneziano, ed. V. Branca (Florence, 1963), 31-61. Relevant are also the unpublished Columbia dissertations by William F. Edwards (on Zabarella), Martin Pine (on Pomponazzi and his critics) and Edward Mahoney (on Agostino Nifo). Averro$s et l Averro~me (Paris, 1852). 8Siger de Brabant et l'averroisme latin au XIII ~ si$cle (2nd ed.; Paris, 1908-11); F. Van [233] 234 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY history of Italian Aristotelianism after the thirteenth century, this book by Renan has never been completely superseded, but still constitutes the general basis for a large part of the later literature on the subject. Recent studies have added numerous details, but have failed to correct numerous errors and misconceptions. The main thesis of Renan's book on which we shall focus our attention in this paper is the following: Paduan Averroism... (shrink)

ArgumentThe interwar period in France is characterized by intense activity to disseminate science in society through various media: magazines, conferences, book series, encyclopedias, radio, exhibitions, and museums. In this context, the scientific community developed significant attempts to disseminate science in close alliance with the State. This paper presents three ambitious projects conducted in the 1930s which targeted different audiences and engaged the social sciences along with the natural sciences. The first project was a multimedia enterprise aimed at bridging what would (...) later be named “the two cultures” – natural sciences and humanities – rather than at popularizing scientific results in the society at large. The second project, an encyclopedia namedEncyclopédie françaiseedited by the French historian Lucien Febvre, was meant to shape a cultural view of science for the general public. The third project and the most successful enterprise was thePalais de la découvertedesigned by the physicist Jean Perrin and explicitly aimed at attracting the young public. This paper explores the paradoxes that resulted from these large enterprises. Despite their social ideals, the scientists-popularizers favored an elitist concept of popular science essentially aimed at integrating science into high culture. While they strove to overcome the increased specialization of sciences, their efforts nevertheless accelerated the professionalization of scientific research and the isolation of science in an ivory tower. In their attempts to get closer to the public, they eventually contributed to spreading the cliché of the increasing gap between the scientists and the public. (shrink)

Ce livre est l’un des premiers en français à avoir été consacré aux émotions en histoire contemporaine en tentant de définir un « régime émotionnel » spécifique à la période et à une grande partie de l’élite d’un État (Reddy, p. 43). Les études s’appuient sur une généalogie qui remonte, sous le vocable des « sensibilités », en 1941 pour Lucien Febvre, puis à Alain Corbin. Nous nous intéresserons particulièrement dans ce livre collectif aux contributions qui concernent « le (...) genre des émotions... (shrink)

The "history of mentalities" considers the attitudes of ordinary people to everyday life. The approach is closely identified with the work of the Annales school. However, whereas the Annales historians refer to the material factors which condition human life, historians investigating mentalities examine psychological underpinnings. Historians who first developed guidelines for the history of mentalities were Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who were both concerned with collective systems of belief. Later, Philippe Ariès and Norbert Elias identified and developed theories (...) on early childhood. Finally, Michel Foucault considered the psychology of social deviants and nonconformists. This mode of interpretation provides a means of examining those aspects of life which the linear approach cannot address, such as the pressure of conformity, the sense of accelerating time, and the preoccupation with self. (shrink)

