Today in 1776, historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark.
In 1810, Niebuhr began a series of lectures at the University of Berlin on Roman history that became the basis of his monumental History of Rome (1811-1832). According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Niebuhr
…started a new era in historical studies by his method of source criticism; all subsequent historians are in some sense indebted to him… The failings of classical sources were already recognized, but it was Niebuhr who evolved what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called tätige Skepsis—the “constructive skepticism” which is the root of a scientific method of criticism. It was Niebuhr who showed how to analyze the strata in a source, particularly poetical and mythical tradition, and how to discard the worthless and thereby lay bare the material from which the historical facts could be reconstructed.
The 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica notes that “…since his conception of ancient Roman story made laws and manners of more account than shadowy lawgivers, he undesignedly influenced history by popularizing that conception of it which lays stress on institutions, tendencies and social traits to the neglect of individuals.”
On July 6, 1886, historian Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was born on Lyon, France. Encyclopedia Britannica:
[In 1941,] Bloch’s extraordinary services [to his country] gained him an exemption from the Vichy government’s anti-Semitic legislation, enabling him to teach for two more years in southern France and compose the unfinished statement of his personal and scholarly creed, Apologie pour l’histoire; ou, métier d’historien (1949; The Historian’s Craft). Bloch’s best-known and most accessible work, it is both a valuable guide to historical methodology and a stirring statement of a scholar’s civic responsibility. After the Nazis occupied all of France, he joined the French Resistance in 1943 and became a leader. Captured by the Vichy police in March 1944, Bloch was tortured by Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie and killed by a German firing squad.
In Marc Bloch: A Life in History, Carole Fink wrote:
[The Historian’s Craft] opens with his son’s question: “Tell me, Daddy, what is the use of history?”… The answer would justify not only his lifelong commitment, but also the underlying creed of Western civilization, which was based on a continuous and vital relationship with the past. Only a few months earlier, on the day the Germans had entered Paris, a young General Staff officer actually cried: “Are we to believe that history has betrayed us?”
The first reason for studying history, according to Bloch, was its enduring appeal to the imagination and intelligence…. The second, and more important purpose, in a world numbed by war and on the threshold of atomic and interstellar exploration, was that history was essential to providing intelligibility to, and achieving understanding of, the human story….
Defining history as “the science of men in time,” Bloch attacked his old demons, “the idol of origins” and the artificial barriers between past and present, and preached “historical sensitivity.” … He outlined his personal version of the historian’s procedures, the search for evidence as a pursuit of “tracks” through a variety of documents; the rigorous critic of sources; and, in the analysis of data, the striving for the appropriate vocabulary and impartiality. The last chapter, on historical causation, ended abruptly: “In history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are to be looked for…” …
Bloch was enough of a historian, and sufficiently knowledgeable of the social sciences, to launch an enduring challenge to both camps. While conscientiously seeking explanation in history, neither discipline must neglect the fluidity inherent in all individual and social phenomena as well as in the observer’s perspective.
In Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience, Liah Greenfeld sought to connect all “areas of human experience, contributing to the study of all of them and the construction of a unified science of humanity.” Greenfeld placed Bloch (and her own work) in the all-encompassing, all-inclusive tradition of the human sciences and its enduring challenge to narrow academic specializations:
[Mind, Modernity, Madness] follows the lead of three giants of the human sciences, who were also philosophers among other things: Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Marc Bloch, alternately claimed by anthropology and sociology; sociology, cultural history and economic history; and history and sociology.
Specifically, it adopts Durkheim’s “rules” of treating every social fact as a thing and of careful, unprejudiced definitions as the first step in attempting any explanation, and combines these with Weber’s “methodological individualism.” From Bloch it takes the distinction between “intentional” and “unintentional” evidence, and the preference for the latter (sources not intentionally related to the phenomenon one seeks to explain, and serving, as it were, as “witnesses in spite of themselves”); the tactic of cross-examining the evidence—or juxtaposing it at every point with evidence derived from elsewhere; and the reliance on language as both evidence and an instrument of analysis.
Durkheim, Weber, and Bloch (I list them chronologically) are unassailable authorities in the social sciences. But, quite apart from the fact that their major theories, all of which treated social—namely, cultural, economic, political—phenomena of great importance, though proposed a very long time ago if measured in life spans of theories in science, have not been superseded, but retain a canonical status for anyone wishing to work in the areas to which they pertain, I rely on them because all three also thought of a unified science of man (or human sciences), and defined it, whether they referred to it as “sociology,” as did Durkheim, “history,” as did Bloch, or sometimes “history” and sometimes “sociology,” as did Weber, as the mental science.
This may be lost in translation when Durkheim’s use of the word “mental” in French is rendered “social” in English, or glossed over in the case of Weber’s insistence on subjective meaning as the defining feature of social action. But in Bloch’s explicit formulation it cannot be missed. “In the last analysis,” he says, “it is human consciousness which is the subject-matter of history. The interrelations, confusions, and infections of human consciousness are, for history, reality itself.” I consider myself belonging to the same “mentalist” tradition in the human sciences.