[자료] Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien

by J. H. Hexter, The Journal of Modern History, Dec., 1972, pp. 480-539.
자료: hexter_on_braudel

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(...) The goal of the ^Annales^ from the outset, therefore, was to undo the work of the ^Sorbonnistes^, to turn French historians away from the narrowly political and the narrowly diplomatic, to turn them toward the new vistas in history, especially toward social and economic history. This was the ^mentalité^ of what came to be known as the ^Annales^ school of French historians, or the ^Annalistes^. In a sense of the term that we will explore more deeply later this ^mentalité^  became a ^structure^, a controlling habit of thought so deeply imbedded in the minds of the believers that they scarecly subjected it to critical examination.

This ^structure^, conceived by Febvre and Bloch, against considerable odds has taken over historical studies in France, at the same time winnig for those studies worldwide admiratin, something like a consensus that in History France is indeed Number One. The marks of the "new history" in France have been an indifference to political and diplomatic history approaching outright rejection and a wide-open hospitality to all other kinds of history, actual or imaginable. This has meant that for more than forty years what became the most powerful voices in the French historical profession have called on historians to keep abreat of the advances in the social sciences, or, as they would insist, in the ^other^ social sciences, or better still, because wider open, in ^les sciences de l'homme^. (...)

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The first ^idée maîtresse^ of Braudel concerns the relation of History to the social sciences. In its protean form he shared it with and inherited it from the founders of the ^Annales^, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, especially the latter. Our previous examination of ^structures^ has shown how effectively he maintained, expanded, and strengthened the institutions designed to realize that idea. ^La Méditerranée^, which launched him on his career as a central figure in French historical studies, also exemplified his concern to bring History into close relations with social sciences, especially human geography, economics, and sociology. In 1951, generalizing his outlook, he wrote:

"For us there are no bounded human sciences. Each of them is a door open on to the entirety of the social, each leads to all the rooms, to every floor of the house, on the condition that on his march the investigator does not draw back out of reverence for neighboring specialists. If we need to, let us use their doors and their stairways."[17] No science of man must cut itself off from the other sciences of man, for in so doing it creates those falsifications-economic man, social man, geographic man. No, it is not with such ghosts that students of the ^sciences humaines^ must deal, "rather with Man living, complex, confused, as he is, . . . Man whom all the social sciences must avoid slicing up, however skillful and artistic the carving."[18]

In the years following 1951, and particularly in the years following his succession to the strategic positions held by Lucien Febvre in the ^Annales^ school, Braudel had to give further thought to the problem of the relation of History to the social sciences. By then two realities had commanded his attention. 

• First, some practitioners of most of the other sciences of man did not share his appetite for roaming through the house of the social sciences. Although that house, like God's, had many mansions, most social scientists were satisfied to stay in their own room. Or in his other metaphor they went right on carving man up. 
• The other reality was the opposite but also the consequence of the first, a propensity of each of the social sciences to enlarge its room. "Without the explicit will to do so, the social sciences encroach on each other; each tends to seize upon the social in its entirety. While believing that it stays at home each moves in on its neighbors."[19] 

Such inner contradictions and confusions in the area of the sciences of man required resolution. Braudel was ready to propose, indeed even to impose, such a resolution. For the moment he wanted "a unification, even a dictatorial one, of the diverse sciences of man to subject them less to a common market than to a common ^problématique^, which would free them from many illusory problems and useless acquirements, and after the necessary pruning and ^mise au point^, would open the way for a future and new divergence, capable at that point of being fruitful and creative. For a new forward thrust of the sciences of man is in order."[20] 

In this process of confluence and reflux what will be the place of History? On this point, no doubts or hesitations. History is the science of the sciences of man. Mingling with them, lending them its own impetus and its dialectic, it feeds itself on their multiple and indispensable movement.[21] Such is Braudel's view; such, he adds, is the view of those eager imperialists of the mind and the academy, "the young French historians, taking great pains to keep their craft at the junction of all the sciences of man," in short of the ^Annalistes.^

The issue is not whether History is a science. On this matter Braudel and the ^Annalistes^ saw matters no differently from their scapegoats, the ^Sorbonnistes^ of the 1920s, equally firm in the conviction that History, as they practiced it, was ^scientifique^. Here perhaps French historians were beneficiaries of a shade of linguistic divergence between their language and English. There appears to be a structural difference between the two tongues, well worth further investigation, that has made French ^science^ a more inclusive term than English "science."