A «proto-história» do livro e a história da imprensa foram sobretudo assuntos dos bibliófi­los, dos bibliográficos e dos historiadores da literatura, ou seja, de especialistas ambicionando defender uma identidade, ou de distinguir, na massa da produção impressa ao longo dos sécu­los, o raro, o monumental, o anedótico, o literário... A partir de meados do século XX c com Apparition du Livre (1a Ed. 1958) de Lucien Febvre et Henri-Jean Martin, a história do livro, usufruindo dos desenvolvimentos da sociologia histórica (...) e de conceitos como o de «história das mentalidades», constituiu-se como disciplina pioneira. Com trabalhos como Histoire de l'édition française (1982-1986), Histoire des bibliothèques françaises (1988-1992), Diction­naire encyclopédique du livre (2002 -...) e outros projectos similares quer na Europa, quer além dela, o livro foi reposicionado, quer quanto à sua produção, quer quanto às práticas associadas, num vasto contexto económico, social, político e cultural. Ao mesmo tempo, as interrogações levantadas pela história do livro foram ao encontro da história da comunicação social e dos media, que hoje se tornaram dominantes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seneca, Ethics, and the Body: The Treatment of Cruelty in Medieval ThoughtDaniel BarazIn an impassioned article written in 1941 Lucien Febvre urges the writing of a history of human sensibility and suggests in particular writing a history of cruelty. 1 The general direction indicated by Febvre has been followed, but as far as cruelty is concerned his plea is still as relevant today as it was five (...) decades ago. And since cruelty is one of the attributes commonly associated with the Middle Ages, 2 it is particularly interesting to examine what and how medieval thinkers wrote on the subject.An examination of sources dealing with cruelty from late antiquity to the early modern period yields surprising results. Whereas the writings of the thinkers of late classical antiquity and of the early modern period do include discussions of the issue, the writings of medieval thinkers before the thirteenth century contain only brief remarks. The first and only exception until the end of the Middle Ages is a short question on cruelty in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Other types of medieval sources, such as legal texts, chronicles, and literary texts, reveal the same scarcity of references to the subject during most of the Middle Ages. Thus this period seems to represent a gap between antiquity and the early modern period, with a reawakening of interest in the issue of cruelty towards the end of the Middle Ages.The relative silence of medieval sources calls for identifying the factors which affected the treatment of cruelty by medieval thinkers. What are the [End Page 195] reasons for the neglect of the subject as well as for the late revival of interest in it? And when the issue is discussed, what factors shape the discussion? Two issues seem crucial to me in answering these questions: the conception of the relation between body and soul and the relative weight given to actions vs. intentions in the dominant ethical framework. A third issue, of equal importance, provides a focus for the investigation of the treatment of cruelty in the Middle Ages and the factors affecting it; and this is the reception of Seneca. As interest in Seneca’s writings grew, so did the preoccupation with cruelty. There is a close thematic interaction between these two processes, beyond the chrono-logical coincidence.Most obviously, discussions of cruelty as a subject per se referred explicitly to Seneca’s writings on the subject. Less directly, when cruelty was treated only in passing in the context of the Christian tradition, the manner in which the subject was addressed reflected a lack of Senecan influence, so that Seneca’s influence was felt through its absence. Nevertheless, the Christian tradition continued to influence references to cruelty even after the revival of Senecan influence during the high Middle Ages and to a certain degree even served as a filter, determining which aspects of Seneca’s writings on cruelty were used.Thomas Aquinas and SenecaThe first medieval discussion of cruelty as a subject per se is the question De crudelitate (2-2-159) in the section on temperance in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Aquinas bases his discussion almost exclusively on classical sources, primarily Seneca’s De clementia. 3 Seneca referred to cruelty in detail both in this work and in another moral essay, De ira. His De clementia was written at the beginning of Nero’s reign, and it is addressed to the young emperor, his former pupil. Its stated aim is to praise Nero for possessing the quality of clementia, and to show how important this quality is for rulers. 4 The concept of clementia describes a quality of political men, the term having acquired political significance since the times of Caesar and Augustus. 5De clementia was written before most of the actions which earned Nero his reputation were perpetrated; the only concrete action which may have inspired Seneca to write it was the murder of Britannicus, of which Nero was suspected. Regardless, the emperors preceding Nero were certainly not renowned for their [End Page 196] clemency. Suetonius tells that one of Caligula’s amusements was to attend sessions of torture and execution; that he insisted on slow... (shrink)

A remarkable amount of the most innovative, significant, and lasting historical writing of the twentieth century has been produced in France, much of it the work of a group of historians associated with the journal Annales. Founded in 1929, Annales promoted a new kind of history based on three central aims: to substitute a problem-orientated analytical history for a traditional narrative of events; to embrace the history of the whole range of human activities rather than concentrate on political history; and, (...) in order to achieve the first two aims, to collaborate fully with other disciplines - notably geography, sociology, psychology, economics, linguistics, and anthropology. The critical history describes, analyzes, and evaluates the achievements of the Annales school, combining chronological and thematic approaches. The author distinguishes three generations in the history of the Annales movement. In the first phase, from the 1920's to 1945, the movement was small, radical, and subverse, fighting a guerrilla action against traditional political history and the history of events. Its leaders, and the founders of Annales, were Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. After the Second World War, the movement's rebels took over the historical establishment. During this second phase, which lasted until about 1968, the movement was most nearly a school, with distinctive concepts and methods, and was presided over by the towering figure of Fernand Braudel. The third phase of the movement, which continues today, is marked by fragmentation. Its influence in France had become so great that it lost much of its distinctiveness, and no strong figures appeared to give the movement the inspiration and direction that Febvre, Bloch, and Braudel had provided. Some members of the group even returned to political history and to the narrative of events. The cycle was complete - the rebels became the establishment and were in turn rebelled against. (shrink)

