Professional Documents
Culture Documents
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Research Foundation of State University of New York, Fernand Braudel Center are
collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Review (Fernand Braudel
Center)
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Braudel on the Longue Durée
Problems of Conceptual Translation
Immanuel Wallerstein
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
156 Immanuel Wallerstein
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
BRAUDEL ON THE LONGUE DURÉE 157
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
158 Immanuel Wallerstein
ences sociales and sciences humaines. They're not quite the same.
man sciences, for example, normally includes history, and it
ally includes geography. It doesn't usually include political scien
In French, the term, social sciences, has a more nomothetic inflec-
tion, and therefore usually does not include history. Still, these are
not hard and fast rules; usage is fluctuating in French.
Furthermore, the institution he created in France a few years
after this article was written, uses neither term. It is called the Mai-
son des Sciences de l'Homme, the house of the sciences of man.
This name was given, of course, before the days of insistence on
gender-neutral language.
The name was perhaps a way of papering over the two distinc-
tive usages. For the self-assigned task of the Maison has been to
bring together philosophers, historians, anthropologists, sociolo-
gists, and economists.
The political scientists weren't included because of the existence
of Sciences-Po, a powerful Parisian institution that lays exclusive
claim to that terrain. In addition, political science in France has
been more closely linked to law than it is in some other countries.
For example, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, constructed
much later, has a fourfold spatial division for researchers: sciences
and technology; literature and arts; history, philosophy, and the
sciences of man (ethnology, sociology, geography); and law, eco-
nomics, and political science.
Clarifying what Braudel meant by the "social sciences" is per-
haps less important than understanding the context in which he
wrote- France in the 1950's. What was going on intellectually at
that time? We should start with the journal, Annales E.S.C. By
this time, it had become very widely read by historians not only in
France but in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Poland, and
Hungary, as well as in a number of Latin American countries. But
it was not yet very much read in the United States, Germany, Scan-
dinavia, or Great Britain. It was a kind of "Latin world" journal.
It was still fighting very strongly against the entrenched pow-
er of those French historians who were very idiographic and very
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
BRAUDEL ON THE LONGUE DURÉE 159
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
160 Immanuel Wallerstein
Let's start with the title. The title is Histoire et sciences sociales:
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
BRAUDEL ON THE LONGUE DURÉE 161
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
162 Immanuel Wallerstein
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
BRAUDEL ON THE LONGUE DURÉE 163
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
164 Immanuel Wallerstein
Furthermore, Braudel insists, models are only valid for the so-
cial reality that they describe. They are only as good as the initial
observations are valid. And, says Braudel, the analyst has to look
at them at more than one point in time. The analyst needs to see
how they relate to the same phenomena 10 years earlier, 50 years
earlier, 100 years earlier, 500 years earlier. If one puts the longue
durée into the analysis, one comes out with quite different models.
Braudel insists he is not against the idea of creating models but,
unless one involves the longue durée, they are meaningless.
Then suddenly Braudel throws a curve ball. After the continu-
ous discussions of temps "time" and durée "duration" scattered
throughout the article, he unexpectedly and suddenly notes that
social scientists are never tempted to talk about temps perdu "lost
time." He uses the phrase temps perdu only once. French readers
know immediately that this can only be a reference to Marcel
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
BRAUDEL ON THE LONGUE DURÉE 165
He says at another point that the important things are not only
those that are loudly shouted. He is referring to events. Events
always involve recordings of loudly shouting people. An event is
somebody saying or doing something out loud. But, asks Braudel,
what about the people who are quiet? How about the people who
don't say anything? It is what Conan Doyle called the dog that
didn't bark. Braudel is calling upon us to be detectives. In order to
figure out why the dog didn't bark, we have to know the frequency
of dogs barking and why they bark. Then we may notice that a cer-
tain dog in a comparable situation didn't bark, from which we can
deduce x, y, and/or z.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
166 Immanuel Wallerstein
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
BRAUDEL ON THE LONGUE DURÉE 167
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
168 Immanuel Wallerstein
("history- science of t
he is the faithful disci
of what he, Braudel, i
which had been the s
history. History is abo
the longue durée is be
ent. The present is the
So it's a final battle t
practical conclusion. F
peal to all social scient
is sociology, what is e
turf. Let's see instead
What do history, anth
science have in commo
mon three things: ma
longue durée. That's a
What does mathema
much quantitative data
new math. That is to s
from which we then
tions.
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
BRAUDEL ON THE LONGUE DURÉE 169
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
170 Immanuel Wallerstein
your theorizing to th
continue to go back a
plausible in the end.
Understanding his
standing Braudel. Tra
into French, then fro
reading Braudel intell
This content downloaded from 168.176.5.118 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:38:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms