International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, VoL 10, No. 3, 1997

m. A Disciplinary Boundary Dispute History and Sociology: Synthesis or Conflict? Franco Ferrarotti

The relation between history and sociology is deep rooted and ambiguous at the same time. The "material" from which sociology draws in order to construct its models and interpretative paradigms (Max Weber's elaboration of an "ideal type," to cite one well-known example) is historical "material." The "monuments and documents" of history, to use a phrase of Gaetano Mosca, are human testimonies to the story of living men and women in society.1 This simply means, as I have sought to demonstrate elsewhere, that one can no more escape history than one can escape the human condition. Furthermore, it also signifies that the apparent timelessness of acquired scientific knowledge does not alter the essential historicity of science; the negation of this historicity is only proof of a certain, probably insurmountable, ignorance and presumption. History and sociology study the same "object," but refuse to accept it as a dogmatically fixed, frozen "object." It is an "object in motion," not an ahistorical reification. Some who speak and write of science are paragons of intellectual immodesty. They boldly describe and even prescribe the essential characteristics of science from the outside, so to speak, aprioristically determining its fundamental conditions. Out of innocence or ignorance they do not hesitate to decree standards of "truth" or "falsity." At times, even perspicacious and experienced scholars reveal this tendency. But a science, today, is dearly not definable on the basis of a purely deductive calculation. It can no longer rest solely on a rationale so preoccupied with its own intellectual pureness as not to realize it is becoming sterile and gratuitous. Nor may the separate sciences be defined and distinguished by rigid and precise divisions, as if an inheritance were being divided strictly among stingy and quarrelsome heirs. In the recent past, the autonomy, as well as its academic authority, of a science depended on the clarity and exclusivity of its given object. This "Translated from the Italian by MieheUePatruno.

O 1997 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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object, a static given, belonged to a science like its very own territory, its own hunting reserve. Today the identity and autonomy of a science have an operative nature. It is the viewpoint of a given science itself that determines its specificity and autonomy. The scientific research of today is essentially multidisciplinary; for certain important aspects it is actually already postdisciplinary. Especially for those of us who are de facto descendants of Max Weber, the "sanctified" division between social sciences and natural sciences appears profoundly diminished. Today, many sciences simultaneously invest in the same object of research. Their essential and methodological resources converge upon this object thereby making it advantageous to periodically suspend the claims of their differentiated traditions. In fact, one can no longer only speak about "objects" but must speak of "problematic spheres" typical of a given science, even if they are common to most sciences. The widening gap between history and sociology is then not a question of the object. Instead, it concerns the method of research in terms of the intellectual viewpoint or of the theoretical-conceptual apparatus utilized in the carrying out of research; however, it does not deal with an abstract, methodological dispute. The difficult relation between history and sociology today is part of the larger crisis that afflicts the entire range of these two sciences. To use a somewhat schematic formulation, sociological analysis reaches across the verification (or falsification) of basic, determining hypotheses and of the hypotheses of specific works in order to ascertain in social facts what is uniform and repeatable. It does this not only to explain but also to interpret the existence of significant, determined correlations between two series of data, phenomena, or behaviors, expressed by the formula "if t h i s . . , then this other." Historical research, on the other hand, aims to accumulate significant data through an examination of sources and a documented reconstruction of processes, sequences of events, or customary micro-behaviors in order to understand a specific occurrence, which is unique and irreducible to another; therefore, unrepeatable. In fact, to use a polemic phrase from Gaetano Salvemini, the historian does not possess "the gift of prophetic virtue and considers events in themselves unrepeatable." Sociology, summarily speaking, makes use of one explanatory "conditional" schema, whereas history undertakes a causal attribution in order to determine a specific process. From this point of view, the observations of Andrew Abbott come to mind about historians who have understood causal explanations in an excessively narrow sense. They are blind to the prima facie evidence that historical research, from Herodotus and Thucydides on, has always been a form of narration--a tale of succession that develops over time. 2 One can

