Fernand Braudel and the Structures of Historical Time
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 24 August 2024 is the 122nd anniversary of the birth of Fernand Braudel (24 August 1902–27 November 1985), who was born in Luméville-en-Ornois, a provincial village in Lorraine, on this date in 1902.
Braudel was one of the most influential representatives of the Annales school of historians, which also included Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, who are usually thought of as the founders of the school. I’ve mentioned the Annales school in several episodes, in particular, in my episode on Marc Bloch. What is or was distinctive about the historiography of the Annales school?
One feature of the school that might not be immediately obvious upon first inspection is that Annales historians were not Marxists. That might sound like a strange thing to say, but French intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century was so pervasively Marxist that not being a Marxist was enough to make an academic into an eccentric, an outlier, an outsider, and probably an outcast. I could even argue that Braudel’s interest in what he called material civilization was essentially in consonance with Marx’s historical materialism. The opportunity was there to forge a connection between material civilization and historical materialism, but the Annalists declined to pursue this connection. This is rare, and we should recognize the rarity of it.
A more conventional way to characterize Annales historiography can be found in another Annalist. Lucien Febvre in his “A New Kind of History,” gives some insight into the Annales method by discussing Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, while also introducing the levels of historical time that Braudel employed:
“In order to place the major objectives of Spanish policy… in their natural historical and geographical context, he first studies the permanent forces that operate upon the human will and weigh upon it without its knowledge, guiding it along certain paths; thus we have an entire analysis never attempted before of what we mean when, almost negligently, we pronounce the word ‘Mediterranean’, and it is seen as a guiding force, channelling, obstructing, slowing down and checking or, on the other hand, heightening and accelerating the interplay of human forces. After which, in the second part, he refers to particular forces animated by a certain common factor. These are impersonal, collective forces, but this time they are dated and, so to speak, identified as being the very ones which operated in the sixteenth century, in the second half of the sixteenth century, that is to say in the space of time occupied by the reign of Philip II of Spain. The third part — events, the tumultuous, bubbling and confused flood of events, often directed by the permanent forces studied in the first part and influenced and governed by the stable forces listed in the second part, only here chance comes into play embroidering her most brilliant and unexpected variations on the loom of events.”
The Annales school is also remembered for the history of mentalities, which I discussed in my episode on Marc Bloch. The history of mentalities went on to have a history of its own, branching off from the Annales school and continuing to have influence after the major figures of the Annales school had died and French historians moved off in other directions. Braudel doesn’t place any great emphasis on the history of mentalities, though I could argue that mentalities are the cognitive embodiment of the longue durée, which is the structure of historical time that most interested Braudel.
Braudel made a tripartite distinction among what he calls levels of history. This is something I’ve found useful and so I refer to Braudel with some frequency when I employ his levels of time. These three levels of history are the history of the event, the conjuncture, and the longue durée. The history of the event (histoire événementielle) is the shortest period of historical time Braudel considers. Braudel viewed the history of the event as a superficial history, or what we could all epiphenomenal history:
“On the surface, the history of events works itself out in the short term: it is a sort of microhistory.”
Braudel described this somewhat poetically in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Volume 2, Part Three: Event, Politics and People, p. 901):
“Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.”
The history of the event has been the definitive level of history for traditional history:
“All historical work is concerned with breaking down time past, choosing among its chronological realities according to more or less conscious preferences and exclusions. Traditional history, with its concern for the short time span, for the individual and the event, has long accustomed us to the headlong, dramatic, breathless rush of its narrative.” (Fernand Braudel, On History, “History and the Social Sciences,” University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 27)
After the history of the event comes the conjuncture. The conjuncture is a period of time of a generation or less. Braudel says it is fifty years at the outside, but he also routinely refers to conjunctures of ten, fifteen, or twenty years, speaking in terms of, “…an account of conjunctures which lays open large sections of the past, ten, twenty, fifty years at a stretch ready for examination.” In comparison to the history of the event, Braudel says,
“…a history of conjunctures follows a broader, slower rhythm. So far that has above all been studied in its developments on the material plane, in economic cycles and intercycles.”
Braudel frequently mentions conjunctures in relation to economic cycles. Kenneth Clark recognized something like the conjuncture when he said of the art and architecture patronized by Pope Julius II:
“Great movements in the arts, like revolutions, don’t last for more than about fifteen years. After that the flame dies down, and people prefer a cosy glow.”
While Braudel writes about conjunctures in reference to economic cycles, he also recognizes qualitatively distinct conjunctures, distinguishing the social conjuncture and the economic conjuncture, for example, and he suggests that these qualitatively distinct conjunctures overlap and intersect, to borrow a Wittgensteinian turn of phrase. With these many overlapping and intersecting conjunctures,
“…this orchestration of conjunctures, by transcending itself, should have led us straight to the longue durée. But for a thousand reasons this transcendence has not been the rule, and a return to the short term is being accomplished even now before our very eyes.”
