Perspectivies of History

Historians approach the subject of history from different perspectives and interpret their findings according to underlying beliefs, attitudes, methodologies, and even ideologies. Whatever method is used is usually found to be adequate and most correct by the person using it, but an examination of a number of different approaches will show that not all methods are equal and that some methods undercut the writer's ability to cope with history while other methods suggest a way of delving deeply into the subject and finding the nature of the forces that shape history.

Fernand Braudel was a member of a school of history developed in a journal the Annales d'histoire Tconomique et sociale. The view taken in that journal was that a traditional and humanistic view of history could be combined with a method adopted from other disciplines, offering a broad definition of the role of the historian. This inspired a scholarship of an interdisciplinary character. Braudel followed this approach and in his work placed historical events in a broader context. Braudel took a scientific approach and wrote about the use of the scientific method in historical analysis. Braudel wrote a treatise on method that was far-reaching and detailed, and it embodied his view that the most important advance in history was to be found in the crisis in the social sciences. New developments were noted by Braudel, but he also found that these developments were not being used because the social sciences had

to the development of civilization and to the desire on the part of society to create controls for the emotional life of individuals and whole populations. Freud describes civilization as a two-pronged entity consisting on the one hand of all the knowledge and capacity acquired by human beings to control nature and on the other all the regulations needed to control the passions of human beings toward one another: The two trends of civilization are not independent of each other: firstly, because the mutual relations of men are profoundly influenced by the amount of instinctual satisfaction which the existing wealth makes possible; secondly, because an individual man can himself come to function as wealth in relation to another one. . . and thirdly, moreover, because every individual is virtually an enemy of civilization, though civilization is supposed to be an object of universal human interest. Freud shows here a view of history that both contributes to the psychological development of the individual and that is influenced by that development at the same time. Carlo Ginzburg offers a new approach called Cultural History, shifting from the social history of Robinson and Braudel. Cultural history is sought in the detailed re

Category: History - P