Suchergebnisse

The historical methodology of leading members of the school of historiography organized around Annales is reviewed & criticized. This school derived from the arguments of Francois Simiand against traditional empiricist historiography, & stressed the need for historians to seek meaningful correlations rather than attempting to produce a total historical record. This approach further influenced Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, & Fernand Braudel, although these authors moved away from serial to comparative history. The resulting approach seeks to reconcile serial history with the ideal of total history that Simiand criticized, & has led Annales historians back to the empiricism their school originally rejected. W. H. Stoddard.

Three different versions of Marxism as a revolutionary theory are compared: skeletal, anatomical, & physiological. Skeletal Marxism is an economic determinism founded on the classical model of thought, in which economy & society are believed separate, with one determining the other. This inadequate view evoked a positive reaction from Leninism & a negative one from humanist Marxism. Anatomical Marxism is a structuralist interpretation that denies the utility of any concept of human nature, stressing the determining role of history & society. It does not, however, adequately explain why history develops along one path & not another. An answer to that question must be found in physiological Marxism, an approach needed to overcome the conflict of skeletal & idealist or spectral Marxism. W. H. Stoddard.