Response to Annales II and Marxist History

“Whether we are dealing with the past or the present, an awareness of the plurality of temporalities is indispensable to a common methodology of the human sciences” (Braudel and Wallerstein, 173).

I have found the articles, including the one I chose History and the Social Science: The Longue Durée by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, to be informative and quite concise with their overall goals. After reading the articles I have a better understanding of what made these historians different and what was new about their approach. These historians realized there were commonalities amongst these social sciences. Even if those disciplines tried separating their study from the others using their goals and methods as the reasons, by trying to lay out the differences showed they knew something of the “other.” “Even more, without intending it explicitly, the social sciences impose themselves on each other. Each one tries to grasp the social in its totality” (Braudel and Wallerstein, 172).

In E.P. Thompson’s article, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, he mentions that “terms evolve for the measurement of time intervals;” however, one can apply that notion to the disciplines themselves. Using the clock example and how time changed over the years, I understood that these historians were trying to integrate the different disciplines under one common understanding of the social sciences as a whole over the years. As time progressed ones understanding would develop as well. The disciplines (terms) evolve for the understanding (measurements) of the social/human sciences (time intervals).