Fernand Braudel and

the concept of the person

By Admir Skodo

This article offers an interpretation and analysis of the presuppositions

of historical thought. When the historian sets out to think about a past
object certain conditions must be fulfilled for thinking to be at all possible.
The aim of a presuppositional analysis is to arrive at a conceptualisation
that articulates the conditions necessary for a particular body of thought.
The point of entry into the analysis is this: observing the practices of a par-
ticular discipline one sees fairly soon that there are certain concepts and
procedures that distinguish it from other disciplines. There is of course
overlap between some disciplines, such as between philosophy and his-
tory. But between other disciplines there is no overlap that would yield an
appropriate and consistent shared theory, such as is the case with history
and mathematics for instance. Nevertheless, sometimes scholars transgress
disciplinary boundaries. A prominent example is the French historian Fer-
nand Braudel (1902–1985).
Analysis is a descriptive undertaking but because all descriptions con-
tain non-descriptive elements analysis is necessarily normative as well.
For this reason, the analysis is only acceptable by historians who share
its main presupposition – namely, that the object of historical thought is
the person. I take the analysis to be justified and appropriate only given
. Confessedly, my main areas of research lie in intellectual history and the philosophy of his-
tory. Consequently, my thought is primarily drawn from and directed towards those disciplines.
However, I still believe that what I am about to propose holds true for other sub-disciplines in
history as well.
. In Swedish academic discourse words like ”individ” and ”aktör” are more akin to what I have
in mind than ”person”. I do not quarrel over words, and only concern myself with the content given
to them.

Fil. mag. M. Res. Admir Skodo, f. 1984, är doktorand i historia vid Europeiska univer-
sitetsinstitutet i Florens där han forskar om den moderna brittiska idéhistoriens och
historiefilosofins historia. Han är medredaktör för ”Companion to R.G. Collingwood”
(under utgivning) och som exempel på publicerade artiklar kan nämnas ”Outline of a
theory of the person for historical-biographical study”, The international journal of the
humanities (20 09).
Adress: Admir Skodo, European University institute, Department of history and civ-
ilization, Badia Fiesolana, Via dei Roccettini 9, 50 014 San Domenico di Fiesole, Italien
E-post: [email protected]

historisk tidskrift 130:4 • 2010

716 Admir Skodo
the nature of the object, or concept, analysed. There is much confusion
among historians concerning this kind of higher-order thinking about their
discipline. Braudel is a good case in point. Therefore, in the following two
sections I shall interpret Braudel’s thought on the presuppositions of his-
tory. By so doing I will demonstrate two things. On the one hand, I will
show by way of implication that Braudel postulates the person as the object
of historical thought of any order, and that this might have been prompted
by very personal experiences. With this interpretation I hope to contri-
bute to re-directing our understanding of Braudel. On the other hand,
I will show that Braudel’s presuppositions are wholly inappropriate given
the nature of the person, and so if it can be shown that one of the most
prominent structuralist historians strove to understand persons and not
structures, then this strongly suggests not only that historians should do a
person-oriented history, but that they usually do.  And from this derives
the value of the analysis: to make explicit the commitments of this doing
of ours. The analysis is undertaken in the last three sections.

The object of historical thought: The person

We know that in the hands of Leopold von Ranke history became a body
of thought that resounds subtly but firmly in contemporary historical sc-
holarship.  Ranke identified the object of historical thought exclusively as
political and diplomatic events at state and international level. The study
of these events Ranke grounded in certain rules of source-criticism, which
he had adopted and developed from classical philology. The innovative
epistemic leap taken by Ranke lay in his privileging of certain kinds of
past remnants as the only sound basis of evidence. The principle Ranke
worked out can perhaps be formulated along these lines: for any event to
be thought about, sufficient evidence for it must take the form of two, or
. This interpretation has not been considered before. See e.g. Jaume Aurell, ”Autobiographical
texts as historiographical sources: rereading Fernand Braudel and Annie Krieger”, Biography 29:3
(20 0 6) p. 425–445.
. I should wish the reader to bear in mind that Braudel’s relationship to the philosophies of
history of his time was recalcitrant. See Fernand Braudel, ”En marge ou au cœur de l’histoire?”,
Annales: histoire, sciences sociales 4:3 (1949) p. 311–315.
. I should like to add that both the interpretation and the analysis could easily be turned into
book-long studies.
. For a good philosophical discussion of Ranke’s method see Aviezer Tucker, Our knowledge of the
past: a philosophy of historiography (Cambridge 20 04). Tuckers’s understanding of Ranke is in some
ways anachronistic and should therefore be complemented with Georg G. Iggers & James M. Powell
(ed.), Leopold von Ranke and the shaping of the historical discipline (Syracuse 19 9 0).

historisk tidskrift 130:4 • 2010

 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 717
more, from each other independent documents, written by direct obser-
vers of the event in question. If they both state essentially the same state
of affairs, then they can be used as evidence for the statement that such
and such actually happened.
In Sweden it was the brothers Curt and Lauritz Weibull at Lund Uni-
versity who, during the first half of the twentieth century, brought about
a change in favour of the Rankean critical approach to history. In France,
critical history was institutionalised not least by the Sorbonnes historians
Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos. Les sorbonnistes, as Brau-
del came to call them, had adopted and diffused the Rankean principles
through their 1897 Introduction aux études historiques.  Braudel gained his
Ph. D. at the Sorbonnes during a time in which the sorbonnistes still had firm
control over the presuppositions of historical thought. 
Braudel’s doctoral thesis, first published in 1949 and then in a revised
form in 1966, has the title La Méditerranée et le monde médititerranéen à
l’epoque de Philippe II. It is truly a monumental piece of historical scholar-
ship and worth reading for many reasons. It began as an exercise in conven-
tional political-diplomatic history. However, Braudel soon shifted his focus
drastically. During his archival studies in Algeria, 10 Braudel received a let-
ter from a certain Lucien Febvre, whom he had first met in Paris in 1937.11
Febvre was a historian from Strasbourg who had studied at the prestigious
École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. There he had come under the
influence of the geographer Paul Vidal de la Blanche and his conception
of human geography. Blanche held that history, as it was conceptualised
in France, was misguided and failed to see the essential foundations of