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certainly agree with Abbott's refusal of every type of dichotomy between timeless, universal explanatory structures and history as a descriptive tale. By accepting this refusal, critically founded on universal "laws" (laws that are both necessary and timeless and that have distinguished a particular type of scientific research), sociology recalls the grandiose, yet erroneous ambitions of August Comte and his conceptions of sociology as superscience or scien~a scientiarum. The fact is that, operatively speaking, the differentiation between history and sociology is evident and should not be ignored in order to advance acritically toward a general classification. We know that the notion of causality is made all the more complex since human phenomena never evidence just a single cause, but the existence and interplay of various causes. This is how conditional, explanatory schemes often implicate more levels of analysis and demand refined and analytical instruments, neatly upholding the distinction between an analytical level and a level of historically specific matter. Sociology is grounded in a generalizing process, while history makes way for a process of individualization in its studies of human situations. In Europe still, and above all in the cultures of Mediterranean countries, this tension is probably the basis of an age-old polemic that has characterized the relations between sociology and historical research. This polemic has traditionally brought about an attempt, whether on the part of positivists or of historians of divergent ideologies (idealistic or materialistic, of the "right" or the "left"), to merge the two disciplines. An attempt to unite these two sciences probably stems from a misunderstanding that, in various forms, persists in today's social sciences. In part, it implies (however unconscious it may be) a Comtian conception of sociological analysis that is systematic in an all-comprehensive sense, which includes sociologists as diverse as Vilfredo Pareto and "lhlcott Parsons. On the part of history, this attempt entertains the idea of a type of historical research that coincides in reality with the whole of humanity and with a/2 of its possible creations: that is, with all that is real, elevated in the various phases of its development to a supreme manifestation of the absolute spirit. Sociology, as a closed and all-comprehensive system, has already yielded to the application of particular social investigations centered on confined phenomena, which are scientifically available, that is, which are observable under effective, methodological controls. For history also, critical applications are surfacing that acknowledge the merits of polysemic and po~vnorphic complexity, as well the value of the essential nature of indefiniteness in the human world. Jacques Barzun contributed to this topic a rather important conceptual clarification. He rejects the expressed claim of the great English historian and philosopher, R. G. Collingwood, that in history itself, is present ade-

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quate means to comprehend historic reality in all its variegated aspects. Barzun's rejection recalls the known limits of historiographic research: "diversity, variability, uncertainty, and (in contrast with depth) superficiality. ''3 Contrary to Coiling,wood's idealization of the perfect historian, Barzun observes that the "methodists" in history are gregarious and favor teamwork for the same reasons that they consider plain history inadequate: it eludes the type of consensus provided by numbers; or, alternatively, provided by a universal structure, whether of the psyche, of myth, or of some other absolute. History, rejecting absolutes, gives no comfort to the many able, subtle, dedicated minds that crave finality and certitude. 4 It is no wonder then that the absolutizing of temporal moments (in which the "absolute spirit" would materialize) has been attacked at its core. This "absolute spirit," a notion of clear Hegelian ancestry and a constituent of romanticidealistic historicism, is both conclusion and closure of the historical course, while at the same time a contradictory declaration of the necessity of "going beyond" that which is confirmed.5 In other words, however influential the above view, historical acts cannot legitimately be reinserted into a deterministic schema. This point has also frequently been made quite skillfully by scholars not tied to the historical discipline as a specific field of research. "[T]he very nature of a free act is its unpredictability." From this, certain correlations are inevitable: It is finally this unpredictability that constitutes the "irresistible power of the present moment" which, according to Isaiah Berlin, expresses Tolstoy's great insight into the nature of history. In the language of modern physics we would call it "indetermination." The ancient Greeks had a word for it that was even more precise: they called it Kairos, which meant exactly the "present moment," the "occasion," insofar as it is unpredictable, unique, compelling, and ephemeral at the same time.6

In the critical tradition, especially (but not exclusively) an Italian one, once sociological analysis is reduced to historical development (idealistically understood), the sociologist acquires a purely instrumental worth, while losing any apparent cognitive worth. This inevitably results in a classification of convenience as has been noted appropriately by Carlo Antoni, who is a strict Crocean. He says that, "as it was for Vico, so for Croce the only form of knowledge was historical knowledge. "7 According to this statement,' history aside, other sciences do not supply knowledge; at best they can supply useful classifications and laws that summarize experiences into practical views and catalogue phenomena. They do not have concepts but only "files," so to speak, or "handbooks" of knowledge already acquired by other means, s From what has been said up to this point, it seems plausible to maintain that the bias toward totality is at the basis of, and helps to explain, the reductionist tendency that aims to dissolve history and sociology into each other. Despite some macroscopic shortages, especially with respect to