Overlapping conjunctures ought to lead us directly to the longue durée, but it is almost as though this development has been frustrated by the conventions of traditional history. Braudel is determined to flaunt this convention, as it is the longue durée that is the focus of Braudel’s historical interest:
“And over and above the ‘recitatif’ of the conjuncture, structural history, or the history of the longue durée, inquires into whole centuries at a time. It functions along the border between the moving and the immobile, and because of the long-standing stability of its values, it appears unchanging compared with all the histories which flow and work themselves out more swiftly, and which in the final analysis gravitate around it.”
Sometimes Braudel simply calls the longue durée structure, and of structure he writes:
“By structure, observers of social questions mean an organization, a coherent and fairly fixed series of relationships between realities and social masses. For us historians, a structure is of course a construct, an architecture, but over and above that it is a reality which time uses and abuses over long periods. Some structures, because of their long life, become stable elements for an infinite number of generations: they get in the way of history, hinder its flow, and in hindering it shape it. Others wear themselves out more quickly. But all of them provide both support and hindrance. As hindrances they stand as limits… beyond which man and his experiences cannot go. Just think of the difficulties of breaking out of certain geographical frameworks, certain biological realities, certain limits of productivity, even particular spiritual constraints: mental frameworks too can form prisons of the longue durée.”
We can see the relationship between the longue durée and Braudel’s conception of material civilization in the follow from his book Afterthoughts on Material civilization:
“…material life as I understand it is the life that man throughout the course of his previous history has made a part of his very being, has in some way absorbed into his entrails, turning the experiments and exhilarating experiences of the past into everyday, banal necessities. So no one pays close attention to them any more.”
The longue durée has become invisible to us because it is everything that is most familiar. These three levels of history — the event, the conjuncture, and the longue durée — work together:
“The longue durée, the conjuncture, the event all fit into each other neatly and without difficulty, for they are all measured on the same scale.”
They are broad categories without much nuance, but sometimes we need broad categories. That is to say, we need the abstractions appropriate to history in order to effectively conceptualize history. If we like, we can make finer distinctions in historical time. Braudel said that we could distinguish a hundred levels of historical time:
“History exists at different levels, I would even go so far as to say three levels but that would be only in a manner of speaking, and simplifying things too much. There are ten, a hundred levels to be examined, ten, a hundred different time spans.”
Another way to say this is that the history of the event, the conjuncture, and the longue durée are useful temporal abstractions for history. We can break history down in different ways, but this particular way of breaking down historical time into three levels serves the purposes of history. At least, they served Braudel’s purposes for the kind of history he wanted to write.
While I find Braudel’s tripartite distinction to be useful, its utility is limited. While the longue durée is the appropriate scale of time to measure trans-generational developments, and to understand the internal development of civilizations, we need a longer scale of time to understand the interactions of civilization in historical time, and the whole of human history. When we cross from the hundreds of years of the longue durée, to the thousands of years over which Egyptian, Western, Indian, and Chinese civilizations have existed, we require levels of history that transcend the longue durée. And when we place these civilizations into their natural historical context, we require an ever greater transcendence of the longue durée.
Braudel has already named his longest time period the longue durée, so what do we call the time period that is longer than the longue durée? The traditional historian may feel no sympathy for this question, since his responsibility to history ends with the period he has chosen for his specialization. Many traditional historians have been sharply critical of meta-historical efforts like those of Spengler and Toynbee. I’m not suggesting that Spengler and Toynbee are above criticism. Certainly they aren’t, but the legitimacy of their undertaking, which I take to be the recounting of historical time longer than the longue durée, is a question distinct from their idiosyncratic methods in taking up this undertaking. The familiar strawman is to attack the weak points in Spengler and Toynbee and then to declare any kind of meta-historical inquiry to be intrinsically bankrupt because neither Spengler nor Toynbee did justice to the idea. The honest way to attack is to attack meta-historical inquiry itself as illegitimate. Some historians have taken this problem at its hardest point and have argued that meta-historical inquiry is intrinsically illegitimate.
More historians instead make a distinction between natural history and human history, consigning natural history to the natural sciences and claiming as their own domain human history, to be narrated according to the traditions of humanistic history. Naturalistic conceptions of history, which I discussed briefly in my episode on Max Scheler, don’t make this hard distinction between natural history and human history. In naturalistic history, human history is contained within a larger context of natural history, much as the history of the event is contained within conjunctures, and conjunctures are contained within the longue durée.
One of the most familiar themes of our contemporary Copernicanism is the smallness of humanity within the vastness of the universe, which in the terms of Annales school translated into terms of naturalistic history, we can say that human history is the ephemera of the cosmos, that it passes across the stage of the universe like a firefly, hardly glimpsed before it settles back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Kant hinted at this, and Karl Löwith, after he had diagnosed all previous philosophy of history as being the recapitulation of eschatology, sought some kind of historical meaning in the natural world.