Po Kartezjuszu wątpienie w istnienie Boga staje się zwolna elementem systematycznego myślenia. Wiek XVII to wyjście z ostatniego po średniowieczu stulecia, „które chce wierzyć” (Lucien Febvre), początek rewolucji naukowej i wyzwolenia od chrześcijańskich dogmatów. Taka wizja zdaje się przekonująca, potwierdzają ją pełne religijnych odniesień przednowoczesne teksty – czy jednak trzymanie się ich litery i rozwijanie na ich podstawie historii mentalności nie jest pochopne? Czy myślenie bez odwołania do Boga to specyficzne osiągnięcie nowoczesności? Polskie ujęcie filozofii wczesnonowożytnej spod znaku Leszka (...) Kołakowskiego, Stefana Swieżawskiego czy Krzysztofa Pomiana nie pozostawia wątpliwości: w epoce przednowoczesnej nie dało się myśleć o świecie, podmiocie czy wspólnocie bez Boga. Tymczasem należy wskazać na panujące przed XVII wiekiem stosunki władzy, uwarunkowania materialne (zwłaszcza wynalazek druku), sytuację wiedzy – a dalej na możliwe „sztuki działania” wbrew narzucanym schematom, w tym na zalążki pisemnego wyrażania nonkonformistycznych, groźnych dla samego autora refleksji. Każdą bowiem, nawet najszczelniej zamkniętą strukturę przebijają jej własne „linie ujścia”, każda ulega ciągłej autodekonstrukcji. Dzieje się to za pośrednictwem jednostek – dla omawianego okresu warto przyjrzeć się Mikołajowi z Kuzy, Pietro Pomponazziemu, Giordanowi Bruno i Michelowi de Montaigne. Nie dostrzegając w przednowoczesności takich jednostkowych możliwości myślenia bez Boga, a więc totalizując ją i ujednoznaczniając, reakcyjnie domagamy się jednolitości dla dzisiejszego świata. A przecież współczesność, jak i to, co ma dopiero nadejść, to zawsze różnorodność i wielość. Historia myślenia może i musi pomóc nam to rozumieć, byśmy nie popadali w – jakże nowoczesny – autorytaryzm. (shrink)

This article deals with the genesis of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, composed by Aby Warburg between 1927 and 1929 as a response to the Great War. His reaction to the war was both pathetic (even pathological) and epistemic (which is to say, methodological). If the history of culture amounted to a great psychomachia of the astra (concepts) and the monstra (chaos), as Warburg said, the war was for him a direct test of his theory (or Kulturwissenschaft). It should be no surprise, (...) then, that between 1914 and 1918 he should assemble a large iconographic collection of materials from and about the war. This essay compares that collection and its theoretical foundations with similar projects of Warburg's contemporaries in France and Germany (notably those of the historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch). (shrink)

Nourri des travaux de Bachelard, Lévi-Strauss, Dumézil, Eliade, salué à sa sortie par le grand historien des Annales Lucien Febvre, Mythe et métaphysique explore un continent resté longtemps inexploré de la pensée philosophique : celui de la place du mythe dans la métaphysique. Loin d'être un savoir inférieur, le mythe possède une rationalité qui en fait un maillon essentiel dans l'histoire humaine. L'erreur de la philosophie classique était de faire de la conscience une entité isolée du monde. Or le (...) domaine mythique embrasse dans une même perception l'ordre des choses et l'activité humaine. Un grand texte philosophique en forme de plaidoyer pour faire du mythe une sagesse à la mesure de l'homme. (shrink)