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historical comparisons (for example, in his famous The Open Society and its Enemies, Plato is criticized as a "totalitarian" outside of every contextualization, which confuses the characteristics of the twentieth century with those of fifth-century-B.C. Athenian democracy), the bias toward totality has found an effective critic in Karl R. Popper. 9 He notes that there is a fundamental ambiguity in the use of the term whole. The term is, in fact, generally used in two cases: first, to show the sum of all the properties or aspects of an object, and particularly of all the intersecting relations among its constitutive parts; second, to valorize some properties or particular aspects of the object in question--those things which make it seem like an organized structure, rather than a mere accumulation of parts. In this second case the term expresses a key concept of the Gestalt psychologists. For them, these objects that possess a certain organized structure constitute something more than a simple sum of their parts. The ambiguity of total or global concepts that tend, by definition, to completely consume (in certain rigid models) all of reality, without remainder, essentially derives from the confusion of the two cases. In both cases, the two meanings of term whole come to be used interchangeably. In other words, since one recognizes that each scientific analysis is necessarily selective, one is therefore unable to take into consideration all of the aspects and all of the properties of a given object or phenomenon. Instead, one tends to allow the analysis of the whole to pass, understood as a comprehensive view of significant aspects and not of all of the aspects of an object, as if it were in effect the positive and conclusive inclusion of all the distinguishing features that constitute a given sociohistorical phenomenon. And because of such a logical jump, it is possible to speak of absolute historicism and to consider totality as an object of scientific analysis that, whether from a sociological or a historiographical point of view, comes to be proposed as a new theology. There is no doubt, however, that the analysis of human relations on the conscious level is the common object of historical research and of sociological analysis. To deny the possibility of a reduction or of a mechanistic synthesis of the two disciplines does not deny their complementary aspects. The methodological formulations are certainly diverse and, as we have seen above, in some of their aspects, contradictory. In the case of historical research this formulation comprises interpretive hypotheses that seek to clarify and logically to secure the relations and the reciprocal interests between specific and individual occurrences. These occurrences are irrational or insignificant in themselves, but through historical research are rendered "intelligible by thought" [penetrati daI pensiero], to use Croce's phrase. For sociological analyses, the elaboration of certain analytical models provides a basic formulation. This should never be confused with concrete historical

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contents, which hypothetically present some of the correlations between two series of phenomena, of which only empirical research, with its instruments and its techniques, whether quantitative or qualitative, will be able to verify and, in some cases, measure. It would be misleading and probably erroneous to research the complementary aspects between history and sociology in their methodological formulations abstractly conceived. The "sacred Method," which came even before the violent polemics of scholars like Paul IC Feyerabend, 1° has lost much of its polish. A scientific discipline is that which has been able to develop its own tradition, a certain way of looking at and studying its problems, which can be considered mainstream without any claim to orthodoxy. The traditions or spheres of thought to which history and sociology refer certainly differ. And yet, primarily because of the choice of problems for investigation, history can teach important things to sociology. Very often sociology is inclined to throw itself into the "great sea of objectivity" without sufficient theoretical-conceptual apparatus, convinced that "the facts speak for themselves"; but the facts, without a preliminary theoretical and hypothetical plan, do not evade ambiguity and only preserve their stately silence. On the other hand, the sociologist can certainly contribute to the widening perspective of the historian, despite Paul Veyne's idea that sociology is nothing more than an open-ended "broad story," unaware of itself, unable to accept itself. From sociology, are extrapolated determined behaviors in their generalized forms (however socially typical, and therefore lacking in a precise historical-empirical correspondence), which can supply historical research with new points of reference with respect to the interpretation of historically specific and individualized facts. 11 It is hardly by chance that this process of exchange and of reciprocal enrichment is logically possible only on the condition that the two disciplines keep intact their autonomy and their traditions. On the other hand, this implies an idea and practice of integration that some scholars already had glimpsed in the late fifties. 12 This particular integration is not postulated as pure and simple fusion, since that often only amounts to lamentable confusion; nor is it postulated as complementarity, each discipline rectifying particular inadequacies of the other. As for the types of research effectively developed in this sense, integration created hope. It gave positive results in the manner in which it posited itself as competitive interdependence, capable of making a place for stimuli and reciprocal controls. There is no doubt that history, above all, has widened its boundaries in the course of the last forty years, so as to embrace more than just political and cultural history. It now takes into consideration the history of institutions, of social behaviors, of commonly held beliefs and of popular culture, of attitudes on death, of religious behavior, and of general daily

