Movements in Historiography: The French Annales, Psychohistory, and Historical Materialism

Full text

C.Ü. Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi,
Aralık 2009, Cilt: 35, Sayı: 2, 223-230
223
Movements in Historiography: The French Annales, Psychohistory, and Historical
Materialism
Kaya Yılmaz
Marmara Üniversitesi
History as a field of study is divided into two branches in terms of its philosophical foundations as (a)
speculative focusing on the actual content of history and (b) analytical concerned with its methodology.
This article deals with the analytical philosophy of history, focusing on the methodologies and theoretical
frameworks used by different schools of thought in history. Despite their importance in the training of
history students, theoretical frameworks or methodologies of history are not explicitly emphasized in the
curriculum of history departments. The purpose of this paper is to outline the developments in
historiography by documenting the theoretical frameworks, methods, and ideological positions of three
different historical orientations, (1) the French Annales, (2) psychohistory, and (3) historical materialism.
Keywords: historiography, historical methodology, the french annales, psychohistory, historical
materialism.
Tarih Yazıcılığında (Historiografya) Görülen Akımlar: Fransız Annales, Psikotarih
ve Tarihsel Materyalizm
Akademik çalışma alanı olarak tarih, felsefi temelleri açısından spekülatif (içerikle ilgili) ve analitik
(metodoloji ile ilgili) olmak üzere iki kısma ayrılır. Bu makale, analitik tarih felsefesini ele alarak farklı
tarih akımları tarafından kullanılan kuramsal çerçeve ve metodolojiler üzerine yoğunlaşmaktadır.
Kuramsal çerçeveler, tarih çalışmalarının temel yapı taşlarını oluşturduğundan akademik tarih yazımının
doğasını ve fonksiyonunu şekillendiren temel unsurlar arasında yer alır. Kuramsal çerçeveler ve tarih
metodolojisi tarih öğrencilerinin eğitiminde ve akademik gelişiminde önemli bir yer tutmasına rağmen
tarih bölümlerinin müfredatında yeterince vurgulanmamaktadır. Bu makalenin amacı tarih yazımındaki
gelişmeleri üç farklı tarih ekolünün (Frans
ız Annales, psikotarih, tarihi materyalizm) kuramsal
çerçevesini, metodlarını, temel kavramlarını, ideolojik pozisyonlarını ve önde gelen temsilcilerini
açıklayarak ortya koymaktır.
Anahtar Sözcükler: historiografya, tarih metodolojisi, fransız annales, psikotarih,tarihi materyalizm
History
1
as a term has two distinct yet interrelated
meanings. It refers both to the past and to the written
accounts of what happened in the past. What is implicit in
this statement is the subtle distinction between history and the
past. As just stated, whereas history is about the written
accounts of the virtually limitless past events, peoples and
processes, the past refers to all human events and associated
processes, most of which are not recorded. That is to say,
history as a field of study is not only the subject but also
object of its own discipline. The discipline of history can be
divided into two branches in terms of its philosophical
underpinnings as (a) the speculative focusing on the actual
content of history and (b) the analytical concerned with its
methodology or the ways historical explanations are
constructed.
The focus of this article is on the analytical philosophy of
history. A wide range of historical movements can be found
in the analytical philosophy of history. Understanding these
movements or what changes occurred in the methodologies
and theories of history over time is important for professional
development in the field in that methodologies provide the
building blocks for the study of the past by providing
historians with conceptual tools used to construct the past.
Theoretical frameworks in the discipline of history also shape
the analytic thinking of historians and thus the nature and
function of scholarly historical writing. Therefore,
developing expertise in history necessitates a strong
Kaya Yılmaz, Marmara Üniversitesi, İstanbul. E-Posta:
kaya.yilmaz@marmara.edu.tr
command of different historical movements and their
methodologies on the part of history students.
Despite their importance in the training of students,
historical theoretical frameworks are not sufficiently and
explicitly emphasized in many history departments (Tosh,
2002) as is the case for social studies education departments.
As a result, the majority of students in history education and
related fields tend to have a limited understanding of how the
past is turned into history by different historical approaches.
