People’s History and Social Science History

A friend and colleague of an author reviews a two-volume history. Acknowledging his relationship with the author the reviewer calls the books “excellent, full of rich new insights, sparkling with intelligence, the sentiment which underlies our empassioned love for the historian’s craft, one of the most beautiful of the discplines devoted to the study of man.” “Yet,” the reviewer continues, “it is striking that the individual is almost entirely absent…. Psychology, although not totally ignored, is always collective psychology.…Is not the author,” the review continues, “turning back to the schematic.…toward the sociological, a seductive form of the abstract?” (Febvre, 1941b: 177, 128). Sit back and imagine the time, place, and people involved in this story: a 1980s traditional historian, perhaps a radical people’s historian, excoriating a social scientific colleague? Not at all; this is no case of contemporary backlash. The time was 1941, the review Lucien Febvre, the author Marc Bloch, the book, La société féodale.

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