“History is the most dangerous compound yet contrived by the chemistry of intellect”: it was in response to these words by Paul Valéry that Marc Bloch, professor of economic history at the Sorbonne, after the defeat of 1940, began writing a book on “how and why history is studied.” He gave it the provisional title Apologie pour l'Histoire ou Métier d'historien translated into English as The Historian's Craft. In the spring of 1944, he was killed by a German firing squad (...) for his clandestine activity in the Resistance. The manuscript of his book remained incomplete. Having entered the world at the same time as the research organization of Annales in 1949, Bloch's book on history, posthumously published by Lucien Febvre, was read and used as a product of that organization, which did not yet exist, even as a project, at the time the book was written. The Historian's Craft was read mostly by historians, history professors, and history students. Despite its readership, Bloch had written it for a different public: persons of culture and action, that same audience that Annales had tried in vain to conquer in the thirties—Paul Valéry's public. The study of the genesis of the interrupted manuscript reveals the richness of the content of Bloch's book, so far underrated. This example of the two pages missing from the 1949 edition, can today be the start of a deeper meditation on history, historians, and philology (and on the documents that refer to them). (shrink)

ABSTRACT The gospel of Matthew is one of the most beloved and studied gospels in Christianity, having a rich history of reception. The purpose of this paper is to article study its reading in Brazil from selected intertitles in two biblical versions. The research aims to identify how the gospel has been received by Brazilian editors and readers and how editorial intertitles can provide evidence of such reception. In order to achieve such objective, the history of reading and the history (...) of the book are used as references, based on theories by Roger Chartier (2001, 2002, 2022), Robert Darnton (2010), Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (2017), Gerard Genette (1997) and D.F. McKenzie (2018). (shrink)

Le concept de civilisation possède deux significations distinctes. Il désigne un ensemble de groupes culturels ayant entre eux un air de famille. C'est l'un des sens que Lucien Febvre reconnaît à la notion : Civilisation signifie simplement pour nous l’ensemble des caractères que présente aux regards d’un observateur la vie collective d’un groupement humain : vie ma­té­rielle ; vie intellectuelle, vie morale, vie politique et - par quoi remplacer cette ex­pression vicieuse? – vie sociale. C...