The implication of this shortcoming is that when these
students become history teachers in high schools or social
studies teachers in elementary schools, their inadequate
training in historiography thwarts their effort to help students
effectively deal with the conflicting accounts of the past. That
is why teachers like historians and history educators need to
be cognizant of different historical orientations to be able to
plan, implement and assess their instructional activities in a
pedagogically meaningful way (Yilmaz, 2008). A growing
body of research on history education presents strong
evidence that if teachers do not have a sufficient command of
historiography and the syntactic structures of the subject
matter of history, they may fail to translate that aspect of the
discipline into curriculum and instructional practices, may
not develop the ability to distinguish between more and less
legitimate claims within a field, and thus “run the risk of
misrepresenting the subject matters they teach”, failing to
help students confront the complexity of the past (Grossman,
Wilson and Shulman, 1989, p. 30; Stearns, Seixas ve
Wineburg, 2000; Seixas, 2001, 2002).

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The above paragraphs clearly illustrate the need to get
familiarized with historiography. Because the space
constraint imposed by the journal does not allow this article
to review all the movements in historiography, it focuses
exclusively on three historical orientations. The purpose of
this article is to survey the developments in the theory and
practice of history by documenting the theoretical
frameworks, methods, principal concepts, ideological
positions, and outstanding practitioners of the three different
schools of historical thought, (1) the French Annales, (2)
psychohistory, and (3) historical materialism or Marxist
historiography, each of which has left an imprint in
historiography.
The French Annales
Scholars participated in the efforts to view and study
history from an innovative perspective in order to obtain a
more comprehensive understanding of the human past. The
Annales movement can be defined in modern terms as “the
attempt by French scholars to adopt economic, linguistic,
sociological, geographical, anthropological, psychological,
and natural science notions to study history and to infuse a
historical orientation into the social and human sciences”
(Bentley, 1999, p. 107). The Annales profoundly changed the
conceptions of what constitutes and what makes history
(Iggers, 1997).
Led by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the founders of
the influential journal, Annales d’historie economique et
sociale, the historians making up the Annales school such as
Braudel rebelled against the prevailing forms of academic
history as of the late 1920s (Gilderhus, 1987). Their
rebellious mood stemmed from their overt loathe for
traditional diplomatic history (Bentley, 1999) and their
professed conviction that political affairs did not lend
themselves to scientific study (White, 1987, p.32). Bloch and
Febvre challenged not only “the conventional division of the
subject matter of history into a number of specialties
(diplomatic, economic, social, and so on),” but also “the
conventional primacy of political narrative” (Tosh, 2008).
Rejecting the narrow emphasis on politics, war,
diplomacy, or event-oriented history, the French Annales
school aimed to “grasp more totally and fully the whole
dimensions of human reality” (Gilderhus, 1987, p.115-116).
They sought to encompass the whole, the totality of life in the
region, focusing upon the uniformities in the political, social,
economic, intellectual, and geographic realms. The quest for
a total history with wider scope and complex content required
a new methodology or a wide range of repertoire of interests,
methods, and interpretations (Breisach, 1994; Roberts, 2004).
For this reason, Bloch and Febvre called for a flexible yet an
analytically rigorous history that required the historian to
identify a problem for analysis and then draw on whatever
intellectual perspectives were appropriate, regardless of
disciplinary boundaries (Tosh, 2008). They suggested that
historians work with their comrades and brothers in the social
sciences to capture the total history in the proper spirit. With
the slogan “Down with all barriers and labels,” they claimed,
“Man cannot be carved into slices. He is a whole. One must
not divide all of history –here the events, there the beliefs”
(Breisach, 1994, p.371).
The Annales historians did not consider their approach as
the reflection of a new school of historiography but as a spirit
characterized by openness of subject matter and method
(Iggers, 1997, p.51; Tosh, 2008). Although the works of the
Annales historians had implicit theoretical and
methodological implications for historical studies, they
hardly attempted to make their methodological framework
explicit through the formulation of an explicit theory of
history (Gilderhus, 1987; Iggers, 1997). “By and large,
Annales scholars left their theoretical and methodological
assumptions implicitly in their writings” (Gilderhus, 1987,
p.116).
As social-scientifically oriented historians, the Annales
historians refused to legitimize the notion of human beings as
imprisoned by external conditions (Breisach, 1994, p.376)
and attempted to discover the patterns of thought and
behavior in a specific geographic, cultural region (Iggers,
1997, p.52). As opposed to the traditional historiography that
viewed history in terms of movement across a one-
dimensional time from the past to the future, they have
offered a very different or radically modified conception of
historical time by emphasizing the relativity and
multilayering of time (Iggers, 1997). Their promotion of a
historiography devoted to the analysis of “long-term” trends
in demography, economics, ethnology, and impersonal
processes (White, 1987, p.32). As a result, their writings were
characterized by a sort of social and economic history with
strong collectivist and environmental emphasis and the
concept of order above that of deciding and acting individual
(Breisach, 1994). Many of them studied the early modern
period with its slow, immobile, geographical rhythm of
traditional society and most frequently studied the cycles
governing the economic and demographic aspects of life
(Breisach, 1994, p.374). French historians of the Annales
School were deemed to be the pioneers in sophisticated
demographic history (Tosh, 2008).