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behavior. It even addresses that which had always been considered extraneous to historical discourse, like the history of social classes and of professional categories, and even of climate. Especially in France, the success of the new "broader" history dates back to its turning point with the Annales, a journal founded by Marc Bloc and Lucien Febvre in 1929. The programmatic hopes of the Annales (primarily kept alive by Ferhand Braude113 with his conception of longue durde) seemed to extend the limits of elitist and dynastic history, which is founded on the great figures and their great events--to quote a wen-loved phrase of Braudel's: l'histoire-homme centre l'histoire-bataille. Despite this, it seems clear that, today, history has lost its position as the great ruler and mediator of the social sciences. One notes instead a considerable dispersion of traditions of research, with the very real risk of fragmentation of themes and of styles. From this point of view, of seemingly little help are the observations of Jacques Le Goff concerning "the new scientific procedures, which psychoanalysis, sociology, and structuralism propel . . . toward research of the atemporal and attempt to evacuate [sic] the past. ''14 A recent consolidation of historical studies, compiled by Jean Boutier and Dominque Julia, 15 allows us to assess the distance between the historical and social research of today and that which was undertaken (and dreamed of) twenty years ago in the three volumes of Faire de l'Histoire. 16 It is an outcry against Braudel, but maybe, much more simply, it is a frank recognition that when broad sociological categories are used by historians in a surreptitious and fundamentally acritical manner, the results can only turn out to be disappointing. They often simply follow current trends and fads, which are turned into "abstract paradigms," as in the case of Carlo Ginzburg. This can also explain curious contradictions. For example: Georges Duby who is the author (along with Philippe Ari6s) of a cumbersome H/stoire de la vieprivde, which is an important work in its opposition to l'histoire ~v~nernentielle, has written Le dimache de Bouvines, which is a standard historical report of a single battle, moreover one which is presented as a "founding event." In the early pages of his complex work on the Holocaust, The Final Solution, Arno J. Mayer affirms that for the serious historian the first scientific obligation is an open attitude to a constant and continual process of "revision." Mayer asserts, "[A] critical and scrupulous revision is the vital sap of reflection and of historical research; and this is as valid for Jewicide as for the cold war and for any other historical events of great importance and of difficult interpretation." I have analyzed Mayer's position in my book, The Temptation to Forget, 17 seeking to demonstrate that his comparison between the two European world wars of this century and the Thirty Years War, concluding with the ~reaty of Westphalia, as sugges-