. Institutionally Lauritz secured Lund, Curt Gothenburg, and their student, the famous Erik
Lönnroth, Uppsala. Birgitta Odén, ”Det moderna historisk-kritiska genombrottet i svensk historisk
forskning”, Scandia 41:1 (1975) p. 5–29.
. To my knowledge it is still a matter of debate about whether, or perhaps to what extent,
Seignobos influenced the brothers Weibull. Rolf Torstendahl is convinced that this is the case. See
Rolf Torstendahl, ”Curt Weibull: en anteckning”, Scandia 58:2 (19 92) p. 151–156.
. For Braudel’s background see e.g. J. H. Hexter, ”Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudelien…”,
Journal of modern history 44:4 (1972) p. 480–539; Traian Stoianovich, French historical method: the
Annales paradigm: with a foreword by Fernand Braudel (Ithaca & London 1976); Georg G. Iggers,
New directions in European historiography: revised edition (Middletown 19 84); and Fernand Braudel,
”Personal testimony”, The journal of modern history 44:4 (1972) p. 448–467.
10. Braudel was in Algeria because he was assigned his first teaching post there in 1923. See
Paule Braudel, ”Les origines intellectuelles de Fernand Braudel: un témoignage”, Annales: histoire,
sciences sociales 47:1 (19 92) p. 237–244, 239.
11. Braudel (19 92) p. 237.

historisk tidskrift 130:4 • 2010

718 Admir Skodo
the constitution of man (homme).12 Febvre had come to be convinced that
the person could only be understood through interdisciplinary work. This
would mean combining efforts from human geography, history, ethnology,
anthropology, sociology, economy, demography, linguistics, and psycho-
logy. All these sciences were ”sciences de l’homme”, sciences of man. It
was to promote such interdisciplinary study that Febvre, along with his
colleague March Bloch (whom Braudel only met three times between 1938
and 1939), had founded the journal Annales in 1929.
It was Febvre who convinced Braudel to shift his focus. He encouraged
Braudel to take into account much more than mere political and diploma-
tic events. Braudel followed Febvre’s exhortation. He retained the initial
part on politics and diplomacy, but added two more. Moreover, Febvre had
persuaded Braudel to reverse the order of importance of historical time.
Instead of beginning with the shortest, the politics of and around Philipp
II, he was to begin with the longest, which meant the Mediterranean qua
human-geographic totality. In between he was to have the time of middle
longevity. It was much, though not exclusively, based on this tripartite
carving out of historical time that Braudel would come to work out his
presuppositions of history. But Braudel seems to have made a clear picture
in his mind of La Méditerranée quite late, perhaps as late as 1944.13 And his
systematic theoretical account is found for the first time in 1958.14 As we
will see shortly, these, are significant facts.
To put it bluntly: Braudel postulates the person as the object of historical
thought. Not only Braudel, but upon closer scrutiny we find that the most
important domains that the Annales historians in general have investigated
are mentalities of people who had no means of saving information about
themselves for posterity. Their studies are (almost) always about persons.15
These studies view the person from certain assumptions about what
the person is, and so these assumptions we must excavate and evaluate.
Braudel’s great incision into the fabric of historical thought was to see the

12. Though Henri Berr and Marc Bloch are two essential actors for the formation of the Annales
School, Braudel always held Febvre closest to his heart. In Braudel (1972) he writes that Febvre came
to be like a father to him and that he would never have managed to finish La Méditerranée without
his support and help. Cf. Braudel (19 92).
13. Braudel (19 92) p. 243.
14. Fernand Braudel, ”Histoire et sciences sociales: la longue durée”, Annales: économies, sociétés,
civilisations 13:4 (1958) p. 725–753.
15. This is perhaps why the later generations of Annales historians affirmed their commitment
to studying persons by turning to biography.

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 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 719
person in the passive mode. With his own words from his inauguration at
the Collège de France in 1950: ”‘Man makes history’. No, history too makes
men and fashions their destiny – the anonymous, profound, and even silent
history […]”.16 Even so, for Braudel historical thought always begins with the
person, and it is to the person that it always returns. As the doyen himself
writes, history is concerned with ”[…] the social experience from which
everything must begin, and to which everything must return”.17
An interesting example of Braudel’s postulation of person as the his-
torical object of study is his recounting of his time as a German prisoner
of war between 1940 and 1945. In these passages we see Braudel recogni-
zing certain elements as being constitutive of the person, his person, but
which run contrary to his other presuppositions. In fact, it was during
this captivity that Braudel finished the first draft of La Meditérranné. At
his disposal he had only his good memory, and pen and paper.18 This was
an arduous time for Braudel, one consisting of what he was to call ”évené-
ments”. Braudel argues, as we will see, that events belong to the most fleeing
temporal dimension, hardly worthy of serious historical thought. Yet, such
unimportant events had such a strong effect on Braudel that he sought to
think beyond them:

I have during the course of a rather morose imprisonment fought hard to

escape the longevity of those difficult years (1940–1945). To refuse the
events and the time of the events meant placing oneself on the margin,
out of harms way, so as to see them from little more distance, judge
them better, and believe in none of them too much.19

16. Fernand Braudel, ”Les responsabilités de l’histoire”, in Roselyn de Ayala & Paule Braudel
(ed.), Les écrits de Fernand Braudel: II: les ambitions de l’histoire (Paris 19 97) p. 97–117, 102. ”’Les
hommes font l’histoire’. Non, l’histoire fait aussi les hommes et façonne leur destin – l’histoire
anonyme, profonde et souvent silencieuse […]”.
17. Braudel (1958) p. 746, ”l’expérience sociale dont tout doit partir, où tout doit revenir”. Con-
sider what was written in the Annales in 1951, quoted and translated by Hexter (1972) p. 491: It is
”[m]an living, complex, confused, as he is”, that “les sciences humaines must seek to understand”, this
”[m]an whom all the social sciences must avoid slicing up, however skilful and artistic the carving”.
18. This probably explains why there are no graphs or tables to be found in the first edition. The
second one, in contrast, is full of them.
19. Braudel (1958) p. 748, ”J’ai personnellement, au cours d’une captivité assez morose, beaucoup
lutté pour échapper à la chronique de ces années difficiles (1940-1945). Refuser les événements et
le temps des évenéments, c’était se mettre en marge, à l’abri, pour les regarder d’un peu plus loin,
les mieux juger et n’y point trop croire”. See also Braudel (1978) p. 453–454.