Because structuralism, a strong French philosophical and
literary movement, influenced the historians of the Annales
approach, the exploration of a number of structural
interpretations characterized the historiography of the
Annales school (Breisach, 1994). These historians employed
what is termed menatalite or the conception of a collective
consciousness to analyze the past. They turned their critical
eyes to “the mental and psychological characteristics of
groups of people at specified times and places and thus
moved historians beyond constrictive and sometimes myopic
concerns with mere individuals” (Gilderhus, 1987). In this
approach, the “collectivity” is the basic concept used to
formulate explanations leading to total history. Led by the
medievalist Jacques Le Goff, this branch of the Annales
school took advantage of the findings from anthropology “to
develop the study of collective mentality in past societies,
focusing on the instinctual and emotional aspects of everyday
life, rather than the intellectual achievements of the elite”
(Tosh, 2008).
In a similar fashion, the Annales historians used a notion
of the longue duree. As a conception of time, “this term
depicted the structural continuities intruding upon the course
of historical change” (Gilderhus, 1987, p.16). The longue
duree consisted of the land, the sea, the climate, and the
vegetation, all of which affirmed stabilizing influences over

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225
human affairs and came to light at a slower pace and rhythm
than the transitory events of politics, war, and diplomacy.
Globalization was also one of the important themes in the
Annales tradition. The history of the Annales can be viewed
as the reflection of globalization in the twentieth century
(Middell, 2003).
Since the Annales or Annaliste historians had distrusted
politics and thus had contempt for political history, they
neglected the studies of power and power relationships, a
major shortcoming apparent in their written works (Breisach,
1994). Marxist historians have been the sharpest critics of
this oversight (Breisach, 1994, p.376). The Annaliste
historians were also criticized for focusing their attention
primarily on medieval and early modern European history,
thereby neglecting the modern historical period (Breisach,
1994; Tosh, 2008). The members of this school were also
accused of “bearing light ideological baggage: most were
avowedly non-Marxist, and few acknowledged the influence
of feminism” (Tosh, 2008).
The criticism the Annales scholars received is balanced by
eulogy on their works. Sharpe (1992, p.31) praised the
Annales school for deepening historians’ knowledge of the
past and providing tremendous methodological insights into
the ways in which novel approaches and new questions can
be developed and formulated to investigate the past.
Similarly, Ankersmit (1997) applauded the Annales approach
to the study of past for being resourceful in finding new and
exciting objects of inquiry. Middell (2003, p.103) argued that
Annales has remained the name of a major school of
historical inquiry, the most celebrated and admired, lamented
and despised school of historiography to which the twentieth
century gave rise. He also claimed that the Annales school
overshadowed the German Rankean model at the turn of the
twentieth century, and gained so much momentum as to
establish supremacy within the international discipline of
history, setting the stage for a pluralist historical field, many
centers of which were located in the USA. (Middell, 2003,
p.105). As a proponent of the Annales school, Martinez-Shaw
(1998, p.91) proclaimed that total history is amenable to fit
into the pedagogical patterns and capable of allowing “a
correct, complete and critical teaching of the past”. Lastly,
this approach to the past has a resemblance of social studies
which is integrative and interdisciplinary too, so I would state
that insights to be gained from studying this historical
movement in detail may help educators to find innovative
ways for teaching and learning social studies in schools.
Psychohistory
Psychohistory is the amalgamation of psychoanalytical
theory with history or the investigation into the psychological
dimension of the past by studying the influences of the
psyche on history (Gilderhus, 1987; Kohut, 2003). In their
view of the relationship between psychology -more
specifically applied psychoanalysis- and history, the
practitioners of psychohistory have assumed that “the history
provides the subject matter or raw data and psychology the
timeless tools of analysis” (Hunt, 1996). Psychohistorians
believe that a greater awareness of the role of unreason and
unconscious in human behavior would result in a better
understanding of history (Rickard, 1981; Gilderhus, 1987,
p.121). As a consequence, they focus their explanations on
personality traits by paying a close attention to their subjects’
pasts, especially to their childhood experiences (Walker,
2003, p.141). They attempt to demonstrate that the
unconscious motivations or the inner world of human beings
such as fantasies, aggression, frustration, identity crisis and
other emotional states helped shape human actions and events
in the past (Breisach, 1994; Nicholas, 2004). In this view,
psychological forces precede everything else in giving shape
to historical events and processes because they create the
outside reality and its order (Breisach, 1994, p.342-344).