Le concept de civilisation possède deux significations distinctes. Il désigne un ensemble de groupes culturels ayant entre eux un air de famille. C'est l'un des sens que Lucien Febvre reconnaît à la notion : Civilisation signifie simplement pour nous l’ensemble des caractères que présente aux regards d’un observateur la vie collective d’un groupement humain : vie ma­té­rielle ; vie intellectuelle, vie morale, vie politique et - par quoi remplacer cette ex­pression vicieuse? – vie sociale. C...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Michelet and Social Romanticism: Religion, Revolution, NatureArthur MitzmanIn 1851, shortly before his second and definitive suspension from his teaching at the Collège de France, Jules Michelet told a young friend of his dissatisfaction with the meager political impact of the Republican professors of the time: “Our present propaganda... has resembled strongly that which might be made by a man enclosed in a crystal glass. He finds his voice to (...) be resounding and very strong: that’s because it breaks against the inner surface. But those who are outside, the men of the people, hear nothing.” 1Michelet had become painfully aware of how little his voice had been heard outside the crystal in June 1848, when barricade-builders outside his house on the Rue des Postes responded to his son-in-law’s appeal not to expose the dwelling of the great historian to artillery fire by asking, “Who is Michelet?” 2 This occurred two years after the publication of Le Peuple and only months after the appearance of his celebration of the commoners’ festivals of federation in 1790, both texts being landmarks in the social romantic anticipation of 1848. In fact it was the 1848 Revolution itself that had diminished the resonance of Michelet’s ideas, by polarizing the country in a way that made it impervious to his message of social harmony.Before 1848, Michelet was a central figure in the intellectual disaffection that delegitimized the July Monarchy. His work in the 1840s had shifted from the historical erudition of his many-volumed Histoire de France to contemporary polemics against the clergy and the government: attacks on the Jesuits and the Church 3 swiftly broadened to a conflict with the intellectual and political establishment of the period. In Le Peuple (1846), Michelet combined an analysis of the profound social divisions within the French nation with a remarkable sketch of the relation between civilization and nature, a Rousseauian appeal to the natural qualities of the common people and an [End Page 659] invocation of the genius of the future, who would be gifted with “the two sexes of the spirit.”Le Peuple was the first of a series of works on nature, women, and the common people, those three “others” of nineteenth-century high culture, that have throughout this century fascinated cultural historians. In the historiographical tradition, its author has been celebrated by those who viewed him as their predecessor in the broadening of history-writing to include culture and mentalities, such as Lucien Febvre and Jacques Le Goff, and denigrated by those, like Pieter Geyl, who have been outraged by his nationalistic pathos and his blatant subjectivity. 4 I shall suggest in this essay that all of these aspects of Michelet’s work are rooted in his significance in the 1840s as a social romantic, the contemporary and friend of George Sand, Lamennais, Pierre Leroux, and others.For apart from what Michelet has come to mean, as totem or as scarecrow, to the scholarship of the twentieth century, he was enmeshed in the ideological conflicts of his own time. Without an understanding of those conflicts, an important perspective on his place in the history of ideas will be missing, a perspective which, moreover, may shed some light on the broader historical significance of the social romanticism he represented. For example, the “ideological” Michelet was best known in his own time as an anti-clerical. 5 Indeed, his version of the Romantic évangile éternel, which he developed in the 1840s, takes a privileged place among the efforts of intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century to work out new religious conceptions to replace a moribund Catholicism. 6 Yet the principal framework of his polemical activity was not the Church but the liberal academic establishment, with which he was at war from his 1843 lectures on the Jesuits to his dismissal from his official functions at the beginning of the Second Empire.Michelet and the July Monarchy: From Liberalism to Social RomanticismSeen from the standpoint of the early years of his career, roughly 1825 to 1835, Michelet would seem an improbable candidate for any kind of romanticism. Given his impoverished, artisan background as well... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 501 the practical problems of daily life by providing an explanation for misfortune and a source of guidance in times of uncertainty. There were also attempts to use it for divination and supernatural healing" (p. 151). Along these same lines, one should also cite a number of articles by Natalie Zemon Davis and, above all, the work of Robert Mandl 'ou. 17 To conclude these remarks, (...) I must stress once again that Cassirer's program, in its pure form, is not only impossible for any but the mystic to follow; it is fundamentally anti~ historical. Peter Gay himself, a great admirer of Cassker, and a historian who has a penchant for such neo--idealist hocus-pocus, has tended to follow Cassirer's dictum in his interpretation of the Enlightenment as a whole (to his grid, one is tempted to add).TM Earlier, in Voltaire's Politics (1959), Gay had made a most convincing case for a radically different approach, which he calls "the social history of ideas." Instead of "searching for a dynamic center of thought," "a single point of view," of which each pamphlet, poem or tale was but another facet, Gay presented Voltaire's works as responses to specific situatiom--a series of positions which, if not discrete, were at least sufficientlydiverse as to be incomprehensible without intimate knowledge of the peculiar circumstances of each. I am not suggestinghere that the historian of philosophy abandon his traditional m6tier in a mad search for more fashionable methods. There will always be a need for insightful, penetrating analyses of individual thinkers, and probing essays into internal consistencies or contradictions. Febvre readily conceded that the historian concerned only with "placing" Descartes in his century has not thereby come to grips with Cartesianism. But abstract analysis cannot safelybe divorced from its natural collateral disciplines. It is time to stop studying philosophical ideas as if they were statements propounded in a void. If we neglect the rhetorical situation of philosophy, if we forget the particular audience to which an idea was addressed, we run the risk of forgetting what it is we mean by an idea in the first place. ALeaev SOMA~ Par/~ COMPLEMENTARY METHODOLOGIES IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS Alfred Soman doses his article with the modest statement, "I am not suggesting here that the historian of philosophy abandon his traditional metier in a mad search for more fashionable methods. There will always be a need for insightful, penetrating analyses of 1T N. Z. Davis, "The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France.,"Past and Present, No. 50 (February, 1971), 41-75; "The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France," ibid., No. 59 (May, 1973), 51-91. Mandrou's recent Des humaniatea au.r hommea de science: XVI 9 et XVIIe si~cles (1973) is by far the most coherent and systematic synthesisof the new historiography of ideas for this period. Specialistswill of course findroom to quarrel over some of the details;but as an initial outline and as a program for future research, the virtues of Mandrou's book are, I think, indisputable. is E.g., P. Gay, The Enlightenment, an Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1966-1969). Gay's s~lmmaryremarks on Charron (I, 303) are so typical of his verbal sleights of hand that I cannot resist the following quotation: "While Charron was not a philosophe before his time---he was a priest and a theologian---the values he celebrates, in open dcfcren~ to his Romans, are the v~u of tl~ Eallghtc~m~nt." 502 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY individual thinkers, and probing essays into internal consistencies or contradictions.''t Yet what else might his intent be when he tacks on to a critique of an article explicitly designed as a textual analysis of De la Sagesse a glowing!audation of the new trends in the social history of ideas. The second half of his article is in fact an attack on many of the textual studies that fill this journal. The new trends in historiography that have so greatly affected eighteenth-century studies do indeed look most promising,2 hut in our concern for the social milieu in which... (shrink)