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720 Admir Skodo
Here, I cautiously submit, Braudel is trying to understand himself. He does
so by denying that such particular events have any significance for histori-
cal thought. In other words, there are strong indications of very personal,
phenomenal, 20 motivations underwriting Braudel’s thought and works. The
support for this interpretation becomes stronger once we realise that it
was not an uncommon sentiment Braudel voiced. Many Western academics
who lived through the two world wars were profoundly affected by their
experiences, and the effects were echoed in, indeed sometimes took over,
their works. We can see this in the works of the historians Gaston Roup-
nel, 21 Reinhart Koselleck, 22 and Herbert Butterfield 23 for instance.
As we will see shortly, Braudel denies particular events any determining
force by displacing the constitutive logic of the person’s thinking and living
to temporal and spatial dimensions of a beyond-personal order. For now,
consider what Braudel writes about how one person comes to know another.
Echoing the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, he writes that ”denying the
other, that is to already know him”. 24 What the foregoing discussion makes
evident is that Braudel himself recognizes the constitutive power of such
elements, although he denies them vehemently elsewhere. This creates
a tension in his historical thought that Braudel never really manages to
resolve.
The importance of personhood for Braudel far exceeds his personal ex-
periences. It is to be found at the heart of his purported structuralism.
For instance, consider how Braudel applies concepts that are appropriate
to understanding humans to objects of wholly different kinds. Structu-
res, ports, towns, without recourse to persons, are attributed planning,
intention, organising, agency, consciousness, unconsciousness, and courage.

20. See the final section for an explication of this term.

21. See Gaston Roupnel, Histoire et destin (Paris 1943). Braudel in fact identified with Roupnel’s
experiences, as he makes evident in Braudel (1958) p. 748. Braudel had in fact reviewed Roupnel’s
Histoire et destin, a review with which Roupnel was most pleased. See Fernand Braudel, ”Faillite de
l’histoire, triomphe du destin?”, Mélanges d’histoire sociale 6 (1944) p. 71–77. See also Roupnel’s
letter to Braudel, published in ”Les morts de l’histoire vivante”, Annales: histoire, sciences sociales
2:4 (1947) p. 479–481.
22. I dare not say how Koselleck’s experience as a Soviet prisoner of war has influenced his
work, as my knowledge on him is minimal. But I am fairly certain that it has, especially in his later
writings.
23. See e.g. Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and his history (Cambridge 1944).
24. Braudel (1958) p. 726, ”nier autrui, c’est déjà le connaître”. To my knowledge, Braudel and
Lacan had some sort of a personal relationship. Certainly they both share a strong conceptual com-
mitment to the thought of Lévi-Strauss.

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 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 721
This culminates in the Mediterranean herself being seen as a person (the
quoted sentences in the long quote that follows are Braudel’s own words
translated into English):

The longue durée, however, he populates with non-people persons – geo-

graphical entities, features of the terrain. Thus in the Mediterranean
peninsulas ’are key actors [...] have played leading roles [...] They are
almost persons ... who may or may not be conscious of themselves’.
Towns are vested with intentions, Constantinople, for example, with
’the determination to impose settlement, organization and planning’ on
the Ottomans. It ’triumphed over and betrayed’ them, luring them into
the wrong wars with the wrong goals. The protagonist of this somewhat
peculiarly cast historical drama, of course, is the Mediterranean itself,
or rather herself. She has designs or purposes of her own, which she
sometimes succeeds in fulfilling. She ’contributed [...] to preventing the
unity of Europe, which she attracted toward her shores and then divided
to her own advantage’. And in the sixteenth century through Genoa she
’long allocated the world’s wealth’. Times, too, get personalized. ’The
sixteenth century had neither the courage nor the strength’ to eradicate
the ancient evils of the great cities, and ‘Modern Times [’la Modernité’]
suddenly projected the territorial state to the center of the stage’. 25

In short, Braudel does not believe that ”the only actors making noise are
the most authentic ones”, because (notice again the silence of history) ”there
are others, silent ones; but who did not know that already”?2 6 By way of
concluding this section, I wish to point out that I share with Braudel the
following: it is with the concept of the person that an analysis has to deal,
and it is the understanding of particular persons that historical research
should result in. Where we differ is that I explicitly follow through on such
presuppositions, whereas Braudel goes on to construct presuppositions
standing in contradiction to and even derision of them. Let us, then, take
a closer look at these presuppositions of Braudel’s.

25. Hexter (1972) p. 519.

26. Braudel (1958) p. 738, ”les seuls acteurs qui font de bruit soient les plus authentiques”; ”il
en est d’autres et silencieux – mais qui ne le savait déjà?”.

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722 Admir Skodo
Braudel’s presuppositions of historical thought
It is not unreasonable to see a connection between Braudel and the logical
positivists. 27 The logical positivists saw the methods of all sciences as being
reducible to a single one, that of the physical sciences. They believed that
all the sciences shared a common logical language. Braudel too believes
that all human sciences ”speak the same language, or can speak it”. 28 He
believes in the possibility of a common method for all human sciences. His
main influence, though, was not the language of the physicist, but rather
that of the structuralist. Braudel lived in an intellectual setting that saw
the rise of structuralism in the human sciences. 29 We can single out the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss as the most important structuralist
influence on Braudel. The references to Lévi-Strauss are overwhelming in
Braudel’s work. And as a matter of fact the two knew each other personally,
after having met at the University of São Paolo.
Braudel rejects the presuppositions of the sorbonnistes who only study
persons as ”quintessentialised heroes”.30 A person worthy of historical
inquiry the sorbonniste takes to be a politically important, rational, and
consciously acting man. The historian is to study the events that such a
person brought to life. It should come as no surprise to the reader to find
Braudel discarding the notion of the conscious and rationality as neces-
sary for historical thought. Braudel’s history is thus about ”the unconscious
forms of the social”. This ”social unconscious” is to be found in the unsaid
or silent in the past. In Braudel’s own words, it is a ”semi-obscurity”.31 It
is Lévi-Strauss’ thought that sets the landscape for this word painting. In
line with discarding these elements that contrive to make the person (the
conscious, rationality, agency) Braudel goes on to reject the meaning of the
spoken or written as a necessary element for historical thought as well.
Language is indeed crucial for historical thought, Braudel contends, but

27. See Carl G. Hempel, ”The Function of General Laws in History”, Journal of Philosophy 39:2
(1942) p. 35–48. It is worthwhile to notice that Hempel postulates the object of historical explana-
tion to be either a specific personality, or something that is the result of human behaviour. He
believes that such objects can be reduced to a certain type of event, which can be explained through
the application of universally conditional hypotheses.
28. Braudel (1958) p. 734, ”parlent le même langage ou peuvent le parler”.
29. For history, see e.g. François Dosse, Histoire du structuralisme: le champ du signe, 1945–19 66
(Paris 19 91).
30. Braudel (19 97) p. 102, ”héros quintessenciés”.
31. Braudel (1958) p. 740, ”des forms inconscientes du social”, ”un inconscient social”, ”cette
demi-obscurité”.