The genesis of psychohistory can be traced back to the
works of Sigmund Freud who coined the term
psychoanalysis. Freud thought that when applied to the
people in the past, be them individuals or societies,
psychoanalysis can reveal not only the outbreaks of collective
psychosis but also the origins of cultural attitudes and even
human civilization (Nicholas, 2004). Freud’s analytical
framework, so to speak psychoanalysis, affected the way in
which historians construct historical explanations about the
past. Questioning the assumption that human beings with
their ability to think rationally always acted on the basis of
what knowledge was at their disposal, Freud put forward the
idea that unconscious derives had determining effects on
people’s behaviors (Walker, 2003). His theory provides
structural explanations about human personality (the
unconscious id or the unrestrained personality, the conscious
ego or the unique self, and the superego or the restrained
personality) and emphasizes conflict rather than consensus
(Nicholas, 2004). Conflict is assumed to happen between the
three parts of the personality (Walker, 2003, p.144). Even
though Freud became more interested pessimistically in
society, social institutions, and civilization in his late years,
he devoted his intellectual interests to individual psychology
-particularly the process in which personality is formed- in
the major body of his work (Breisach, 1994, p.343).
This line of inquiry along with its ideas and vocabularies
began to affect the historical writing around in the 1950s
(Gilderhus, 1987; Breisach, 1994; Walker, 2003) in part
because of diminished faith in reason and progress after
World War II (Gilderhus, 1987). It enjoyed growing
influence on historians in the following decades after the call
for experimenting psychoanalysis by William L. Langer, the
president of the American Historical Association. Langer
declared that incorporating psychoanalytic theories into
historical research could open up new possibilities to advance
the discipline (Walker, 2003, p.141; Nicholas, 2004), and
thus asked historians to practice its methods without the fear
of jeopardizing the integrity of their professional endeavor
(Hutton, 1986). Langer himself also applied the
psychoanalytical method to the study of the extreme
behavior, the character and role of mobs and crowds in the
French Revolution, the modern totalitarian movements, and
the long term psychological effects of epidemics (Weinstein,
1995). By applying the psychoanalytical method to the study
of the past, psychohistorical works have focused on
individuals or historical agents such as Hitler, Franklin and
Stalin, and groups or societies such as Nazi Youth, Nazi Part,
and Nazi Germany. The majority of works in psychohistory
are devoted to studying the issues of (1) heterogeneity in
individual experience, (2) discontinues in life, (3) the
capacity of people to actively construct versions of the world

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(Weinstein, 1995). In general, psychohistory is specifically
preoccupied with establishing laws and discovering causes in
precisely the Hempelian manner (Hunt, 1996).
Breisach (1994, p.342-344) argues that the following
factors were instrumental in providing pscyhohistory with
vociferous proponents and visible recognition in the field of
history: Psychohistory owes its present status to the quest for
a science of human behavior, to the strong individualism in
contemporary Western culture, to the gradual loss of faith in
progress and rationalism, to the attractiveness of the
psychoanalytical theory’s reinterpretation of evil as irrational
or psychotic in the discourse of the modern world (the value
judgments implied by the latter terms were less visible than
the term evil), and to the inclination to view order as
originating in the mind of the observer rather than being a
feature of the observed world.
Kohut (1986, p.338) noted that two basic characteristics
can be identified in the method used in psychohistorical
studies. First, as opposed to the conventional historical
methods which emphasize the importance of evidence in the
construction of historical interpretations, the psychohistorical
method first and foremost emphasizes theory drawn from
psychology to make the past understandable. In other words,
it provides explanations about historical agents and events
solely on the basis of psychological theory without needing to
substantiate historical arguments with reference to evidence
from the past. Second, the conception of evidence found in
the psychohistorical method is quite overarching in
comparison to what is deemed to be evidence in the
traditional approach to the past. Whereas historians accept
evidence only from the past, psychohistorians look for
evidence in the present to back up their interpretations of the
past figures and events. While doing so, instead of proving
the validity of the theory with evidence from the past, they
just resort to psychoanalytic literature to find contemporary
evidence.
