Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- A note on translation
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Marc Bloch and the “Université”
- PART I Sociology, geography, and history during Marc Bloch's years of apprenticeship
- PART II Marc Bloch as a critic and practitioner of sociology and geography
- Notes
- Index of names
- Subject index
- Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- A note on translation
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Marc Bloch and the “Université”
- PART I Sociology, geography, and history during Marc Bloch's years of apprenticeship
- PART II Marc Bloch as a critic and practitioner of sociology and geography
- Notes
- Index of names
- Subject index
- Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography
Summary
When preparing Marc Bloch's unfinished Apologie pour l'Histoire for publication in 1949, Lucien Febvre found the following observation:
each science, taken separately, often finds its most successful artisans in renegades from neighboring sectors. Pasteur, who renewed biology, was not a biologist – and during his lifetime, one made him see that clearly; just as Durkheim and Vidal de la Blache, who left an incomparably deeper mark than any specialist on historical studies at the beginning of the twentieth century, did not rank among the certified historians, the first being a philosopher turned sociologist and the second a geographer.
Bloch himself was one of those historians who began their training at the beginning of the twentieth century when Emile Durkheim and Paul Vidal de la Blache had such an impact. In 1931, when his generation was well established in the historical profession, he still felt that history had much to learn from both geography and sociology. These fields were “the two great disciplines of which one can say that they renewed or ought to have renewed history.”
Despite the claims of many scholars, Bloch did not adopt either the Durkheimian or Vidalian approaches, which so intrigued him, and would never refer to himself in those terms.
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- Information
- Marc Bloch, Sociology and GeographyEncountering Changing Disciplines, pp. 1 - 4Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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