Debating the Longue Durée

Abstract

Has history, as a social science, become inaudible? With the exhaustion of the great paradigms and the fragmentation of research, have historians cut themselves off from their public, retreating to an internal dialogue with no resonance beyond their ivory tower? And, if this observation proved true, would it signal a crisis for the discipline? This is the premise of David Armitage and Jo Guldi’s reflection in the text that opens our debate. The “crisis of history” has been a recurring theme for at least a generation. Here, however, the two authors offer a very different diagnosis from the one the Annales proposed in two recent editorials.1 This is, in part, a matter of perspective. Armitage and Guldi’s position stems explicitly and near-exclusively from North-American historiography, and especially from the major research universities in the United States, where the professional imperative to demonstrate novelty has fostered the “turns” that the authors criticize and which can sometimes appear rather removed from European historiographical practices. This situated perspective explains, perhaps, why Armitage and Guldi appear particularly sensitive to what they describe as the loss of history’s influence as a discipline on society, and, more specifically, on public policy. Yet in their own way, they might just be advocating another of those “turns.” Is the article published here not contemporary to their History Manifesto, addressed to the entire community of historians?2 In both texts, they call for a return to the longue durée, combined