| The aim of this thesis is to relate the Annales School of historiography to major trends of the French intellectual milieu during the years 1949 to 1968. This was done by showing that certain representative texts from the Annales Journal and from the intellectual milieu had parallel course of development which could be apprehended by the appropriately framed schemas of interpretation.;Now, to demonstrate the existence of these parallels, it was necessary to establish certain schemas of interpretation that could guide our reading of the material at hand. Since we were trying to relate historiography to structuralist and phenomenological texts (existentialism being subsumed under the latter term), our schemas were loosely defined as 'structure' (i.e., the systemic functioning of a group of elements) and 'being-in-the-modes-of-its-appearing' (i.e., the ways in which reality manifests itself). With these categories in mind, then, we examined the socio-economic history of the Journal (1949-1968) and found that a six-phase periodization emerged: narrative-structuralism (1949-1951), simple-structuralism (1952-1956), interpretive-contextualism (1957-1960), operational-structuralism (1961-1963), problematicity (1964-1966), and post-problematicity (1967-1968).;The narrative-structural and simple-structural phases entailed a certain directness in the way historical reality (viewed as a primitive structure or system of constants) presented itself, that is, there was little in the way of subtle interpretation or tortuous data manipulation. If these first two modes differed, it was only in so far as articles written in the former had more of a narrative or temporal dimension than those written in the latter mode. In contrast to this, articles written in the third phase of our periodization (i.e., interpretative-contextualism) were characterized by a relative indirectness in the manner by which historical reality seemed to manifest itself in the articles. Here the emphasis was on delicate interpretation, puzzle-solving, deciphering by way of oblique references to historical context, etc. With the operational-structural phase a scientific orientation was featured as data was measured and manipulated in order to draw out the existence of latent patterns or structures. As for the problematic and post-problematic modes, the articles now seemed to be marked by a certain unknowability, mystery, paradoxicality, etc., although the post-problemistic phase showed these difficulties as being overcome.;Given these newly refined categories (or schemas of interpretation), the final stage of our experiment involved our turning to the intellectual milieu texts described above. Since the latter displayed a course of development which paralleled the six-phase periodization, our contextualization experiment was a success. In effect, it was shown that the Annales was deeply tied to an intellectual milieu that heretofore seemed to bear no relation to it.;To be specific, our focus was on the social and economic history articles that appeared in the Journal during the aforementioned time-frame. After discussing our reasons for choosing this textual source, we defined our intellectual milieu materials as the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss, the hermeneutic phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur, and the existentialist drama of Sartre. The works of these well-known thinkers were chosen, not only because they were contemporaneous with our Annales texts, but also because they embodied disparate tendencies in the intellectual milieu (i.e., structuralism, phenomenology, and existentialism). And in this connection it was reasoned that, if parallels could be found between such heterogenous sources, we would be touching upon very deep strata of the intellectual world as well as showing that the Annales was profoundly involved (i.e., contextualized) in that world. |