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 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 723
it is the language of the phonemes, the smallest sound elements of langu-
age, which are wholly detached from meaning. He does not care much for
cultural practices and subjective meanings as explanatory concepts. His
preferred mode of explanation is the model. The model Braudel defines
as a set of systematic and explicative hypotheses either in the form of the
equation (”this is equivalent to this”) or the function (”this determines
this”). He even speaks of a social mathematic through which modelling can
be conceptualized.32 Models are of the highest value because they can be
applied ”across time and space”.33 But witness how Braudel immediately re-
turns to the person when he says that models ”vary infinitely all according
to their users’ temperament, calculation or goal”.34
The annaliste, in opposition to the sorbonniste, argues that the person
and event does not constitute the whole of social reality. For him the his-
torical time which such persons are part of is of ”the most capricious, the
most treacherous of durations”.35 Such a time does not take into account
other social kinds of man, especially those without writing and power.
In Braudel’s account, history should be about civilisations, which he de-
fines vaguely. The content of a civilisation entails language, science, law,
institutions, religions, beliefs, technologies, customs, and everyday life.
Braudel speaks of the need to acknowledge ”the most modest cultures”,
and therefore of the need for a ”microhistory”.36 Indeed, Braudel wants to
take into account all possible aspects of man in history. From this stems
his notion of l’histoire globale or l’histoire totale. But to his credit, he was
fully aware that it was an ”impossible total science of man” that he sought
to construct.37 In my view, what makes it impossible is that it never gives
any notable attention to persons and their time in life.38 I agree with this

32. Braudel’s father was a mathematician I note in passing, and, according to testimony, a very
strict man. See Braudel (19 92).
33. Braudel (1958) p. 740. ”à travers de temps et espace”.
34. Braudel (1958) p. 740. ”varient à l’infini suivant le tempérament, le calcul ou le but des
utilisateurs”.
35. Braudel (1958) p. 728. ”la plus capricieuse, la plus trompeuse des durées”.
36. Fernand Braudel, ”L’histoire des civilisations: le passé explique le présent”, in Roselyn de
Ayala & Paule Braudel (ed.), Les écrits de Fernand Braudel: II: les ambitions de l’histoire (Paris 19 97)
p. 197–243, 224.
This article was first published in 1959 in volume 20 of L’Encyclopédie française, edited by
Febvre.
37. Braudel quoted in Stoianovich (1972) p. 121. ”impossible science globale de l’homme”.
38. Cf. Peter Burke, ”History of events and the revival of narrative”, in Peter Burke (ed.), New
perspectives on historical writing: second edition (Cambridge 20 01) p. 283–301, p. 287.

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724 Admir Skodo
multi-dimensional approach to history, but not with the presuppositions
that Braudel constructs for it.
Braudel’s main suggestion for what historical thought should presuppose
is the argument that three temporal dimensions determine persons’ actions
and thoughts during a certain time space. These dimensions Braudel calls
structures or ”structural durations” (durées). He compares them to (notice
the choice of word) prisons when defining their constraining effects on
mentalities.39 Of the three, Braudel stresses ”the exceptional value of the
long durations”, the longues durées. 40
Stressing a particular duration in research will constitute a particular
kind of history according to Braudel. So, the histoire évenémentielle is history
that focuses on the shortest durée. This is the history of political events,
which are explosive, fleeing and almost insignificant for historical thought.
Braudel’s lukewarm attitude towards this duration should be understood
in relation to his personal anxieties and hardships. Next is the history of
les conjonctures, a term borrowed from contemporary economical thought.
Braudel expands the concept, and identifies three kinds of conjonctures.
This kind of history studies social, economic, and mental structures. Fi-
nally, there is the history of les longue durées. This history seeks out the
longest structural durations, which are ”a reality thriftily spent by time,
and carried for a long while”. 41 Braudel refuses to specify for how long; it
can be a matter of several centuries or a few decades. He even holds that a
long duration can be short. It is difficult in principle, he says, to keep apart
the different durations, and on one occasion he hyperbolically speaks of
history as having a hundred faces. 42 Indeed, it is difficult to understand
what Braudel wants to capture with these distinctions. They all seem to
overlap in an inextricably entangled manner.
What I will be proposing in the next three sections can be considered as
a reappraisal of the histoire évenémentielle, because I believe that, if properly
analysed, it can be shown to lie at the heart of historical thought. In prin-
ciple, I have no problem with the histoire des conjonctures either, because
if one views such a history as a colligation or aggregate from more basic
elements (persons), then certainly a more long-term view on human life is

39. Braudel (1958) p. 731, ”les cadrex mentaux, aussi, sont prisons de la longue durée”.
40. Braudel (1958) p. 727, ”la valeur exceptionelle du temps long”.
41. Braudel (1958) p. 731, ”une réalité que le temps use mal et véhicule trés longuement”.
42. Braudel (1958) p. 727, ”l’histoire aux cents visages”.

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 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 725
of great value. The only concept I dismiss tout court, then, is la longue durée,
but then again so does Braudel. We can see this in the content that Braudel
gives his long durations: it always boils down to particular persons. When
Braudel thus exemplifies his long durations, e.g. the idea of the crusade
and market capitalism, it always necessarily involves recourse to individual
humans. In other words, time and again we see that Braudel is trying to
understand persons. But, crucially, we constantly see him hopelessly trying
to move beyond the time during which they lived. I say hopelessly for we
repeatedly see how he ends up personalising these durations. This creates
a conceptual tempest that is not without traces of personal tragedy.
Braudel’s longest durations belong to the realm of demography and cli-
mate studies. It is important to note that Braudel does not believe that
there is a correlation between climatic and demographic structures on
the one hand, and, social and economic ones on the other. 43 In other words,
by way of implication, the longues durées are nugatory in the activity of
understanding persons. It is ironic, then, that the most disseminated of
Braudel’s concepts turns out to be ill defined and of little epistemic value!
In consequence we should not give primacy to the concept of longue durée
in attempts to properly understand Braudel’s thought. Instead we should
pay closer attention to the relation it has to his personal life.
What would the answer be if we approached Braudel’s work with the
question: ”Do structures determine persons, or persons structures, or is
there a dialectical relation between persons and structures”? Not a clear-
cut one. Sometimes structures determine persons, sometimes structures
are like persons, and sometimes persons stretch the rigour of structures.
Surely, we need to go beyond Braudel in order to properly draw out the
concepts appropriate to historical thought.