five as it is, at the end does not prove convincing--even if only because it seems somewhat difficult to equate "horse and tank, catapult and Stukas." One can understand--as I observed in that study--"the historian's concern not to fall into the personalistic fallacy" on the basis of which great historical events (in themselves essentially extrasubjective) would come to dep e n d on strictly individual idiosyncrasies. Consequently, the great individual, the "hero" of Thomas Carlyle or the "Over Soul" of Ralph W. Emerson would be seen as the great creator, if not the mechanistic deus ex machina, of overall historical development. From the point of view of the macrosocial explanatory establishment, competent historians legitimately worry themselves with relevant antecedents and seek almost to deny the rash theoreticians of progress, from Condorcet to today, as chronological destiny. The historian is able to find, as in our case, a plausible precedent of the "sanctified violence" of Nazism in the medieval crusades or the Thirty Years War, as a type of European laceration that would have its tragic replica in the European "civil war" of this century. In addition, fearful of "demonizing" a character (even a little Lucifer, like Adolf Hitler), the historian who is alert and sociologically up to date does not limit herself or himself to exploring the economic and political "factors," but attempts to trace the fundamental lines of the mental framework and climate of the time--the philosophical ambiance, so to speak, in which the character belongs. The historian, in other words, returns to storytelling. After multiple and generous attempts to quantify history, with an abundance of tables and statistics, and to psychologize history with astute analyses and even with interviews of the dead, there seems to be a return to Herodotus. The historian returns to create a relation of events that is carried out over time, being recreated as a tale, as narration. For Lawrence Stone it is a sort of long-awaited vindication, now to be heartily relished, is Is it then true that the longue durde of Fernand Braudel and disciples is an expansion of the boundaries of historiography? That the sociologists do not have any more to say to the historians and that their microhistory has resolved itself in short-range learning, in petty small-scale research? Do we return then to the traditional separations of sociology and history? Should we renounce on principle the collaboration and the "reciprocal enrichment" between the two sister disciplines? Among historians belonging to the Anna/es, if not orthodox Braudelians, it is time now to defend themselves against charges of treason. They seem to say: Yes, it is true, we are traitors. But we betray Braudel in order to be more faithful to him. Bernard Lepetit, Jacques Revel, and even Jacques Le Goff appear to have embarked on this road to Damascus. After much research on micro and macro structures, and on viewpoints abundantly informed by

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sociology and anthropology, here is what they discovered as absolute innovation and ancient truth: the actors of history make sense of its events. The post-Braudelians beat their chests and recognize that the big question of historical research, much neglected by the old style of Annales, centers on the capacities of historical actors. We are still not at the "hero" of Thomas Carlyle, nor at the prophet, nor at the great individual, founder of religions, or of nations, or of an entire linguistic and literary tradition. Nor have we arrived at explicit "hero worship," or adoration of the hero, as the charismatic creator of history and its destiny. But they strongly denounce the limits and the blindness of history according to Braudel, that is, a history of structures, which is an impersonal, extrasubjective history. 19 The new historians, instead, tend to think that structures have only the meaning that historical actors bestow on them. These structures cannot remain immutable in an "indefinite duration" of time because they depend on the significance that is given to or taken from them in the passage of time. For history, as for sociology, what is prevailing is that which has been called the "return of the actor"; the actor as depositor and dispenser, who gives or refutes meaning to events. Stone offers us a convincing picture (even if the broad lines make it subject to notable exceptions) of the situation in which historians and sociologists spill over. If one still cannot speak of a real and true divorce, it seems clear that we are at least in front of a progressive distancing. Using a witty metaphor of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Stone defines the two groups of historians, those fond of the facts and those fond of macro theories, respectively, as the seekers of mushrooms and the parachutists. The first group keeps its snout to the soil, while the second falls from the clouds and does not always touch ground. Understandably, Stone's judgment is also more rigid with regard to the sociologists whose faces are split in two: on one side are the experimentalists and those impassioned by general reconstructions; on the other side are the builders of models. Both history and sociology despise the qualitative description of the ensemble of unique events which characterized history in the old manner and, in many ways, was completely lacking in foundation. First, the specificity of empirical social research impedes the construction of comparative models or, more modestly, the elaboration of medium-range hypotheses (or middle range theories as termed by Robert K. Merton); second, there is the matter of the impossibility of f~ding scientifically, or mathematically, verifiable data. It is no wonder Stone concludes that in the sphere of political science, of anthropology, of psychology and of many other social sciences, skepticism in confrontations with the historical approach would be very much diffused . . . . Above all, the sociologists isolate themselves even more from the historians by adopting a style of writing almost antiliterary, obscure, turgid, repetitive, pretentious, spotted with slangy expressions or neologisms lacking