An attempt to classify further levels of historical time beyond the longue durée can be found in Steven J. Dick’s paper “Bringing Culture to Cosmos: The Post Biological Universe,” which is included in Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context. Dick doesn’t mention Braudel, and in fact he doesn’t mention any traditional history at all. He’s known for his histories of space exploration and astrobiology, so he is mostly coming from a point of view of the natural sciences, but he is, essentially, taking up where Braudel left off with the longue durée. Dick identified six levels of time scales in human thought:
Human: 100 years
Historical: 10,000 years
Anthropological: 10 million years
Geological: 5 billion years
Astronomical: 14 billion years, and
Stapledonian: biology and culture on an astronomical scale
The reference to a Stapeldonian level of time is to the science fiction author Olaf Stapledon, who wrote two books in particular that stimulated the imagination of readers, Last and First Men (1930) and Starmaker (1937). These books are memorable for the scale of time over which they unfold. I applaud this effort, but I think that Dick’s time scales of human thought could be improved. We ought to just divide up historical time in to powers of ten, and give an appropriate name to each power of ten. If that is too fine of a scale for Stapledonian thinking, then take years in the hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, and trillions. Also, what Dick called Stapledonian, i.e., biology and culture on an astronomical scale, is just a special case of his astronomical scale of time.
We could call billions of years Stapledonian, millions of years anthropological, thousands of years historical, and hundreds of years human, and that would be both simple and more schematic. So while I think there is room for improvement of Dick’s scales of time as applied to a naturalistic conception of history, I agree with his assertion that:
“…long-term Stapledonian thinking is a necessity if we are to understand the nature of intelligence in the universe today.”
History taken at the scale of the nature of intelligence in the universe makes humanity a special case of a larger conception of the universe, which could also include things like what Dick calls postbiological intelligence. I think this is appropriate for a naturalistic conception of history, but if it’s difficult to get scholars to make the transition from traditional history to the longue durée, which Braudel seemed to think was the case, it will be another level of difficulty to get historians to make the transition from the levels of time of the Annales school to a Stapledonian conception of history.
Bertrand Russell said that Stapledon’s Last and First Men was, “quite good — I mean an important book, worth writing.” (interview with Alan Melville in 1956, in Collected Papers, Détente Or Destruction, 1955–57, p. 401) That’s rare praise from Russell. Russell also wrote a review of Last and First Men in which Russell said that Stapledon was:
“…a writer with a very remarkable cosmological imagination, who has taken seriously the prophecies of astronomers as to the immense future ages during which the human race may be expected to continue. To most of us, when, if ever, we try to picture the distant future, it appears as leading up to some sort of Utopia and then growing uninteresting. The thought of (say) a hundred million years of orderly government, virtuous living, and steady scientific progress somehow fails to be inspiring. Mr. Stapledon does not have this common imaginative defect.” (The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell Volume 21 — How to Keep the Peace: The Pacifist Dilemma, 1935–38)
Russell even cited Stapledon in a work of philosophical logic, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, in the chapter on the law of the excluded middle — tertium non datur — in developing the idea of the possibility of universes that exist but which have no spatio-temporal relationship to our own — a suitably “big picture” question that can be addressed by philosophical logic, but which one is more likely to find treated in science fiction.
We get more of an understanding of Russell’s assessment of Stapledon in Russell’s short essay, “Taking Long Views,” in which Russell again praises Stapledon’s futurism, noting that many, like Russell himself, who are pessimistic in the short term, are nevertheless optimistic in the long term, and that works like those of Stapledon inspire real encouragement by their “vast vistas.” While Russell appreciated Stapledon’s cosmological perspective on history, Russell himself was often so caught up in contemporary political events that he was blind to developments that were, or should have been seen as, part of this cosmological perspective on history.
In particular, Russell was highly critical, if not contemptuous, of the Cold War Space Race. The human, all-too-human elements of the Space Race — competition, nationalism, the drive to succeed at any cost, the struggle for recognition — which so effortlessly engaged the public interest, left Russell cold. Russell’s failure to connect the excitement with the Space Race to the futurism of Stapledon is essentially a failure to connect short term futures with long term futures.
If the short term future offers us no path to the long term future, then any long term future is merely illusory. But the short term future is always one that is human, all-too-human, full of human failings and foibles, exhibiting the best and the worst of human nature side-by-side. We must be sufficiently charitable to the imperfect but striving nature of the short term human future to find within it, in embryo, as it were, the way forward. Braudel said that there were movements among the levels of historical time both upward from events through conjunctures to the longue durée, and downward from the longue durée, through conjunctures, to the history of the event. The same is true at the larger scale of cosmological history, or, as Dick calls it, Stapledonian time scales. We should not only keep in mind the various levels of cosmological history, but how each shapes the other.