Ontological determination and epistemological underdetermination

I therefore bid farewell to Braudel’s irksome ways of thinking about the
business of history, and turn to what I believe is a more appropriate way.
The ontological determination of past persons, or indeed any kind of past
object, is the first presupposition I wish to establish as necessary for his-
torical thought. It is my belief that I might be able to shed new light on a
problem (or non-problem) that still haunts the historical discipline to a cer-

43. Stoianovich (1976) p. 82–83.

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726 Admir Skodo
tain extent. I am speaking of the problem of the objectivity of propositions
about some past object, their truth-value, or whatever one wants to call
it. The presupposition is formulated thus: a person’s particular thoughts
and actions existed during a certain time in the past, and cannot be chan-
ged in any way by (conscious or unconscious) thought, (conscious) actions
or (unconscious) behaviour in some subsequent temporal duration. Our
language reveals to us that things do not exist in time, but rather during a
certain time. For example, in order to be informative in a manner relevant
to our needs and wants we usually speak in terms like ”at t1 X occurred”,
”between t1 and t2 Y occurred”, ”it all started at t1” (implying that it is ongo-
ing, finished, or will finish at some other time). Now, of course connections
can be made to other temporal states in order for us to gain more relevant
knowledge about X or Y, but, crucially, such connections do not seem to
presuppose all past and present temporal states. No, knowledge about X
or Y hinges on particular temporal states. Moreover, something analogous
to this can be said of the notion of ”context”, ”convention”, or ”tradition”,
that is, a thing is not understood in a context, but as related to certain other
things, but not to others. The rest of the argument in this section aims to
reveal that the use of our language about such temporal states implies a
commitment to what I call ontological determination. The argument has
the form of a thought experiment, and is easy to comprehend.
Suppose you are writing an article when someone comes up to you and
says ”I’m going to show you some facts which contradict your claim, and
you’re going to be ashamed when you see them”. After the utterance he
shows you some facts, perhaps in some document you have not read before.
You go through these facts, and it turns out that they do not disprove your
claim at all. You are of course not ashamed, and you rightfully dismiss
him. But suppose that the same person returns the day after, with the
same aim in mind as the day before. This time he actually has facts that
will contradict your claim, and make you feel ashamed, maybe because
they were there right in front of your eyes and yet you failed to see them.
Let us finally assume that you have lost all memory of the day before.
Our discloser of facts has no moral qualms; he wants to take advantage of
this situation, that is, he wants to make you believe that he has never at-
tempted and failed to show you contradicting facts before. What he can say
then is ”I just wanted to remind you of yesterday when I showed you some
facts which contradicted your claims, and you were ashamed when you

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 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 727

saw them”. He cannot say ”I’m going to show you some facts contradicting
your claim yesterday, and you’ll be ashamed when you see them yesterday”.
The closest thing to such an expression he can come, and there is really no
closeness here, is ”Yesterday I showed you that you’re contradicted, and you
were ashamed of it”. But this presupposes that he has already uttered ”I’m
going to show you some facts which contradict your claim, and you’re going
to be ashamed when you see them”. In turn, this presupposes, expressed in
the intentionality of the expression, that you have as a matter of conscious
perception seen this fact and been ashamed. But for you to be able to say
and believe ”yes, I saw them, and I was ashamed”, it is necessarily presup-
posed that your seeing and feeling ashamed was stored in your memory,
and that the memory in a subsequent situation was brought to your consci-
ousness essentially representing the content of the utterance that you see
them and are ashamed of it.
Our discloser of facts is fully aware that your memory is gone, and is
thereby committed to accepting the possibility that he either did not see
you at all yesterday; or, that he saw you, presented the facts, but that they
did not contradict your claim, nor made you feel ashamed, that is, he is
committed to accepting that he cannot change, as he wants, what has once
occurred. Consider what would happen if he was to think, act and speak
consistently with the belief that he could do whatever his heart desired
with objects ontologically determined. He would then say ”I have no food
today, but I had some yesterday, so I’ll eat yesterday”. Or, ”I humiliated him
two weeks ago, and he killed himself, but I’ll not humiliate him two weeks
ago, so he won’t kill himself”.
If our fact shower would be consistent in his thinking this way he would
not be able to make himself understood to others, nor would he be able
to live in a social community. To only nominally deny ontological deter-
mination is a paradox or self-contradiction; to deny it in actual use is a
disaster.
However, even if some past person has actualized a particular num-
ber of possibilities of thought and action, it is nonetheless the case that
our understanding of that person is epistemologically underdetermined,
that is, we cannot give a complete description of some past person. It is a
matter of presupposition that several logically incompatible descriptions
of the same object can exist. But consider that even if this ontological
determination is presupposed, if that object existed in the past. In order

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728 Admir Skodo
to encourage a fruitful basis for reflection, I would say that what episte-
mological underdetermination commits us to is simply that we should be
neither reductionists, nor compatibilists. There can be no ultimate view of
the world, nor do all views cohere with each other.
That our thinking is underdetermined does not stop us from perceiving
things, from understanding them, from living, from going on with our lives,
from living with others. Even life forms like war or capitalism are human
life forms, because you would not say that other species have a concept of
war or capitalism, would you? And it is in our language that we find our
life forms, the logic of social activity. 44

Understanding the person: The cognitive aspect

So far the analysis has been negative. It has drawn certain logical bounda-
ries that the historian should not transgress. In the remainder of the essay
I will be concerned with working out the constitution of the logical space
that falls within those boundaries. 45
As a matter of presupposition the historian should attribute cognitive
attitudes to his person of study. 46 First, the historian must attribute the
attitude of desire. The logical form of a desire is that a person, X, wants,
wishes, something, Y (expressed in a linguistic sentence, y), to happen, occur,
to be brought about or be possessed. In other words, a desire wants the
world to mirror it. The second attitude to be attributed is that of belief.
The logical form of belief is that a person, X, believes a proposition, y, to
be true or false about some concrete object or event, Y. Third, we have
the attitude of judgement, the form of which is that a person, X, values or
appraises some object or event, Y (expressed in a linguistic sentence, y). All
three of these cognitive attitudes are intentional – they are all about or
directed toward particular objects or events. 47 They are all capable of being

44. Language and logic too have their history, which of course overlaps. ”Logic” is not just logic,
but predicate logic, propositional logic, deontic logic, set theory, modal logic, meta-logic. All these
certainly share family resemblances, but does one entail all the others? Does each one entail every
other?
45. Bear in mind that the distinctions drawn in what follows are of a logical kind and do not
purport to enounce anything about temporal priority and succession.
46. I of course take it for granted that historical understanding is not possible without evidence,
linguistic or otherwise, which embodies past person’s activities. I also take for granted that histori-
ans know how to go about finding relevant evidence and judging its worth for research.
47. Due to practical reasons I will say nothing of the grammatical and lexical form of these
logically distinct attitudes.