Today three basic psychohistorical orientations are
practiced in various forms (Weinstein, 1995). The first
orientation is based on Freudian individual psychology which
is considered to be the most widely practiced strand of
psychohistory among historians, the most of whom are
American psychohistorians (Breisach, 1994). The proponents
of this branch of psychohistory such as Peter Gay, the most
preeminent Freudian practitioner, employ the basic Freudian
concepts of sexual and aggressive strivings to interpret the
past. Sexuality and aggression are used as conceptual tools to
“examine relations of power as a way of understanding the
processes by which political, gender, and other hierarchies
and unequal relationships are constructed and internalized or
otherwise enforced” (Weinstein, 1995). Central to this
approach is the individual as the main agent, who no longer
was the celebrated rational being but the scarred battlefield of
contesting internal forces. The fundamental force in the
universe was the libido that was manifested in every
individual as the sexual drive (Breisach, 1994). Freudian
historians tend to explain history in terms of the historical
subject’s unresolved unconscious conflicts (Walker, 2003,
p.144). Each individual human being, they argue, has to deal
with an ongoing conflict between the internal drive of
biological id for unlimited gratification and the collective
restraints of nonbiological forces coming from the outside or
the cultural world (Breisach, 1994, p.344). This constant
conflict has detrimental effects, they claim, on the individual
psyche as manifested in irrational and abnormal behavior.
The second orientation, which is called “object relations”
school informed by Melanie Klein’s theory, resorts to the
conceptions of very early infantile development to make
sense of the past. It is based on (a) more remote, less
accessible, and less assessable experiences and (b)
imaginative constructions that cannot be disapproved
(Weinstein, 1995). Childhood experiences have been
regarded as the direct causes of later successes and failure
(Breisach, 1994, p.345). The last orientation delves into such
concepts as ego, self, and the social world to explain the past.
This approach has the notion of people as meaning-seeking
rather than pleasure-seeking and focuses on the ways that
various ideological perspectives justify hierarchical and
inequitable social relationships (Weinstein, 1995).
Having outlined the important points and arguments in
psychohistory, I will turn to the question of how historians
view psychohistory and its methodology. Psychohistory is
deemed to be one of the most experimental departures in the
twentieth century historiography and its practitioners have
not been taken seriously by traditional historians (Hutton,
1986; Runyan, 2003). Whereas few historians employ the
Freudian mode of explanation, many historians don’t favor
psychoanalytic theory (Breisach, 1994, p.343; Walker, 2003).
Traditional historians’ disfavor for psychohistory has to do
with (a) the theory’s assumption of historical constants and
essentialism that is deemed to be ahistorical (Walker, 2003,
p.142-147), (b) fragility of its truth claims, (c) self-
confirming or unfalsifiable nature of its methods, (d)
reductionism inherent in its methods (Gilderhus, 1987), and
(e) psychohistorians’ unwillingness to take cultural context
into account (Breisach, 1994, p.342).
Jacques Barzun considers the works in psychohistory as a
contrived attempt to impose the methodology of
psychohistory upon the canons of the historians’ craft
(Hutton, 1986). David Stannard proclaimed that the
psychoanalytical method is devoid of the capacity to help
historians tell anything reliable about the past (Hutton, 1986).
Hunt (1996) claimed that the ahistoricity of psychohistory is
starkly apparent in the work of its best known proponents.
Moreover, Hunt (1996, p.173) contended that even though
psychohistory is seen as “an ideal vehicle for introducing the
timeless questions of human motivation in the past, this is
just where psychohistory has gone wrong, by focusing on the
putatively timeless rather than asking how selfhood has
changed over time.” In a similar vein, Cohen (1999) argued
that Freud’s new theoretical formulations went wrong in
practice.
Psychohistorians’ cardinal argument that every historical
source must be searched for its real meaning, which they say
lies behind the observable reality, (i.e., the subconscious
world), could not escape the scrutiny of the critics. Historians
criticized this procedure for its potential threat to submerge
the clarity and precision of historical research and pointed out
psychohistorians’ failure to provide a systematic context for
such psychohistorical terms as “paranoid style of politics,”
“status revolutions,” and “social-psychological tensions”
(Breisach, 1994, p.347).

MOVEMENTS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY
227
The critics also assailed the psychohistorians’ tendency to
reduce history to individual biographies, and thus to
rejuvenate the new versions of the old-fashioned and
discredited “Great Man theory”, failing to address social
underpinnings of psychological attitudes and individual
actions (Gilderhus, 1987, Runyan, 2003; Kohut, 1986).
