Beginning with Engels, Marxist historiography viewed the absolute monarchy in France as mediating between the nobility and the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie. More recent Marxist accounts stress that the absolute monarchy reflected the interests of the nobility. Revisionist Marxist historians have taken this perspective to an extreme arguing that, at the height of the Bourbon monarchy in the seventeenth century, a capitalist bourgeoisie did not exist. This paper argues that, in taking such a view, these historians have ignored the ongoing dialectical (...) opposition between the forces of rent and profit in the early-modern period. As a result, they have severed the connection between the ancien régime and the Revolution of 1789. Despite being thrown on the defensive by the advance of rent and the crystallisation of the absolutist state, a capitalist bourgeoisie that emerged in sixteenth-century France survived and persevered during the seventeenth century. It resumed the initiative in the succeeding period of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Medical history has so far paid hardly any attention to the longue durée, a history in which, according to Braudel, 'all change is slow'. It is therefore one of the challenges of the emerging field of the social history of medicine to work audaciously across time as well as across space. An interesting subject, for example, is the history of contraception. Throughout history, there has been almost nothing people have worried about more than having sex without fear of (...) consequence. At first sight, the story of contraception seems to be one of progress, from the Ancient Egyptian crocodile-dung pessary to the modern-day condom and contraceptive pill. A closer look, however, shows a pattern of remarkable continuities in the reproductive behaviour of men and women over the last two thousand years. In this paper, I shall attempt to show why traditional male-dominated contraceptive methods still linger on despite the sexual revolution brought about by the invention of the 'pill' in the late 1950s. (shrink)

Spengler’s The Decline of the West was a major publishing success in Weimar Germany. The study presents the end of Western civilization as an inevitable process of birth, maturity and death. Civilization is conceived as an inflexible ‘morphology’. Spengler’s thinking was influenced by a profound distaste with the optimism of the Belle Epoque, which he found to be complacent. The argument had a good deal of attraction to readers, especially German readers, who were suffering under the ‘Carthaginian Peace’ of the (...) Treaty of Versailles of 1919. Adorno and others were critical of Spengler’s thesis. The article examines Spengler’s thesis and its implications for the West today. (shrink)

Joseph Nechvatal 'La Beaute tragique: Olkowski, Deleuze, and the 'Ruin of Representation'' _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special Issue vol. 5 no. 36, November 2001.

Les femmes mariées restent gouvernées par les hommes qui en attendent un travail domestique ménager, culturel, social, et sexuel. La famille reste oppressive pour les femmes. Patriarcat et capitalisme sont deux systèmes d’oppression distincts. Partout, et pas seulement dans le capitalisme, le travail ménager est fait par les femmes gratuitement et obligatoirement, parfois par des domestiques qu’il faut tout de même contrôler. La hiérarchie entre les hommes et les femmes reste admise, car elle est héritée du passé. Les femmes continuent (...) de s’autosacrifier quand il faut partager au sein de la famille. (shrink)

The hematologist-historian author became interested in the nature 'medical miracles', following a request to write a report on a set of bone marrows that was sent to the Vatican as a possible miracle cure in a cause for canonization. She questioned the prevalence of medical miracles, their structure, and relationship to other 'official' miracles that are recognized by the Church. Evidence was drawn from a variety of sources: oral testimony of pilgrims at feast day celebrations, ex voto paintings, and 160 (...) miracle files in 67 canonization records of the Vatican Archives. Some changes can be detected through time, but the results also testify to remarkable longue durée in the healing experience: the patterns of suffering and despair, the gestures of pleading, the presence of beds and dreams, the astonishment of the caregivers, and above all the simultaneous recourse to medicine and religion both. (shrink)

A review of Memory, History, Forgetting. By Paul Ricoeur. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Historians of historiography have paid more attention to differences and innovations than to similarities and constants. This article investigates the importance of "longue durée structures" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography.The first part shows the extent of the common philosophical ideas shared by the "new histories" on the rise from the 1920s to the 1970s: the Annales school, Marxist historiography, the American social science historians, the Past and Present group, and the "Bielefeld school." It suggests continuity between German Historismus (...) and these "new histories."From the postmodern point of view, all "new histories" are also "modern histories"; since the 1970s various types of history have come to be regarded as postmodern and, therefore, radically different. The second part of the article brings to light major continuities running from modern to postmodern thought, from the "new histories" to the "new new histories."The article ends with some ideas on how to "reconstruct" a plural historiographical community. (shrink)