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significance, or else of useless, sophisticated algebraic formulae and impenetrable statistical tables.2° It would be fair to point out that the reaction against unnecessary obscurity in the style and the pomposity of some sociological formulae has come from inside sociology itself. Everyone recalls the biting criticism of C. Wright Mills who, taking his cue from Talcott Parsons, reduced his entire Social System to no more than two pages. But the question evidently is not just a problem of style. It is a question of substance. Stone enumerates with stubborn precision the three motives for which historians refute functionalistic, sociological theory: first, there exists on the inside of every society residual institutions that survive because they come to be equipped with an autonomous, institutional life of their own; second, many societies are attacked, so to speak, by powerful ideologies that cause them to crumble; last, it must always be kept in mind that human beings are much more than rational beings, directed toward preserving the system. They are also playful animals, symbolic, ritualistic, and in some aspects lacking sense with respect to that which is useful and therefore functional to the existing society. Stone recognizes that probably the greatest historical-sociologist was Max Weber, but asserts at the same time that "history became ever more short-sighted and drawn in on itself while social sciences were becoming ever more ahistorical. ''21 It seems to me that what should be stressed is that today's criticism, going against the structuralism of longue dur~e, is making itself ever more harsh and destructive; even with those cultures that have not had a true and real historiography like the one practiced by the historians of Annales. These other cultures, on the contrary, are always limiting themselves, albeit with considerable results, to the history of great men and great political events, to a more elite group. They demonstrate a sovereign carelessness for the aspects of human cohabitation most narrowly tied to habit and daily life. It is almost superfluous to remark that in these cultures sociology and other social sciences have always been considered with the conceit reserved for sciences sui generis, of little reliability, constituently lacking in any real cognitive capacity. Criticism here seems not only to embrace that which is still not there, but posits itself as a preventative measure, intended to safeguard the traditional historiography with respect to the "contagion" of social history and of microhistory connected to sociology, to cultural anthropology, and to social psychology. It has recently been written (with exaggerated alarm) that the risk of transforming ourselves into exclusivehistorians of structures is always lurking behind the door, in ease we should miss the link with the history of ideas, of culture, of spirituality. We are satiated with histories of commonlyheld beliefs. Can we sustain that the great historians of the eighteenth century, from Vico to Gibbons, to Muratori, and those of the Restoration, from Guizot to Burke to ToequeCJle, no longer say anythingto us? ... Arrivingat the end of the Millennium

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and the shining dawn of the new Millennium--with its immense problems of upsetting demographics, of environment, of the same anthropologic and religious geography that assails the planet--we can no longer sit still in front of the tables of our rich archives, enjoying ourselves with the history of dally lives, of extremely minute details, of the subaltern, of the primitive. If, from this type of history we have dealt more with a utility, we should admit that we have paid for it perhaps by distancing ourselves a little bit too much from that other history;, a history of change, of revolutions, of ideas, of "religious living," of the complexity of the profound, of the "duration" of which has been noted. Today it seems to us to have lost the feeling of the whole, broad history which one measures with the events of everyone, as individuals and as an entire humanity. It goes beyond the dimension, the circle, the confines of our dear Christian West, as well as of our flourishing gardens, breeding grounds and work laboratories. We recognize ourselves in the worlds of others (although they are strangers to our philologies), because of hopes born out of unhappiness, today we feel close to them even though they were once far away. 22

We have cited this long passage because in it, more so than in other, more restrained scientific texts, it manifests the pathos that implies a Eurocentric passion for supremacy--historical, cultural, and religious--of the West that today feels threatened and in danger. But, with analogous sentiments we seem to be able to perceive (as Stone himself does even if in a general and much more cautious style) that the actual danger of history in a "simplistic, mechanistic determinism is based on some preconceived theoretical idea of universal validity, independent of time and space, verified--as one would expect--on the protection of rules and scientific methods. "23 The authority on which Stone places his "fundamental criticism" is that of Robert Nisbet, the well-remembered author of The Questfor Community and of other books in which the intuitive-artistic moment of research is exalted. This moment will clearly never be forgotten nor deliberately omitted, but too often appears conditioned by a clearly conservative attitude, so as to justify the suspicion that its partiality toward subjective judgments hides in reality the refusal to quietly come to grips with prevalent economic interests. But regarding this, in the end, Stone gives persuasive evidence of his basic composure. He writes that "without doubt the alarmism of conservatives is not wholly justified. But if indeed the historians should end up returning to their ever more narrow view, condensing the gamut of intellectual alternatives--as was done in the early 1990s--they would risk either an increasing sterility or else a f~agmentation into factions. "~ Probably the positive encounter between history and sociology allows for a profound reorientation of the two disciplines. If history contents itself in being "monumental history" or of the great individual (to use a phrase from the young Friedrich Nietzsche), and if, on the other hand, sociology does not learn how to renounce its own bad habit of flirting with the natural sciences with its very complicated and unfruitful quantitativism, it is difficult to foresee a positive outcome. In another work I have dealt with this problematic tangle, the solution of which depends, at least in its preliminary

