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Societies for the History of Economics <[log in to unmask]>
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Sun, 4 Mar 2018 04:14:20 -0500
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Prof Massimo Mastrogregori recently opened up this paper on Academia.edu

https://www.academia.edu/2510875

It concerns the suppression of two pages of Bloch's Apologie pour l'Histoire
ou Métier d'historien"  (aka 'The Historian's Craft'), prior to its 1949
publication by the editor Lucien Febvre.  

Mastrogregori writes "It was not a question of censoring" but I feel that
statement is open to doubt.

I would read the broad context thus:  Bloch was replying to fairly
commonplace pro-enlightenment criticism of professional historians by the
poet Paul Valery.  Voltaire notoriously spoke along the same lines long
before, and in the Anglosphere, Valery's contemporaries such as Auden made
similar points, in line with others like H G Wells and Russell.

Bloch's sought to counter this move by endorsing (in complicated ways!) more
traditional and indeed religious anti-enlightenment views.  In this he seems
to be paralleled in the Anglosphere by such contemporaries as T S Elliot, in
line with others like Keynes and Wittgenstein.

I would point specifically to this sentence from Bloch, suppressed in the
published work:

"What is needed is that the historian abstains from thoughtlessly distancing
from their meanings words that are already commonly used"

Febvre published the redacted Bloch work in 1949, the same year his "adopted
son" Fernand Braudel published "The Mediterranean".  That work contains at
its heart the two chains argument, (p. 902 in my 1966 English edition) which
surely implies just the opposite, that professional historians should turn
away from traditional history.  He calls "traditional history" a "misleading
pageant".

I count myself a member of that "public" which Mastrogregori associates here
with Valery.  

As such I do not so much criticise the inconsistency of critics, so much as,
its apparent cover up.

Robert Tye, York, UK (no affiliation)

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