Procurou-se, e esse foi o objetivo essencial, que este volume fosse marcado pelo discurso questionador e crítico de historiadores, de filósofos, de especialistas da ciência política, das ideias, do direito, da economia, da educação, da comunicação, da informação, das ciências, das artes. Surgiram assim interpretações, quadros, configurações e reconfigurações, ângulos de análise diversificados que fomentarão, por certo, uma reflexão viva dos leitores. É fundamental — continua a sê-lo — repensar e questionar campos temáticos à luz das análises teóricas e concetuais, (...) mas também dos processos, das dinâmicas, das relações, das potencialidades explicativas da nossa contemporaneidade. É assim que se entende este livro, com muitas contribuições, que vêm propiciar e enriquecer a reflexão sobre Outros Combates pela História. Combates pela História é, como se sabe, o título de um livro famoso de Lucien Febvre dos anos cinquenta. Através de uma recomposição, de novo se deu importância a todas as modalidades da História, mantendo, todavia, o sentido do rigor que era algo perseguido nos «combates pela História». Quer-se, pois, analisar o sentido da História, nas suas várias áreas. Contudo, ao propor-se este tema, não se desejou que os autores apresentassem tanto as suas investigações nas suas áreas próprias — embora elas estivessem subentendidas e devessem ser expressas —, mas que refletissem sobre o seu sentido no âmbito da História entendida como Ciência Social e Humana. Para tal, desejou-se que discutissem o objeto e o método da História das diversas áreas, equacionando os seus vários problemas. Foi isso que também sucedeu — estamos disso convencidos. Mas será o leitor, melhor do que ninguém, a ajuizá-lo. (shrink)

This article is concerned with history that is fuzzy in the sense of impressionistic rather than systematic, using “soft” rather than “hard” data and concerned more with “lumping” than with “splitting.” It argues that there have been at least four phases in the two centuries of conflict between precise and fuzzy historians. In the first phase, in the nineteenth century, precise history, firmly based on documents, was defined, by Leopold von Ranke and the Rankeans, against an older fuzzy or “conjectural” (...) history. In a second phase, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new fuzzy history was defined against “positivist” history, by Karl Lamprecht in Germany, Lucien Febvre in France, and George Trevelyan in England, among others. In a third phase, in the middle of the twentieth century, practitioners of quantitative history (sometimes known as the New Economic History or more generally as “cliometrics”) condemned all nonquantitative historians as fuzzy. In a fourth phase, from the 1970s onward, a still newer fuzzy history, comprising historical anthropology, microhistory, and the New Cultural History, was defined against quantitative history by scholars such as Georges Duby in France, Carlo Ginzburg in Italy, and Robert Darnton in the United States. In short, there has been a gradual move from more or less unself-conscious imprecision to self-conscious antiprecision. (shrink)

We are frequently asking ourselves today about the role of the historian in a rapidly changing world. Some expect the past provide them with an explanation or a justification of the present. Others search in history for the basic roots of identity or even for keys to the future. More than ever we are being faced with what Lucien Febvre perceived to be the social function of the historian: “to organize the past as a function of the present.” From (...) this arises a responsibility toward society, as the knowledge that is being produced gains its authenticity through being stamped as officially “scientific.” Faced with the expectations of society and the attention of the public, the historian has been called upon to disentangle events and to furnish a guiding thread, frequently by blending his role as a critic with a civic and an ethical one. Even when we are not dealing with the attempt to set up the historian, through an appeal to his great expertise, as the licensed sage in town, it must be stressed that assuming the rostrum in response to the questions of the time is-provided that the rules of the discipline are strictly adhered to-perfectly legitimate in that it provides history with signifiant depth. (shrink)