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A History Without the Social Sciences? *

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2017

Claire Lemercier
Claire Lemercier*
Affiliation:
Centre de sociologie des organisations (CNRS-Sciences Po)
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Abstract

According to David Armitage and Jo Guldi, digitized sources and quantification almost naturally lead to the sort of longue durée history that they seek to promote. This article questions that assertion on the basis of the long tradition of quantitative history, open to exchanges with the social sciences and revived, not annihilated, by microhistory. The digitization of numerous historical sources does not call for less caution in our analyses—quite the contrary, as it creates new biases. More importantly, it does not solve the crucial question of controlled anachronism, that is, the need for carefully constructed categories in any quantification based on the longue durée. The article also addresses the implications of choosing the longue durée as the exclusive basis for reflections on historical processes and causality. Is the longue durée purely a scale for description? If not, can it escape a simplistic vision, a monocausal path dependency? If we are to avoid such pitfalls, the wider debates within all the social sciences on time-scales and causality must be taken into account.

Type
Debating the Longue Durée
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 70 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 271 - 283
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2015

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Footnotes

*

Thank you to Clare Crowston and Alix Heiniger for our conversations. This text is largely based on Claire Lemercier and Claire Zalc, Méthodes quantitatives pour l’historien (Paris: La Découverte, 2008).

References

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4. Claire Lemercier, “La longue durée: une histoire sans histoire?” and “L’histoire et ses publics: une question d’historiographie ou de modes de diffusion?” Devenir historien-ne. Méthodologie de la recherche et historiographie (December 2014): http://devhist.hypotheses.org/2729 and http://devhist.hypotheses.org/2763. Thank you to Émilien Ruiz for publishing these editorials and for his pertinent remarks.

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22. Here I am referring to an ongoing research project with Clare Crowston and Steven Kaplan.

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