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410 IRVING M. ZEITLIN Weber's words: 'It is the dictatorship of the official, not of the worker which, for the present at any rate, is on the advance: Weber's critique of socialist theories should not, however, be taken to mean that he was uncritical of capitalism. As he witnessed the rise of giant corporations and powerful employer organizations, he advocated legislation that would assist the working people in their struggles. Weber had no doubt that the working classes, through their trade unions and political parties, could bring their influence to bear upon the governmental apparatus, thereby improving their situation. In a word, since Weber saw no grounds for assuming that socialism would lead to a society morally and humanly superior to capitalism, he advocated significant reforms by means of which labour would be strengthened in its struggles with capitat and the most glaring ills of the capitalist system gradually eliminated. He was disappointed, however, to see that the Social Democrats consistently refused to adopt an effective refonnist strategy. They persisted, instead, in their revolutionary rhetoric, which, though it was ineffectual, nevertheless heightened the fears of the middle classes, thereby precluding political alliances of any sort with their more liberal elements . I have tried to convey the range of issues considered in this volume, and why Mommsen is to be commended for the care, balance, and critical acumen with which he has examined Webers politics and scholarship. One of the Fathers of Annales JOHN C. CAIRNS Carole Fink. Marc Bloch, A Life in History Cambridge University Press 1989. xix, 371. $29.95 Like Moses, Marc Bloch did not live to enter the Promised Land. Nevertheless, he had a clear glimpse of it from his particular historical mount before he died violently almost half a century ago in a field in central France. When his flock eventually crossed over, Bloch's name had assumed a mythical. almost mystical, place in the profession. Those present at the Sorbonne in the warm summer days of 1950, attending the rather relaxed first post-war meeting of the International Congress of Historical Sciences, wi1l recall the panegyric references and the sense of his martyred presence. In the bare, spare rooms where the papers were delivered, Bloch's memory was as much a healing as an intellectual force. The name of this man, deprived of his rights by Frenchmen, denounced to the enemy occupant, had become an alibi in a France scarcely able or willing to begin to confront its recent past. But the mosaic analogy will not do. Bloch was never a Jone visionary on the road to an innovative new history. Lucien Febvre was with him - or rather, Febvre was on a kind of parallel course - from the beginning of their 'gifted and UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1990 MARC BLOCH 411 ferocious' collaboration in 1919 (as Bloch's biographer accurately calls it) at the new post-war University of Strasbourg through their successive arrivals in Paris in the 19)05. Their related but very different combats pour I'histoire, to use Febvre's expression, were fought in the classroom at Strasbourg, then at the College de France (Febvre) and the Sorbonne (Bloch), at international historical meetings, and above all in the pages of the review they founded in 1929, best known simply as Annales. These combats, among the most celebrated in the modern historical profession, are not less memorable for having been fought against a foe who, at this distance anyway, would seem by the 19305 (let alone the 19405 and 19505, for the 'contest' went on) to have had little fight in him. Against German historicism and the ostensible dead hand of the positivist, political, and diplomatic historical canon recognized in the Third Republic's University, Bloch and Febvre's advocacy of economic, social, and a kind of intellectual history was finally to triumph under the leadership of Febvre and his student Fernand Braude!. [n its recent imperial version, their conception of a vastly expanded, wonderfully variegated historical discipline has been named la nouvelle histoire. Today Bloch, Febvre, and Braudel are dead, the prestigious inheritance is divided, and heresies have been spoken. Departures and stunningly unavowed, opportunistic...

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