The Functional-Institutional School
Although the personal-social-intuitive group was widely esteemed, its attitude seemed too belletristic and its methods too intuitive and uncritical for many of the more serious minds in the historical profession. Inspired by the pioneering work of the great English legal historian F.W. Maitland at the very beginning of the century, a transatlantic school of historians emerged in the twenties, thirties and forties that aimed to examine the working of political and social institutions in a realistic, functional way, free from the now-discredited assumptions of the organic school. What the functional-institutional school tried to achieve was an understanding of the forms of conduct and values that emerge in a particular era in response to man's struggle for power, wealth, status, and freedom. Among the scholars who had the greatest success in evoking the complexity of social and political organization and forces for change were the French historian of the feudal world, Marc Bloch, (see this Unit, Section Two), and the American historian of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, R. R. Palmer.

The Sociological-Behavioral School and the Problem of Causality |
In the 1950's, particularly in England and France, a new generation of historians emerged unprecedented (since the end of the nineteenth century) for its vitality and originality. . . .In explaining and categorizing the past, the new generation of historians has shown a fondness for the concepts of the sociological, behavioral, and psychological sciences. . . .
Among [their]... methods is the use of "models" or "paradigms" - generalized patterns of structures extrapolated from individual instances of such recurring social phenomena as "industrial sectors" or "scientific revolutions." Nowadays, in studying a particular society (or movement or institution) historians try to determine the general pattern or model to which the society belongs. Then they establish the peculiarities of the society under study and analyze the ways in which it departs from the general paradigm. These differences are of great importance to the historian because they allow him to identify how and why a particular society, movement, or institution, in a specific place and at a specific time, developed distinctive qualities. Thus, many societies have experienced an industrial revolution, and these all exhibit certain common qualities that pertain to the model of an industrial revolution; but no two industrial revolutions in the past have developed in precisely the same way and have induced exactly the same consequences.