According to this view, “psychohistory entailed the most
blatant of empathetic leaps into the heads of historical actors
and allowed for no believable methods of proof at all”
(Gilderhus, 1987, p.121). Breisach (1994) similarly contends
that this approach harbored a radical reductionism in that it
viewed the fate of nations in particular and of civilization in
general solely in terms of the psychoanalytical patterns of
personality development. For instance, to grasp the American
politics of 1912 and 1920, it is argued, one just needs to
examine how Wilson experienced his personality
development. That is, Wilson’s personality, more specifically
his fundamental ego problem and flawed psyche, shaped all
of his actions and thus the American politics during that
period. By the same token, the horrors of German
totalitarianism and anti-Semitism are attributed to Hitler’s so-
called abnormal personality and sexual repression (Breisach,
1994, p.345).
Psychohistorians are also criticized for not paying
attention to historical context. Walker (2003) states that
Pflanze explained the difference between Bismarck’s two
contradictory statements not in terms of their different
contexts and audiences but in psychoanalytic terms. Accusing
psychohistorians of coming to the past with their explanation
already in hand, Walker continues to assail the
psychoanalytical theories and methods:
This demonstrates how psychoanalytic theory can
perpetuate sameness and fails to allow for historical change.
Psychoanalysis allows evidence that conflicts to be
interpreted as having the same meaning. A theory that allows
for evidence and lack of evidence to lead to the same
conclusion is obviously highly problematic….The evidence
that conflicts with psychoanalytic theory is made to fit the
theory….Effectively the theory is confirmed whether
evidence is present or absent, so Freudian psychoanalysis
seems to be incompatible with the historical method because
its self-confirming nature means that it cannot be tested
against evidence. (Walker, 2003, p.145-147).
For the above reasons, the methods of explicit
psychoanalysis have remained on the margins of the
historical project in general (Hutton, 1986). Still, for all the
attacks against its methodology, psychohistory has managed
to escape from being a defunct orientation. Linda Kerber
(2007), the president of the American Historical Association
for the year 2006, recently declared that “psychohistory (or
history informed by psychological perspectives) is a serious
and important area of historical research.”
Historical Materialism
Karl Marx’s ideas and theories with respect to such
concepts as class, economics, and modes of production
enriched historiography by both expanding the scope of the
subject matters of historical writing and enriching the
conceptual tools that historians use to study the past. Marx is
the person who “fundamentally redefined the Western
philosophical tradition, the subject-object relationship, and
the nature of intellectual labor” (Fracchia, 1991). Marx
viewed history as the “theory of the conditions for the
emancipation of the proletariat” (Breisach, 1994, p.297).
Explicitly committing himself to a political project of
socialism, he labored to bring the European revolutionary
crises into historical perspective in order to capture the main
logic of social development during a period of capitalist
industrialization and to explain the possibilities of a future
capitalist collapse (Eley, 2003, p.64). To Marx, history
unfolded through a serious of stages, such as the Asiatic, the
antique or ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois,
each of which was determined by the prevailing conditions in
which wealth was produced (Marwick, 2001, p.71;
Blackledge, 2006 ).
Marx’ engagement with history can be characterized by
the commitment to the intellectual task of “descending
worlds of thoughts to the actual world, from language to life”
(Palmer, 1990). By looking at the forces shaping the past
from a radically different angle, Marx together with Engels
developed a new conception of history. His vision of history
was partly influenced by the Hegelian system of thought
(Breisach, 1994, p.293), and thus “the logic of Marx’s
explicit argument about the events, his explanation of the
facts, is manifestly dialectical” (White, 1987, p.47). Whereas
Hegel’s dialectic stressed the conflict between ideas, the
dialect Marx employed emphasized conflict among economic
classes. According to Marx, because every social system and
its mode of production harbored internal contradictions,
which functioned as the motor of change in historical
development, each produced its own opposite along with
corresponding changes in the productive relationships.
Therefore, the kind of philosophy of history Marx developed
is basically called dialectical historical materialism (Breisach,
1994, p.297). Marx’ maxim summarizes what assumption lies
at the core of historical materialism: “it is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence, but
their social existence that determines their consciousness”
(Eley, 2003, p.63). Fracchia (1991) argues that historical-
materialism is a branch of experimental science, which is:
based on certain guiding threads about the content of
history and historical change…, specified with a fundamental
theory of the nature of the capitalist mode of
production….The epistemological purpose of historical-
materialist science is not only to correct the categories of
conceptual presentation, but also to provide the means of
moving beyond it to the presentation of bourgeois societies in
their concrete totality.