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steps, on the collaboration between history and sociology, without which the two disciplines seem destined to a serious and substantial methodological crisis, z5 Braudel himself, among other things, writes diffusely (and with customary sobriety) of the "time of the historian" and of the "time of the sociologist. "26 His astonishment is alluring, but it seems that it should not be taken seriously: '~t the end of a raid on the country of mathematical, social timelessness, here I am back to time, to the duration. And as an incorrigible historian I marvel once more that sociologists have not been able to escape from here. The fact is that their time is not ours: it is much less imperious, and also less concrete, it is never at the heart of their problems and their reflections. "27 According to Braudel, the time of the sociologists is a malleable time; they can sever it, block it, put it back into motion, they can consider it from a diachronic point of view and also, more often from a synchronic one. This time, which grounds itself on thinking about life as if it were dealing with a mechanism which can occasionally come to a halt, perhaps can consider a particular aspect with greater attention, but it cannot be the same time of the historian. On this subject, Braudel is rather straightforward: "the profound structure of our profession is repelling. Our time is exacting like that of economists. When a sociologist tells us that a structure only ceases to destroy itself in order to reconstruct itself, we voluntarily accept the explanations which historical observation confirms. But we would want, in the axis of our habitual demands, to know the precise duration of these movements, positive or negative. ''28 But Braudel is not content with general affirmations. He offers specific examples. He cites, among others, Jean Paul Sartre's studies concerning characters of painting and of literature, from Tintoretto to Gustave Haubert. He is aware that Sartre's analysis has its own dialectic movement that departs from the superficial; that is from official personal data to a deeper framework, or to the context that is behind it, supporting it, and informing the specific case or individuality of the character or the event. He would like a reverse examination also to take place; one that would part from the sociohistoric and economic context to reascend or descend to the single event. 29 There is a page of Lawrence Stone's in which the return of history to the story, in all of its aspects--from a social history to an economic one, to a history of institutional structures--comes to be celebrated in almost triumphant tones. Stone writes that George* Duby has dared to do that which a few years ago would have been, to say the least, unthinkable. He dedicated an entire book to a single battle--Bouvine*. . . . C.arlo Ginsburg has offered us an accurate description of the cosmology of an obscure and humble miller of northern Italy in the early 1500s . . . . Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has painted a unique and unforgettable picture of life and death, of

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work and sexuality, of religion and customs, in a Pyr6n6,es village of the early 1300s. Montaillou . . . . Carlo M. Cipolla ... has recently published a book that is primarily

concerned with reconstructing, in a more evocative manner, the personal reactions to the terrible crisis of a widespread epidemic. It does not calculate the statislics of morbidity and mortality. For the first time, we are told the story of history.... If my diagnosis is correct, the inclination of the "new historians" toward a narration is a sign of the fading of an era: the end of trying to arrive at a coherent and scientific explanation of change in the past. The models of historic determinism, based on the economy, on demography, or on sociology have disintegrated in front of the facts. 3° It s e e m s clear that the sociology to which Stone refers is the s a m e o n e held by the majority of p e o p l e today, that is to say, sociology exclusively tied to the m e t h o d s of naive quantitativism. This sociology in s o m e cases is too technically e l a b o r a t e and seeks in every way to imitate the o p e r a t i v e f o r m s and the structure of explanations that belong to the natural sciences. T h e s e sciences are considered sciences of the highest level, as "solid" sciences. F u r t h e r m o r e , this sociology is not aware of h o w the p r o b l e m a t i c cond i t i o n f o u n d its w a y t o d a y , s p e c i f i c a l l y in t h e s c i e n c e s at o n e t i m e c o n s i d e r e d "exact" and therefore, superior, to the "vague or a p p r o x i m a t e sciences." O n the contrary, today's sociology, in the n a m e of a n t i d o g m a t i s m and o f a r e n e w e d critical spirit, has to pave the way for a new alliance, w h i c h g o e s b e y o n d every scientistic a m b i t i o n of " g e o m e t r i c a l i z i n g the w o r l d " (to use a p o l e m i c p h r a s e f r o m E d m u n d H u s s e r l with r e g a r d to Galileo), b e t w e e n the natural sciences and the h u m a n sciences.

