Fernand Braudel - an assessment - Alan Macfarlane

i was interested in your review of uh braudel as a historian because ultimately it seemed to me that he was saying he he kind of failed even though he was you know he masked this massive amount of material but he didn't have the questions or something he would he almost needed an anthropologist to come along and and deal with the stuff rather than the historian well brudelle is obviously a hero of all of us yeah his great book interestingly was written in his mind in south america when he was teaching in south america he had the idea and laid out the foundations for the one really great book he wrote the mediterranean in the world of philip ii which is a an absolute you know one of the greatest books ever written by a historian because he he has this vision of the whole of the mediterranean and all the tides and flows of peoples and ideas and it's just mind-boggling and he wrote it himself out of this vision of a total civilization so it's a great civilizational history of a slice of the world but he then but but it is a great painting it doesn't ask the question why was it like that really or what is the meaning of it or anything it just says what was it like so he he's a agoya or whatever rubens and he paints it and you don't ask of rubens or agoya you know what is the meaning that it's showing you just are astonished by it when he then decided he was quite young when he'd finished that and he then spent you know 20 30 years writing much bigger books well very big books um civilization and material life and so on in three volumes and the rest of it and the approach changed he firstly he was now so well established and and so on that he had a lot of money and he set up a team so he became a like edmund de val or um artists in our uh country they they are successful as artists as young people um and then their success gives them a huge studio and they stop doing the thing itself and they start organizing others so academics do the same thing and this has an advantage that you you know you get through much more because you say to your team of researchers you do this all the spanish sources and you do all the french sources and give me these are the 100 questions i want you to answer and you end up with a fantastic sort of um wikipedia basically an early wikipedia of europe which is what he does and not just europe china and other parts of the world so everything gathered together on uh eating habits or the trade in pepper or whatever it is but the question which he sets at the beginning of that volume which is the origins of capitalism now how did we he does ask the question in a broad way why did the modern capitalist world emerge and he goes on and he reminds me of casabourne in in yeah um basically you know he goes on and the question that he's pursuing the meaning of life is lost i mean what was the question yeah and the the the evidence for this is if you look at his last chapter because in the early part in the first chapters he's absolutely demolished the opposition he's demolished marks his uh all the great thinkers who joined me and others who've tried to solve this problem you know he shows they're wrong he says i'll show you and you plod on through thousands of pages you come to a suspiciously short final chapter where he's going to reveal result and i mean i can't remember the exact wordings but basically he says sorry folks i haven't found it the nearest i can give you to an answer is if you read a book by someone called norman jacobs um which is a comparison of japan and china and and europe on a vabiarian model um read that and you'll get a better answer than i can give you and i read norman jacobs and he's one of the people i selected to make a study of and i got to know him in his last years and it is his books is more of an answer to this question than than many that's his he comes very close because he uses weber properly as a very good viberian and he spoke japanese and he knew east asia anyway uh so basically in a talk i gave i said brodel was like a museum designer curator he set up this museum of the mind in which you could go through it and you could go into the spanish room and this french room and so on and you could go into them the room to do to do with food and eating and all that and clothes and so all that and armies and all that and you can get masses of interesting stories and facts but what he didn't have and this is something that i learned from anthropology and political theory he didn't have a theoretical framework i only gradually to a certain extent developed this not through not by reading historians you don't get it even in maitland or bloch or rodel they don't give you a framework of how to approach theoretically data they assume as for example people like um people i met jack plum uh or jeffrey elton or trevor ripper they assume that the historian intuitively has the framework knows what the questions are they don't need to think about the methodology they just get on and borrow into the art archives as much as possible now you don't you can get a certain way like that but there is so much out there what how do you select it and how do you uh check it and how do you build it into a broader narrative if you don't have a theoretical framework methodology and mark block has quite a lot of it but you know doesn't develop it and um collingwood the philosopher of history and so on being a philosopher as well has quite a lot of it too but no only rudiments of it what you have to do is you have to do as i did look at the great theoreticians montesquieu cockfield adam smith john stuart mill and there they had to think about this um before they took on civilizations so brodel to a large extent lacks that i think

Channel: Prof Alan Macfarlane - Ayabaya

Views: 622

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: b6sYR3h_xSI

Length: 8min 7sec (487 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021