Response to Marxist History

While I enjoyed Bloch’s work for its seemingly honest approach to telling history not for the sake of historians but for history itself, I did not find that same about Braudel after reading the article by Hexter.  Braudel sought to present social history as a sciences historiques (social science) and to include history in the total package in the larger school of social science.  This in and of itself is a worthy desire, but I found Hexter’s review of Braudel’s thesis hard to follow.  The reason for this is that while Hexter was indeed a fan of Braudel’s, he admitted that La Mediterranee was “in some ways a flawed book” (p. 520) and that it didn’t solve “the historiographical problem that it poses” (p. 533).  Moreover, Hexter concluded that Braudel did not even try to solve this problem.  Without having actually read Braudel’s book, my guess is that Hexter’s review was hard to follow because Braudel’s work itself would be hard for the lay-historian such as myself to follow. 

Eley’s article was informative as a history of the late Annales and of Marxist history.  Having briefly read and studied Marx in sociological and criminological settings, I tend to immediately dismiss anything related to Communism.  Unfortunately, Eley confirmed that the goal of Marxist historians was to pursue an agenda intent on changing the study of history to meet to comply with their ideology, namely through school curriculums.  I understand that all historians write with some sort of inherent bias, the fact that these Marxist historians organized with an agenda in mind is disheartening.

As for Thompson’s articles, while I did not always agree with his arguments, I at least could read his works with a level of interest and understanding.  I especially liked the article, The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.  My first reason is that the study of Eighteenth Century Britain and her Colonies has a special appeal to me.  Second, his extensive use of primary source documentation was a refreshing change from the other works we have read in this class.  By utilizing a variety of primary source references, Thompson may have come closer to seeing into the thoughts and minds of the historical subjects he studied.