ENDNOTES 1. For elaboration on this subject, refer to chapter 2, part 5 of "I1 metodo storico-comparativo" in my book, Trattato di sociologia, UTEX V ed., 1994, pp. 369-391. 2. A. Abbott, "History and Sociology:.The Lost Synthesis," in Social Science History, 15, 2, 1991, pp. 201-238. 3. J. Barzun, Clio and the Doctors--Psycho-history, Quanto-history, and History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974, p. 145. 4. J. Barzun, op.cit., p. 146. 5. My essay, "Metodologia soeiologica e ricerca storica," in Quaderni di sociologia, 1957, now in ldee per la nuova societa, Florence, Vallecehi, 1974, pp. 32-40. 6. N. Chiaromonte, The Paradox of History, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, p. 32. 7. C. Antoni, Lo storicismo, 'lbrino, ERI, 1957, p. 196. 8. For more on Crocean historidsm, the literature is very ample; for a relatively recent and balanced contribution, see D. Rober~ Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978. 9. See, especially Karl R. Popper's, The Poverty of Historicism, Boston, Beacon Press, 1957, (originally in Economica, 11 & 12, 1944-1945). 10. For a detailed account, see Paul K. Feyerabend's D/a/ego su/metodo, tr. It. Bari, l.aterza, 1989. 11. I would like to cite, as an example, Louise A. Tilly's Politics and Class in Milan--18811901, New York, Oxford University Press, 1992. 12. I am thinking particularly of M, Komarovsky, in Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences, Glencoe, Free Press, 1957, especially Part I, "History and Social Research," p. 33.

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13. With regard to the double, sometimes ambiguous role played by E Bmudel, one should look at L. Krieger's Time's Reasons, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 157: "Brandel is the figure who causes confusion among the genemflons of Annalistes because he both continued the dependence upon the neighboring human sciences pioneered by his mentor, Lucien Febvre, and he advocated a historical structuralism that linked him to the anthropological and literary stmcturalists and that prepared the way for the current generation of Annalistes and poststructuralists with their historically internal doctrines of serial history and the archaeology of historical knowledge." 14. L Le Goff, Storia e memoria, tr. It., Torino, Einaudi, p.181. 15. J. Boufler and D. Julia, ed. "Passes recomposes--Champs et chantiers de l'histoire, Paris, Ed. Autrement, 1995. 16. J. Le Goff, P. Nora, eds. Faire de l'Histoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1974. 17. The Temptation to Forget, Westport and London, Greenwood Press, 1994. 18. L. Stone, The Past and the Present, Boston, London and Henley, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981; tr. It., under the fl0e, V i a ~ nella storia, Bari, Laterza, 1987; citations are taken from this translation. 19. See especially R. Romano's, Braudel e noi--Reflessioni sulla culture storica del nostro tempo, Roma Donzelli, 1995. 20. L. Stone, op.cit., p. 9. 21. L. Stone, op.ci£, p. 11. 22. G. De Rosa, "Microstoria addio," in L'Avvenire, March 17, 1995, p. 21. 23. L. Stone, op.cit., p. 45. 24. L. Stone, op.cit., p. 47. 25. "lhken from my work, Histoire and histoires de vie, Paris, Klincksieck, 1990, II ed., pp. 173-191. 26. E Brandel, La longue dur~e," in Annales, n.4, Oct.-Dec. 1958, pp. 725-753; now in E B., Ecrits sur l'histoire, Paris, Flammarion, 1969, p. 75. 27. /b/d. 28. /b/d 29. E Braude~ op.cit., p. 80. 30. L. Stone, op.cit., p. 98-100.