History and the Social Sciences: Past Imperfect; Future Promising

It has been almost 40 years since Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published an English translation of his (at the time) deeply unsettling essay, “Motionless History,” in the second issue of Social Science History (SSH, Winter 1977).¹ For many historians, whose livelihoods depended on narrating the “march of history,” his claim that long periods of history were characterized by a distinct absence of change—his example was Europe from late antiquity up to the early eighteenth century—was nothing short of heretical. The newly established SSH was, however, an entirely logical place from which to launch this fusillade against the disciplinary norms of the Anglo-American historical profession, as the journal was the product of a contra-establishment project, the Social Science History Association (SSHA). Founded in 1974 and hosting its first annual conference in Philadelphia in the fall of 1976, the SSHA emerged out of the more general social and political ferment of that period. Its organizers had the specific intention to disrupt (to use our word and not theirs) what they thought were the rigid practices and limited vision of the then American Historical Association.² In so doing they hoped to make space for a new kind of historical enquiry that had much to learn from the social sciences, and hoped to teach them something in return. They were joined in that enthusiastic moment by historically minded rebels from the American Sociological Association, as well as small numbers of anthropologists, demographers, economists, geographers, and political scientists who were all eager to incorporate both historical context and a theoretical appreciation of contingency into their work.³ In the intervening years since that hopeful beginning, many have argued that the anticipated interdisciplinary exchange failed in one way or another. But let me not get ahead of myself.

First back to Le Roy Ladurie. “Motionless History” was an article with multiple agendas. One, of course, was to review the evidence for the thesis that “on the whole, the dominant impression up to 1720 is one of stability” (ibid.: 132). Le Roy Ladurie also used this article to announce his plan for a new course of study at the College de France, a development that was little noticed in North America, as attested to by Peter Perdue in his essay in this volume. Finally, and most importantly for my purposes, Le Roy Ladurie offered a summing up of the relationship between history and the social sciences as he saw it from the vantage point of the third quarter of the twentieth century in France. His remarks are worth quoting at length.

By way of conclusion, I would have liked to have emphasized the enormous debt we working historians owe to the social sciences. For lack of time, I shall have to content myself with dispelling a misconception. Up to the last century, the essence of knowledge was founded on the interaction of two parallel cultures: the exact sciences and humanities; mathematics and intuition; the geometric spirit and the sense of nuance. History, from Thucydides to Michelet, naturally formed part of the humanities. And then there appeared on the scene, first discretely, then in full view, a “third culture”—that of the social sciences. For a long time, their practitioners got along well with the historians. One could observe, in the tradition of Marx and Weber, of Durkheim and Freud, a constant exchange of concepts and defectors. More recently, however, there has been an attempt to reject the dimension of past time. The social sciences, which prided themselves on their hard-nosed scientific rigor, undertook to exclude history (considered a “soft” science) from their ranks. The struggle implied a great deal of ignorance and a certain measure of malevolence on the part of the aggressors. One pretended not to know that, since Bloch, Braudel and Labrousse, history had also effected its scientific mutation. History had surprised the social sciences at the swimming hole and made off with their clothes, and the victims had not even noticed their nakedness.… Everybody, by now, has been forced to admit the obvious: it is not possible to construct a science...