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 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 729
held in higher-order and lower-order (sub-conscious) cognitive modes as
well. For example, not only can I desire to write a book, I can also believe
that my desire is unattainable. Or, I can be unaware that the tone of voice
in me saying ”I don’t like your friend, what are you talking about” strongly
implies that I do like her, but that I am for some reason not willing to admit
it, even to myself.
”How can I make a distinction between thought and language”, a critic
might object. ”Are not all linguistic expressions understood only by means
of reference to other linguistic elements in a ‘chain of signifiers’? We could
never hope to break out of the prison house of language”. So goes the charge.
The answer to such an objection involves pointing out a distinction between
three different kinds of meaning. 48 First, an expression has ”linguistic mea-
ning” (l-meaning), which is understood sufficiently by identifying its gram-
matical, syntactic, morphological, and conventional properties. Second, it
has ”semantic meaning” (s-meaning), which is sufficiently understood by
means of its logical properties, e.g. its extension. Now, even though both of
these are necessary for there to be ”person meaning” (p-meaning), they do
not sufficiently determine the content of an expression of p-meaning.
Let us take an example to show the upshot of these distinctions. Imagine
two friends, Judith and Paul, walking down a street discussing the concept
of intention. Both are philosophers. Judith is a post-structuralist (not so
far removed from an annaliste, as in the case of the historian Arlette Farge)
who argues that intentions are ungraspable, and Paul is a philosopher who
believes that they are graspable. Judith says to Paul, ”Barthes argues that
language bars access to intentions”. As she is saying it, they both notice a
kid being caught by a security guard outside of a store. The kid calls the
guard ”pig”. Paul says, ”That’s so stupid of him”. Now, though we can get at
the l-meaning and s-meaning of this expression without any recourse to
what was p-meant, we cannot stop at that if we want to know what Paul
meant. Certainly Judith would like to know what was p-meant. Nothing in
the linguistic and semantic context will help us in finding out what Paul

48. Here I draw on R. G. Collingwood, The idea of history: revised edition (Oxford 19 94); Lud-
wig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations (Oxford 19 68); H. P. Grice, ”Utterer’s meaning and
intention”, The philosophical review 40:2 (19 6 9) p. 147–177; Mark Bevir, The logic of the history of
Ideas (Cambridge 19 9 9); and A. P. Martinich, ”Four Senses of ‘Meaning’ in the history of ideas.
Quentin Skinner’s theory of historical interpretation”, Journal of the philosophy of history 3:3 (20 0 9)
p. 225–245. The distinctions can be made finer, as is done by Martinich and Grice, but for my
purposes the ones drawn will suffice.

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730 Admir Skodo
p-meant, for nothing in such contexts has an individual viewpoint, and
an ability to express and communicate that viewpoint. So when Judith,
probably somewhat angrily, asks, ”What do you mean by that”, she is not
inquiring into the conventional or morphological properties of Paul’s ex-
pression, or what ”that” refers to of itself. If she did, she would not need to
ask Paul. No, she wants to know what Paul meant. And Paul can then say,
”I meant that it’s so stupid of that kid to shoplift”, or even ”I meant that it’s
a bad argument”. Broadly speaking, in a way to be determined more spe-
cifically, it is with such p-meaning (so far identified in terms of cognitive
attitudes) that historians should be interested in if they are interested in
understanding persons.
It is fully possible to identify cognitive attitudes in a human who was
not aware of them. What is of essence when the historian identifies such at-
titudes is that he must be aware that he is doing so, and his understanding
of unconscious states must have a fairly rational form even if the identified
unconscious attitudes are seen to exhibit irrationality. By irrationality I
mean particular cognitive attitudes held by a particular person that are
found to be logically incompatible with each other. By structure I mean
a fairly systematic body of related cognitive attitudes, relations between
such cognitive attitudes, and actions or behaviour brought about by them.
This goes for all human forms of life, so what constitutes cultural, social,
legal, etc, structures is underwritten by the same set of presuppositions.
Such structures do not live on their own; they do not act, think, and feel.
The closest thing a structure can come to living, if this can be called ”clo-
seness”, is when persons behave in an unconscious way. Perhaps in that case
it might be appropriate to postulate an unconscious defined as a semi-
independent agency within the person. I trust the reader will notice the
crucial differences between my concepts of the unconscious and structure,
and Braudel’s.
Now, a person’s action or behaviour is understood by identifying the
expressed reasons for it, which simply means the identification of relevant
cognitive attitudes. Their form of explanation is a rational one, and it is not
compatible with the form of the equation, function or logical deduction. 49

49. In some cases however I believe that it might be appropriate to invoke the notion of mecha-
nism to understand the behaviour produced, perhaps to the dismay of the anti-naturalists. I will
not go into this aspect here. See my ”Outline of a theory of the person for historical-biographical
study”, The international journal of the humanities 7:1 (20 0 9) p. 59–70.

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 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 731
In addition to the three kinds of cognitive attitudes just discussed, I
will add to the list one more that is akin to these three in that it too is
intentional. I have in mind speech acts. A speech act, Y, is a linguistic ex-
pression, y, uttered or written by a person, X, which by and only by means
of its expression brings about an action or fact. In other words, a speech
act in a very real way makes the (social) world, for what it brings about is
necessarily conditioned upon being expressed linguistically. 50 Examples
include naming, marrying, and ordering. Of course Quentin Skinner must
be mentioned in this context, because he was the first to construct a theory
based on speech acts for intellectual history. I disagree with Skinner in that
I do not see the invocation of speech-act theory as necessary even for Skin-
nerian intellectual history, for Skinnerian intellectual history is essentially
about understanding texts. Asking, as Skinner does, ”what was X doing in
writing y”, and answering something like ”X was defending the monarchy
in writing y”, is surely logically different than asking something like, ”What
was X doing in saying ’Yes’ to the question ’Do you take this woman to be
your lawful wedded wife?’”, the answer being ”X was getting married”. In
the latter case, X brings about a marriage if and only if he says, ”Yes”. In the
former it is not necessarily the case that X, by defending the monarchy
in a text, manages to bring about an actual defense of the monarchy. This
reveals that his success in the writing (or saying) of y does not necessarily
bring about that which it wants to bring about.
A particular human does not hold one or some particular desires, speech
acts, aims and judgements that are the reasons for her actions and behavi-
our. No, she lives by very many, and changing, ones. The historian cannot
understand any one of them without connecting them to an extensive
amount of others. Even seemingly simple actions require this procedure in
order to be understood. The historian, however, typically deals with com-
plex cases, such where the larger contexts are so much richer and at times
even foreign to her. Still, the form of understanding is the same in trivial
as in non-trivial cases. In principle, the more the person to be understood
acted and behaved in ways for which we cannot see any reasons, the more
research is needed to identify those cognitive attitudes that will prove to
be consistent with them. A good historian does just this; she makes the

50. See the collection of his philosophical pieces in Visions of politics: volume I: regarding method
(Cambridge 20 02). I review Skinner in my ”Post-analytic philosophy of history”, Journal of the phi-
losophy of history 3:3 (20 0 9) p. 308–333, 30 9–314.