Microbial diversity has become a leitmotiv of contemporary microbiology, as epitomized in the concept of the microbiome, with significant consequences for the classification of microbes. In this paper, I contrast microbiology’s current diversity ideal with its influential predecessor in the twentieth century, that of purity, as epitomized in Robert Koch’s bacteriological culture methods. Purity and diversity, the two polar opposites with regard to making sense of the microbial world, have been operationalized in microbiological practice by tools such as the “clean” (...) Petri dish versus the “dirty” Winogradsky column, the latter a container that mimics, in the laboratory, the natural environment that teems with diverse microbial life. By tracing the impact of the practices and concepts of purity and diversity on microbial classification through a history of techniques, tools, and manuals, I show the shifts in these concepts over the last century. Juxtaposing the dominant purity ideal with the more restricted, but continuously articulated, diversity ideal in microbial ecology not only provides a fresh perspective on microbial classification that goes beyond its intellectual history, but also contextualizes the present focus on diversity. By covering the period of a century, this paper outlines a revised longue durée historiography that takes its inspiration from artifacts, such as Petri dish and the Winogradsky column, and thereby simple, but influential technologies that often remain invisible. This enables the problem of historical continuity in modern science to be addressed and the accelerationist narratives of its development to be countered. (shrink)

This short article shows that Heller’s assertion that I have announced the death of the early modern French bourgeoisie is misplaced. At the same time, it defends the view that a prolonged period of economic stasis together with the low level of bourgeois classness make it impossible to sustain Engel’s view that absolute monarchy rested on a supposed balance between it and the nobility. In conclusion, it is suggested that Marxist analysis cannot be reduced to a treatment of class-anatogonisms.

Microbial diversity has become a leitmotiv of contemporary microbiology, as epitomized in the concept of the microbiome, with significant consequences for the classification of microbes. In this paper, I contrast microbiology’s current diversity ideal with its influential predecessor in the twentieth century, that of purity, as epitomized in Robert Koch’s bacteriological culture methods. Purity and diversity, the two polar opposites with regard to making sense of the microbial world, have been operationalized in microbiological practice by tools such as the “clean” (...) Petri dish versus the “dirty” Winogradsky column, the latter a container that mimics, in the laboratory, the natural environment that teems with diverse microbial life. By tracing the impact of the practices and concepts of purity and diversity on microbial classification through a history of techniques, tools, and manuals, I show the shifts in these concepts over the last century. Juxtaposing the dominant purity ideal with the more restricted, but continuously articulated, diversity ideal in microbial ecology not only provides a fresh perspective on microbial classification that goes beyond its intellectual history, but also contextualizes the present focus on diversity. By covering the period of a century, this paper outlines a revised longue durée historiography that takes its inspiration from artifacts, such as Petri dish and the Winogradsky column, and thereby simple, but influential technologies that often remain invisible. This enables the problem of historical continuity in modern science to be addressed and the accelerationist narratives of its development to be countered. (shrink)

Against the background of a new interest in empires past and present and an inflation of the concept in modern political language and beyond, the article first looks at the use of the concept as an analytical marker in historical and current interpretations of empires. With a focus on Western European cases, the concrete semantics of empire as a key concept in modern European history is analyzed, combining a reconstruction of some diachronic trends with synchronic differentiations.

Summary Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key (...) examples come from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of long-range intellectual history. Summary Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key examples come from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of long-range intellectual history. (shrink)

Our understanding of body–world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer world – ‘plasticity’ or ‘metabolism’- or external influences on the body - ‘environment’ or ‘milieu’ – appeared with the rise of modern science. On the other side, although premodern science lacked a unifying term for it, an anxious attentiveness to the power of ‘environmental factors’ in shaping physical and moral traits held sway in (...) nearly all medical systems before and alongside modern Europe. In this article, I build on a new historiography on the policing of bodies and environments in medieval times and at the urban scale to problematize Foucault’s claim about biopolitics as a modern phenomenon born in the European eighteenth-century. I look in particular at the collective usage of ancient medicine and manipulation of the milieu based on humoralist notions of corporeal permeability (Hippocrates, Galen, Ibn Sīnā) in the Islamicate and Latin Christendom between the 12th and the 15th century. This longer history has implications also for a richer genealogy of contemporary tropes of plasticity, permeability and environmental determinism beyond usual genealogies that take as a starting point the making of the modern body and EuroAmerican biomedicine. (shrink)

Islamic legal historiography has dealt extensively with questions of continuity and change, as epitomized by the relationship between ijtihād and taqlīd. This paper offers a new conceptualization of the ijtihād–taqlīd modes of law-making in the Sunni legal tradition. I argue that the institutional transformation from ijtihād to taqlīd required that jurists transform the views of the founding authorities of the schools over the course of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. They achieved this by stratifying legal knowledge in their typologies of (...) muftis and judges in ways that had not been envisioned earlier, justifying their typologies by invoking tropes of decline and the extinction of mujtahids. This longue-durée view will shed light on the institutional significance of the taqlīdification of Islamic law, where legal security and stability were privileged over judicial discretion. (shrink)