• ^Science^ extends in the direction of “organized knowledge in general.” 
• “Science” tends to restrict its application to “those disciplines that take physics as a model.” 

The trouble with the ^sciences historiques^ as they were practiced in France in the twenties was their isolation, a consequence of their isolationism. Fortunately the French had two phrases which might be used to break through History's isolationㅡ^sciences humaines^ and ^sciences de l'homme^. It was harder in France to doubt that History was one of these than it was in the English-speaking world to deny that it was a "social science." In Braudel's view History must place itself not merely among the ^sciences de l'homme^, but at their head or at least at their center.

.... .... 498-500쪽

(...) Braudel's vision of the place of History in relation to the social sciences gives us a link with Braudel's second ^idée maitresse^ㅡthe conception of ^durée^. Among sciences of man History distinguishes itself by being ^globale^, “susceptible to extending its curiosity to any aspect whatever of the social.” But it does not have a monopoly on this distinction; it shares it with sociology. What then justifies Braudel's unrepentant imperial claims for his discipline? He justifies them by relating them to History as the sole study linked to ^la durée^. ^Durée^ does not mean time, but rather unit of time, duration. In practice most sociologists, Braudel says, assume two postures toward ^durée^, both in different ways stultifying. 

• Some, intensely concerned with that convenient fiction "the present," are trapped in a unit of time too brief to afford them anything but ephemeral perceptions about man. They are prisoners of the ^trop courte durée^. They miss the historical experience, so valuable for understanding the present, of displacement into an unfamiliar past that enables a man to know "those most profound and original traits of the present that he was unfamiliar with before, as a consequence of being too familiar with them."[26] 
• Other sociologist-ethnographers, Levi-Strauss, for example, are preoccupied with micro-units of social behavior-the ^phonême^, the marital structure, the raw and the cookedㅡthat endure multimillennially. They are prisoners of the ^trop longue durée^. 

Between the instantaneously present and the perennially immobile of the two sociologies lie the effective ^durées^ that are the constant preoccupation of historians and that are History's unique and indispensable contribution to the sciences of man.

Braudel assimilates (although not explicitly) the ^durées^ that are the historian's business to the wave phenomena of physics. Thus radio transmission can be analyzed into waves of considerable length, carrier waves, bearing waves of lesser length, bearing waves of yet less length. In Braudel's view the past can be analyzed into the interrelation of waves of three lengths, and it can most effectively be written about that way.

1. The first set of waves are short ones, those of ^courte durée^. At least they are those first and most readily observed because they embody the experience "of daily life, of our illusions, of our immediate awareness." Because of their immediacy, they are the substance of the individual consciousness. Braudel, following the philosopher-economist Simiand (1873-1935), also calls them ^événementielle^, having to do with events. "Events are explosive, 'resounding news,' as they said in the sixteenth century. With their deceptive vapors they fill the consciousness of contemporaries but they do not last at all." Although the most conspicuous, "the ^temps court^ is the most capricious, the most deceptive of the durées."[27] It is the subject and the substance of the newspaper and in ages past of the chronicler. By preference the ^courte durée^, the ^événementielle^, is also the past that historians of politics, traditional historians, bury themselves in.

[28] conjoncture 에 대한 각주:

There is no satisfactory English equivalent for ^conjoncture^. Its English homologue "conjuncture" does not bear a similar sense. The difficulty can be illustrated from the choices the English translator made when he found the term in a chapter heading. Thus:

• "Navigation: tonnage et conjoncture" (Méditerranée, 1:27 I ), translated: "Shipping and Changing Circumstances"; 
• "Les résponsabilités de la conjoncture" (ibid., 1:429), translated: "The Gold Trade and the General Economic Situation"; 
• "La conjoncture italienne . . ." (ibid., 1 :538), translated: "Italy's Situation. . . ." 

Conjoncture appears to be a term in one respect like "alienation," "confrontation," and "relevance." It started out with a reasonably bounded set of senses. Subjected to indecent abuse by masses of the intellectually chic, it acquired a precocious middle-aged spread. It has now become hard to discover what, if anything, a person has in mind when he utters it. Fairly consistently Braudel seems to use conjoncture to signify [:]

• cyclical economic transformations or, 
• less precisely, changes in society, sciences, technology to which he ascribes cyclic changes (undefined) over times (not clearly specified). 

I shall try in this essay simply to use the term ^conjoncture^ to label phenomena which conform to or at least do not lie beyond the phenomena that Braudel so identifies.