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732 Admir Skodo
seemingly unintelligible turn out to be intelligible. A presupposition that
is implied in all of this, which I now make explicit, is that the person is a
holistic entity, and for our understanding to be possible at all, it too must
be of a holistic character. If Braudel and the other annalistes did much
to promote holism, it is a holism of the wrong kind – so much should be
evident. If sometimes the historian does not find reasons, or if sometimes
there are no reasons to be found, then what? Well, this is just all part of
being a human, and no theory can adequately deal with it, if at all.
We must take into consideration the social situation when we understand
others. I analyse the concept of social situation as a limited space-time in
which two or more persons, act, re-act, and communicate with each other
in accordance with certain types of norms and rules. Norms and rules are
fairly systematic principles whose role is to regulate what can and cannot,
or should and should not, be done and said in a certain social situation. So-
cial structures simply consist of norms and rules. Cognitive attitudes are
constitutive of such structures, so to that in order to understand them the
historian must necessarily see the cognitive attitudes lying behind them.
It is certainly a presupposition that some actions or behaviour have unin-
tended or unwanted consequences. It is also true that a certain person can
misunderstand certain norms and rules, so even if the person thinks he has
complied with them, he has as a matter of fact not. But what is presupposed
in misunderstanding, misapplication, unintended consequences, and the
like, is the necessary possibility of proper understanding and compliance.
It is safe to say that what interests the historian most is how certain
structures are upheld and changed. To give an analysis of this requires the
invocation of self-consciousness and self-reflectiveness. This is the dimension
where the person in question is aware that it is she who has thoughts, and
that it is she who has acted within the constraints of some rules. From
this highest order of consciousness the person can go on to evaluate past
and present cognitive attitudes and actions, whether her own or those of
others. She can plan for the future, and fairly rationally commit to fulfil-
ling those plans, e.g. make a promise to someone and keep it. Such actions
and commitments cannot be understood if there was no presupposition
of self-consciousness and self-reflectiveness. Nobody is constantly in this
state, or any other state for that matter.
For a social structure to be upheld for a longer period of time, it is neces-
sary that the persons in that situation follow its rules or norms, whether

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 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 733
consciously or unconsciously. But if these persons are self-aware and self-
reflective about these norms, their own beliefs, and so on, then they have
the power not to follow the rule, they have the power to deliberate about
its justification, and they in some cases even have the power to go on and
change the rule. In principle, rules or norms are not sufficient determinants
of a person’s thought and behaviour.51 In order to understand how and why
particular social structures are constituted, upheld and changed the his-
torian must necessarily relate them to particular persons in particular si-
tuations. Such an understanding involves indentifying the relevant actions,
behaviour and the behind them lying cognitive attitudes, whether consci-
ous or unconscious. And again, the way I propose historians should view the
social world is drastically different from what Braudel’s proposed.

Understanding the person: The phenomenal aspect

Understanding a person as analysed in the previous section is about att-
ributing cognitive mental states based on evidence in linguistic or other
form. Surely we must presuppose that the person we study held beliefs,
desires, and the like. We cannot, however, assume that he drew the same
connections between his cognitive attitudes, as the historian will come to
draw. What is more, he might not have been aware of some of them, and
yet expressed them somehow. Then again, he might have withheld some
actual convictions and values, which he took pains to never express. All
this is to say that nothing in my analysis (of cognition) ensures us that we
will come to understand a particular person as he understood himself. The
logical consequence of this analysis is that in this attributing of ours we
will undoubtedly lay a particular emphasis, accent if you will, on certain
aspects of a person’s being. In other words, the cognitive dimension is a
matter of third-person understanding, which implies that it is in some
crucial ways cut off from the way a person understood herself. This kind
of understanding is a rather cold endeavour, if the metaphor is apt. Put
differently, we might be making the unintelligible intelligible only for us. I
submit that our very humanity, personhood, hinges on having both cogni-
tive and phenomenal capacities.
I have in a (rather poor) previous essay sketched out some necessary
meta-theoretical principles for history much in the same vein as I am
51. I am sidestepping the important issue of power, but the main implications of my analysis
concerning power should be somewhat clear by way of implication.

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734 Admir Skodo
proceeding here. Understanding is, I proposed there, a cognitive-pheno-
menal activity. 52 If it was only a question of cognition, then we would be
unable to understand such deeply human aspects as love, trust, revenge,
personality, irony, and style of writing. How trite history would be if this
was so! Of course these characteristics are not homologous but, crucially,
none of them can be properly understood only by means of attribution of
cognitive attitudes. 53 To be sure, in history understanding phenomenally is
necessarily related to grasping p-meaning; nevertheless, and crucially, it is a
different dimension of understanding than the one discussed so far.
We must therefore distinguish between cognitive understanding and
phenomenal understanding, because in some cases grasping what a person
p-meant is not enough for grasping his action or what the content of his
linguistic expression is. Let me illustrate what I mean. Imagine a white
middle-aged American man X, a successful businessman, walking down
a street in New York with an expensive iPhone in his hand. First imagine
another American middle-aged white man, Y, who does not know X. Y, who
is wearing an expensive suit, runs up to X and asks ”excuse me Sir, can I
borrow your phone, it’s really important”. Now imagine an alternate situa-
tion where a young American black man, Z, comes up to X. The two men
do not know each other. Z, dressed in some baggy clothes and a backward
hat, asks the same question, but his tone of voice is different, and he might
even phrase himself slightly differently, like ”hey man, can I use your phone,
it’s important”. The p-meaning is the same in both questions – namely,
that both Y and Z want to use X’s phone because they say it’s important
that they do so. But in some cases X will tend to trust Y and lend him
the phone, but he will feel distrust towards Z, and at least be suspicious
as to the sincerity of his motives, and so will be reluctant to give him the
phone. Now, of course cognitive attitudes are at work here, e.g. X’s belief
that young black males dressed in a certain way are to be suspected of
criminal behaviour. We could go on to identify relevant cognitive attitudes
that would help us understand say X’s refusal to give Z the phone. But it
is evident that we miss something crucial if we leave it at that. For X feels
something, he does not reason and conceptualise, and it is the feeling that
52. See Skodo (20 0 9).
53. The phenomenal dimension of understanding has become an eminently defendable set of
theses in the philosophy of mind, and the cognitive- and neurosciences. For philosophy, see e.g. Peter
Goldie, On personality (London & New York 20 04), who also reviews findings in the cognitive- and
neurosciences.

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 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 735
prompts his behaviour in a way different than a reason does. His attitude
is more direct, closer to perception and emotion than it is to reflection.
Cognitively we ”take a step back” when we understand. Phenomenally ”we
leap forward”, attuned to the way we feel and perceive. Indeed, intuition,
sympathy, imagination, and the like – these should be part and parcels of
the historian’s mind.
Is this really important for the historian’s practice? During the last fifty
years or so historians and philosophers of history have dismissed this di-
mension as something belonging to a bygone age; the annalistes and their
emphasis on social, sometimes beyond-personal, forms had a considerable
part to play in this dismissal. But I urge the reader to recall some of the
seminars, lectures, and meetings with colleagues he or she has attended.
And I ask: do you doubt that at times there were feelings, moods, and
personalities expressed which were crucial to your understanding of what
the person you were listening or talking to was saying? Did you not have
feelings of your own? Think of this now: how easy is it to sidestep this
phenomenal aspect when we conduct a historical inquiry! We neglect it
both in ourselves and in the person we are studying. 54
As a way of rounding up this essay I wish to put forward an example
that illustrates the importance of the phenomenal dimension for historical
studies. 55 It is that of Michel Foucault. 56 Foucault studied at the ultra-
prestigious ENS in the 1940s. During this time it is known that Foucault
had severe bouts of depression during which he hurt himself physically and
even attempted suicide. It is reported that he spent time in the sanatorium
of the ENS, and went to therapy and psychoanalysis.57 Why was Foucault
depressed? This question we can answer fairly easily, as it is ”widely ac-
cepted” that it was due to the inner conflict Foucault was struggling with
in coming to terms with his homosexuality. 58 Thus, we can perhaps invoke

54. For this reason, although he goes too far, I have sympathy with Ankersmit’s Sublime historical
experience (Stanford 20 05), because he acknowledges it.
55. I could give many many more, but alas, the space does not allow it.
56. I would have chosen Braudel, but unfortunately I did not have the time to dig deeper into
the connections between his personal life and his work.
57. Depression is (and I do not mean to sound opinioned in saying this) a condition that we find
abounds among great thinkers and artists. Another example is William James, who in a lecture
drew on his depression to formulate a philosophical question – namely, how to convince someone
who wants to kill himself that he should go on living. Indeed, I too ask myself that. The lecture is
published in On a certain blindness in human beings (London 20 0 9).
58. David Macey, Michel Foucault (London 20 04) p. 29–30.

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736 Admir Skodo
the strong desire to be with men; the belief that this desire was not an
accepted norm in Vichy France; the belief that he was worth less than most
people, and that he was abnormal because of his desire. Finally, because
these desires and beliefs were inconsistent and yet all held by Foucault, he
could not cope with them, and therefore felt that killing himself would re-
solve his negative condition. Certainly this helps us to understand Foucault
cognitively, but surely the reader will agree that we are missing something
fundamental in this kind of understanding, in this kind of case. For, in
one of Foucault’s depressions, surely his body felt different than when he
thought about a philosophical issue; surely he saw things differently and
even reflected on them differently; surely he felt intensely. Might there not
be something crucial to take into consideration here when we try to un-
derstand Foucault’s preoccupations with the history of madness, sexuality,
and the very presuppositions of subjectivity?
Let the final question be my concluding remark. No, let it be an expres-
sed experience that bids the historian and philosopher alike to ponder its
nature and place in our life, whether past or present.

Fernand Braudel och personbegreppet

I denna artikel analyseras Fernand Braudels (1902–1985) teorier om historie-

vetenskapens förutsättningar. En grundläggande tes är att Braudel (implicit)
postulerar den mänskliga individen som historievetenskapens främsta stu-
dieobjekt. Detta kan tyckas stå i motsättning till Braudels strukturalistiska
vetenskapssyn, men i artikeln hävdas att detta kan förklaras utifrån Braudels
erfarenheter som tysk krigsfånge under andra världskriget. Efter en inledande
presentation och tolkning av Braudels uppfattning om historievetenskapens
förutsättningar följer en kritisk granskning som visar att Braudels metatän-
kande om historikerns objekt, influerat av den strukturalistiska antropolo-
gin, begreppsligt inte hänger samman. Denna kritik utgör grunden för den
följande diskussionen där artikelförfattaren försöker urskilja nödvändiga, om
än inte tillräckliga, villkor för det historievetenskapliga tänkandet och histo-
rieforskningen. Den övergripande tesen är att historisk forskning bör ägna sig
åt att förstå enskilda personer. För att en historiker ska kunna förstå en given
person måste följande villkor uppfyllas: historikern måste genom ett urval av
relevanta källor identifiera de kognitiva attityder som frambringade personens
handlingar och beteenden, så som dessa gestaltade sig inom de strukturella

historisk tidskrift 130:4 • 2010

 Fernand Braudel and the concept of the person 737
ramar som var rådande vid den aktuella tidpunkten. Genom analysen blir det
möjligt att förklara hur givna strukturer konstitueras, upprätthålls och för-
ändras. I artikeln framhålls att det är personer som konstituerar, upprätthåller
och förändrar dessa strukturer. Historikern bör dessutom försöka urskilja den
så kallade fenomenala aspekten hos en given person. Denna aspekt inbegriper
känsla och personlighet och är logiskt distinkt från den kognitiva aspekten. Ett
annat viktigt resultat av analysen visar att det ur denna dimension framkom-
mer handlingar och beteenden som inte kan förstås enbart genom tillgripandet
av kognitiva attityder. Historikern bör därför även beakta de så kallade feno-
menala aspekterna hos enskilda personer.

Keywords: Fernand Braudel, the person, presuppositional analysis, understand-

ing, historical thought

historisk tidskrift 130:4 • 2010