Since Marx thought that it was the material world that
should be the proper object of historical study, he based his
own philosophy of history on the materialist condition of the
modern world of the humanity (Kelley, 2003, p.54). For
Marx, the ultimate life-shaping force in history is the
production and re-production of real life (Eley, 2003). From
that perspective, Marx claimed that if human past was to be
adequately understood, the ways in which people make a
living and produce goods through different means must be
studied (Breisach, 1994, p.293). Therefore, as a general
principle, the Marxist history views the forces of production,
the relations of production, and their forms of development as
the main motor of history, considers “politics and culture in
relation to production” (Thompson, 2000; Blackledge, 2006;

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Tosh, 2008), and contends that the noteworthy political
changes came into being as a result of economic crises and
associated social forces needed to sustain them (Eley, 2003,
p.64). In other words, the mode of production of material life
is considered to be the most important factor that conditions
the general process of social, political, and intellectual life.
The superstructure manifested in the intellectual, cultural, and
spiritual realms of human life in the form of philosophy,
political ideas, religion, art, and so on was just the reflections
of these primary socio-economic conditions (Breisach, 1994;
Kelley, 2003).
According to this materialist view of history, the actual
world is nothing else than the economic struggle to obtain a
livelihood (Gilderhus, 1987) and the main motor of change
was class conflict (Marwick, 2001, p.71; Eley, 2003). Not the
ideas but the productive forces were the driving force behind
history (Iggers, 1997, p.79). Challenging the traditional
historiography, Marx argued that abstract and idealistic
conceptions of the universe held less reality than the press of
material conditions in an era marked by industrialization and
dramatic economic change (Gilderhus, 1987). He then
focused his attention on the ways in which the productive
systems were organized and on the means by which people
fulfilled their material needs (Gilderhus, 1987, p.108). For
Marx, history stands for “a continual growth in productive
forces, of destruction in the social forces, and of formation of
ideas” (Breisach, 1994, p.294). Because Marx and his
followers were single-mindedly interested in elucidating the
transition from feudalism to capitalism or the revolutionary
origins of bourgeois society, the majority of Marxist
historians, especially in Britain and in continental Europe,
investigated earlier periods, particularly early modern
Europe, and revolutionary periods in French history (Judt,
1985).
Has the Marxist historiography been widely recognized
and practiced by historians? Since Marx’s socialist ideas
came to the fore in his analysis of historical processes, the
reaction of historians to the Marxist view of history has
basically been shaped by their political orientations and the
cultural context in which they are embedded. Even though
Marxist conception of history was recognized by the
Frankfurt school (Thompson, 2000) and became the official
view of the Soviet Union from 1917 until its collapse in the
late 1980s, it remained on the margin of historiography until
the 1960s. “Only in the chaotic atmosphere of the 1960s did
Marxism become a major influence on historians” (Tosh,
2008). Because the Marxist vision of history lent itself to
emancipatory history and to total history, a history that
encompasses elites and masses, many historians
enthusiastically wrote in a Marxist fashion during the 1960s
and 1970s. Marxism ultimately became the most dynamic
strand of social history by the 1970s. Its influence on the
writing of history proved to be enduring because of its
potential to offer solutions on some of the most intractable
problems of historical explanation (Tosh, 2008). “The
theories of Karl Marx not only set in motion a continuing
series of interpretations of history from the Marxist economic
point of view but also affected historians of all other schools”
(Tosh, 2008).
Some scholars have made judgments about the merits or
shortcomings of Marxist historiography such as internal
tensions in Marx’s scheme of history. For instance, Gilderhus
(1987, p.115) and Breisach (1994, p.349) contend that due to
the discrepancy between the Marxist interpretation of the
human past and real life situations, Marxist scholars struggled
with the intellectual puzzles of reconciling empirical
evidence with theory and thought with practice. In Marxist
vision of history, the complexities of actual human life were
oversimplified via an excessive reliance on economic
determinism and the roles of individual historical agents in
shaping the historical process downgraded (Breisach, 1994,
p.350-356). According to Kelley (2003, p.54), Marx’s
conception of history was deterministic and a pragmatic,
“except that economics rather than politics provided the
ruling methodology and revealed that the prime causal
factors, property, followed by labor, and especially mode of
production and accompanying class conflicts”. Tosh argues
(2008), the Marxist historians (a) wrote history from the
perspective of marginalized groups, (b) located the forward
march of history with subordinate classes instead of the
controlling elites, (c)emphasized the trajectories of
progressive change in history, and (d) articulated the
structural significance of these classes. According to one
Marxist philosopher, all versions of the culture-oriented
history or history from the below owe their frames of
reference to Marx’s conceptualization of history (Sharpe,
1992, p.27).
