‘The gift of theory’: A critique of thehistoire des mentalités

Abstract

The histoire des mentalite's represents, for some historians, the new approach to illuminating the role of the common people in history. For some time the innovations of this approach in conceiving time, space, ritual and popular culture have enjoyed acceptance from those social historians keen to recover the everyday life of the lower orders through histories of the family, the mob, riots, women, sexuality and even death. Taking an interdisciplinary approach characteristic of the Annales' ' total history', and concerned with understanding the meanings and values held by historical actors, the project of these Annaliste historians of mentalite has even been likened to that of the British marxist historiographers.1 And yet in a recent symposium the British social historians Peter Burke and Eric Hobsbawm remained sceptical of a possible concord. While sympathizing with the Annales approach in general, and the histoire des mentalite's in particular, they tended to skirt any issue of using the concept outright, and instead offered suggestions as to what they wished the histoire des mentalites to become. Burke, for example, acknowledged a debt to the Annales but quickly observed that 'British cricitism of the French approach would be of great value '.2 Hobsbawm raised similar doubts. Indeed, after outlining the merits of the approach he effectively redesigned the concept when he suggested: