 Marc Bloch was responsible for linking
history with social science in a concrete and imaginative
way. His works, such as the Feudal Society and Life
in Rural France, made use of new data, other than
traditional documents, such as topographical and
historical maps. Bloch worked with his friend and
collaborator, Lucien Febvre (who helped to pioneer new
economic theories based on quantification) as they
established a new theory of history, built on a
foundation set by Henri Berr that history could be
understood beyond the study of diplomatic and political
activities. In 1929, Bloch and Febvre founded their
important journal, Annales d'histoire économique et
sociale. Later, they dominated the 6th
Section of the École Pratiques des Hautes Études, and
influenced a wide array of historical approaches. Marc
Bloch pioneered a new route in historical research by
insisting that questions themselves determined the nature
of study, that documents of an age, which had been the
sole source for many historical studies of the early 20th
century, were not objective sources.
"The written documents with which conventional
historians had worked were for the most part only
secondary sources which were insufficient for scientific
or scholarly purposes because they reflected the events
only through the subjectivity of the observer. They could
be viewed as primary sources only insofar as they
themselves provided observational material for the
structure of consciousness, the mentality of a society,
or if - as in the case of laws or business papers - they
constituted a concrete constituent part of the actions of
the society. ....Objective reality, whether in nature or
society, answered only the questions which the researcher
posed. Science, therefore, could never dispense with
questions, selections, analysis, or abstraction. Bloch,
as had Durkheim before him, thus shifted the emphasis
from the individual to the collectivity [Iggers, New
Directions in European Historiography]. " |