This paper presents a longue durée account of the discursive emergence of ‘the market'. It seeks to develop understanding of the ‘crisis system' by showing that the crises of the present have their origins earlier than some critical realist scholars have suggested and can be better understood by the theorization of the generative mechanisms that emerged from the economic and political chaos of the early 1600s. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed to show that in the context of (...) the emergence of capitalism in England, these generative mechanisms resulted in the meaning of the word ‘market’ slipping loose of the geo-spatial semiotic bounds by which it had commonly been delineated – i.e. as a physical space in a town or city where goods were bartered or sold – and being re-semioticised to refer to abstract space where all acts of capitalist economic exchange, including those impacting upon the natural world, take place. (shrink)

Ce texte a paru initialement dans ANNALES ESC. Vol. 13, n° 4, oct.-déc. 1958, p. 725-753, puis a été réédité dans Écrits sur l'histoire, Paris, Flammarion, 1969. p. 44-83. Il est également disponible, mais dans une version assez fautive, ici. Il y a crise générale des sciences de l'homme : elles sont toutes accablées sous leurs propres progrès, ne serait-ce qu'en raison de l'accumulation des connaissances nouvelles et de la nécessité d'un travail collectif, dont l'organisation intelligente reste à mettre (...) (...) - Histoire – Nouvel article. (shrink)

This essay deals with plague and plagues in renaissance and early modern Europe over the longue durée, principally from a methodological perspective. I shall combine an historiographical approach with an historical account of developing reactions to plague and in passing compare measures to cope in the early sixteenth century with reactions to the impact of the Great Pox or the Mal de Naples. I shall concentrate on southern Europe and in particular on Italy and my aim is to (...) re-assess the historiography of plague through the lens of some of the more recent Anglo-Saxon literature in this field. In the process I shall outline some of the debates within the field and end with some general methodological observations drawn from early modern Italy. (shrink)

This paper summarizes Grmek's theoretical contribution to history of disease and explores to what extent the longue durée could still be a useful concept in order to better understand past perceptions of, and reactions to, diseases. The case of the medical responses to epidemic disease in pre-industrial Europe is synthetically expounded in order to illustrate this issue.

Conventional historical and popular accounts tend to emphasize sharp polarities between empires and nation-states. While an empire is traditionally associated with conquests, slavery, political inequalities, economic exploitation and the wars of yesteryear, a nation-state is understood to be the only legitimate and viable form of large-scale territorial organization today. This article challenges such interpretations by focusing on the organizational and ideological continuities between the imperial and the nation-state models of social order. In particular, I focus on the role coercive and (...) ideological apparatuses as well as the transformation of micro-solidarities play in the formation of polities over long periods of time. I argue that although empires and nation-states are different ideal types of polity they are highly compatible and as such prone to metamorphosing into each other. More specifically I explore how, when and why specific coercive-organizational, ideological and micro-interactional processes make this periodic historical metamorphosis possible. (shrink)

Claiming the legacy of revolutionary of 1789, the Republicans organise at the end of nineteenth century the French school in its modern form and developpe a philosophy that is “fondationnaire” placing educational institution as foundation of the nation. The idea of the emancipation of the people by rational instruction without neglecting the moral and civic education is well located in the heart of the French school project and aims abstract rational subjects, despite their unique characteristics and affiliations. The phrase “the (...) Republic will be educator or she will not! “claim this fundamentally political intent stay up until the Second World War. After this period, the school system begin to be invested by the economy; during the period of the welfare state, an original synthesis seems to occur between “republican meritocracy, [...] social equality mass... [the] concern individualistic “(Gauchet, 2002), the rising concerns of the economy and employment, making the question of the qualifications of a concern more central. This delicate balance then seems to break during the Twenty pitiful’s years, then the school is characterized by a multiplicating of its missions, the lost of landmarks and the difficulty to make sense. The actual siginification of the scholar system will be questioned regarding to economic and anthropological influence of neo-liberalism, the requirement for long life education and its consequences, and also the education-socialization-qualification relations. (shrink)

Beik criticises Heller’s mechanical view of the dynamic role of the bourgeoisie in the rise of capitalism in early-modern France. While they agree that the primary class-conflict was between the nobility and the peasantry, Beik stresses the slow emergence of genuine capitalist social relations and the cooptation of the bourgeoisie by a monarchical state which was still propping up the feudal regime, whereas Heller views mercantile activity and production increases as evidence of rising capitalism.

This extract is taken from the article by Professor Michel Vovelle, published in History of European Ideas 2 , 1981, 1–18.

Grmek's important article on pathocenosis, which appeared in 1969 in the Annales, did not achieve the fame and significance which it seemed to merit. This needs to be explained not only in terms of Grmek's own history, but also in changes in intellectual fashion, including in the Annales themselves. The work was also eclipsed by W.H. McNeill's best-selling Plagues and Peoples. History's 'cultural turn' since the 1980s has also limited the article's perceived utility. Nevertheless, the value of the concept is (...) underlined by the articles in this collection. (shrink)