Eley (2003, p.65-66) identifies four major commitment
that he thinks mainly characterized a Marxist approach to
history: its progressive theory of history based on ascending
stages of development; its “base” and “superstructure” (i.e.,
ideas, laws, institutions, literature, art etc.) model of social
causality; its ascription of meaningful historical change to the
conflicting interests and collective agency of social classes;
and its sense of itself as a science of society. He says,
“Commitment to the materialist conception of history was
associated almost with an oppositional culture of dissent,
intellectual polemics and working-class autodidacticism.” He
then concludes that the Marxist historians classically reserved
a first-order priority –ontologically, epistemologically, and
analytically- for the underlying economic structure of society
in conditioning everything else, including the possible forms
of politics and the law, of institutional development, and of
social consciousness and belief. Iggers (1997, p.108) detects
three elements in the Marxist historical orientation: The first
is the belief that social inequality is a central characteristic of
all historical societies. The second is the role that production
and reproduction play in the formation of cultures. The third
is the belief that historical study must be based on rigorous
method and empirical analysis.
In conclusion, the Marxist scheme of history along with
its standpoints or assumptions can be summarized as the
combination of a model of social and economic
determination proceeding upward from material life; a clear
demarcation of historical periods in line with modes of
production; a theory of social change based on class struggles
and their effects; the objectivist idea of history as social
science, and objectivist approach to social understanding;
quantitative methodology, long run analysis of economic
fluctuation through prices; structural history, materialist
model of causation; and left-wing empathy for the social

MOVEMENTS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY
229
causalities of industrialization (Breisach, 1994, p.350-351;
Eley, 2003, p.67-68).
Conclusion
The three historical orientations reviewed in this article
approach to the past with their own unique theoretical
frameworks, methods and ideological assumptions. The
intellectual and socio-cultural climate of the era in which they
came into existence inevitably influenced their theoretical
frameworks and methodological approaches. Their genesis
was a kind of reaction to previously hold conceptions of what
history is, how the past should be studied, what methods
should be practiced to study the past, what should count as
the proper object of historical inquiry, what unit of analysis
the historian should use when studying the past, and
ultimately how the past can be made meaningful and
understandable to the new generation. Each historical
approach’s answers to these very same questions were
fundamentally different from one another. Each has its own
strengths and weaknesses in their explanations about the past
as illustrated in the preceding section. What they afford us
with their differing approaches to the past is the multiplicity
of perspectives which help us look at the past from different
angles, broadening our insight into the past. That is, they
enrich our understanding of the complexity of past events,
peoples, processes, and institutions by putting emphasis on
different constructs of history. On the other hand, explaining
large-scale developments in history by reliance on just a few
constructs should be viewed with skepticism as is the case for
psychohistorians’ and Marxist historians’ reductionist
explanations which are basically based on the construct of
psycho or inner motives and the construct of economics or
materialism respectively.
Even though the movements reviewed in this article have
a number of different characteristics in terms of their study of
the past, they do have certain similarities in common
especially in terms of their philosophical underpinnings. The
French Annales, psychohistory, and historical materialism all
are based on the philosophy of history that tries to apply
scientific methods or empiricism to the study of the past.
They share the assumption that history is a science in terms
of its nature. That is, they all belong to the positivist tradition
and thus embody a positivist notion of history, aiming to find
a sort of uniformities and regularities in the development of
past events and processes as is the case in scientific
endeavors. Each movement attempts to explain the past by
making general statements of invariable relationship via the
hypothetic-deductive model of reasoning which focuses on
structural and causal explanations. But, not all
historiographical approaches subscribe to this view of history
as a science. Some historical orientations such as the
linguistic and postmodernist approach to the past view
history as an art rather than as a science, emphasizing the
significant roles that subjective elements such as the
historian’s gender, ethnicity, ideological identification etc.
play in the construction of historical knowledge. These are
fundamental epistemological issues in the analytic
philosophy of history that historians, history educators,
history teachers, social studies teachers and history students
are supposed to know to develop a sound conception of
history. In short, a sophisticated understanding of why the
same events in history are interpreted differently by different
historians demands a historigraphical literacy; i.e., familiarity
with different modes of historical writing or understanding of
how historians’ writings about the past get changed over
time. One of the best ways to accomplish this, fostering
historigraphical literacy on students’ part, would be to
incorporate historiography as a mandatory course into the
curriculum programs of both social studies education
departments in the Colleges of Education and history
departments in Liberal Arts Colleges.
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Kabul Tarihi: 8 Kasım 2009