2. Economists and economic historians, on the other hand, frolic in waves of intermediate length-price curves, demographic progressions, movements of wages, changes in interest rates, ^conjontures^,[28] which follow cycles of ten, twenty-five, or at the limit fifty years. The notion of cyclical movements or rhythms can be extended from economic to social phenomena, and even beyond. Braudel presses for the investigation of ^conjonctures^ in the realm of culture, "if one may extend to this domain, as I would gladly do, the expression which up to the present passes current only for economic life."[29] Although such waves of change exist and profoundly effect human affairs, men are not always aware of them. Their very length often conceals them from their victims. Recurring only a few times, sometimes only once in the lifetime of an individual, they often escape the consciousness of those who nevertheless live in and have to learn to live with them.[30]

The history of ^conjoncture^, of historical rhythms of ^moyenne durée^, fascinates Braudel.[31] But instead of turning him back to a search for the linkages between medium-wave and short-wave or ^événementielle^ history, it projects him forward on a search for historical waves of even vaster length. And he finds them. Before him, economists had spoken of secular (i.e., centuries-long) trends, but they had not much investigated them. Braudel, however, identifies in the past (and present) such "extremely slow patterns of oscillation, . . . movements [that] require hundreds of years to complete."[32]

Or again, in greater detail, beneath the waves of ^conjoncture^, "phenomena of trends with imperceptible slopes appear, a history of very long periods, a history slow to take on curvature and for that reason slow to reveal itself to our observation. It is this that in our imperfect language we designate by the name of ^histoire structurale.^" Historical waves of great length constitute the ^longue durée^. They belong not to the recurrent crises of ^conjonctures^ but to ^structures^. Sociologists see structures as "fixed relations between realities and social masses," historians (or at least Braudel), as "a reality that time has a hard job wearing down, and carries a long while." Some structures "encumber history in impeding, and therefore commanding, its course."[34] They mark bounds, limitations that for centuries men cannot conquer or control. Such for example are the slow transformation from nomadism to transhumance and the movement of men out of the mountains to settle in the plain.[35] The history of the ^longue durée^ is the history of the constraints that ^structure^ imposed on human movement in the broadest sense of the word "movement"ㅡnot only migration but intellectual thrust and spiritual transformation.

As he loves the Mediterranean, Braudel loves the ^longue durée^. It is the land where his heart lies, and the very last lines of his arduous revision of ^La Méditerranée^ are at once a confession of faith and a declaration of love.

Thus confronted by man, I am always tempted to see him as enclosed in a destiny which he scarcely made, in a landscape which shows before and behind him the infinite perspectives of the ^longue durée^. In historical explanation as I see it, at my own risk and peril, it is always the ^temps long^ that ends up by winning out. Annihilating masses of events, all those that it does not end up by pulling along in its own current, surely it limits the liberty of men and the role of chance itself. By temperament I am a structuralist, little attracted by events and only partly by ^conjoncture^, that grouping of events carrying the same sign.[36]

Still, faith and love aside, Braudel knows that the ^longue durée^ is not the sole proper concern of the historian. "This almost motionless framework, these slow-furling waves do not act in isolation. These variations of the general relations between man and his environment combine with other fluctuations, the sometimes lasting but usually
short-lived movements of the economy. All these movements are superimposed on one another." Superimposed, not separated. Rather, interpenetrating. The function of the historian, aware of the three ^durées^, is to discern and set forth the dialectic that takes place among them.

Such, then, is Braudel's perception of the past:

• événementㅡcourte durée; 
• conjonctureㅡmoyenne durée; 
• structureㅡlongue durée; 
• and collisions, tensions, and interchanges of each with the others.

(...)

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■ (...) We will, however, postpone further pursuit of the issue to consider two further ^idées maîtresses^ of Braudelㅡthe idiocy of the événementielle and the pursuit of histoire totale (or globale) as a goal.

ㅡ Histoire problème.
ㅡ histoire globale, histoirr totale.


In histoire globale we must "remerge each observation, each measurement, into the totality of the field of social force."[51] "Faithful to the teaching of Lucien Febvre and Marcel Mauss, the historian will always want to seize the whole, the totality of the social."[52] It is in the interest of a totality that allows varied possibilities of slippage, uncertainties, explanations which are "daughters of the moment," that historians must
part company with sociologists. It is not easy to be sure what Braudel means by histoire totale. It comes more frequently to the lips of younger historians. But the impulse is there, who can doubt it? (...)

... 506-512쪽