Welcome to Monday Methods and happy international workers' day!

In this weekly feature, we aim to expand upon methods, theories, and approaches that are important for historians in how they write history.

Today's feature is inspired by user /u/Reggaepocalypse who recently asked:

Is there a relation between the so-called "Great Man" theory of History and capitalism? Between the "trends and forces" approach and socialism?

Both economic systems have streams of thought inherent to them. To be overly terse, capitalism emphasizes personal progress and individuality, while socialism emphasizes social progress and the collective. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but are these two prominent theories of history in any way related, to or a result of, these systems?

My own field of academic psychology found itself in what seems to me to be an analogous situation during the sociobiology debates, as detailed in Defenders of the Truth: The Sociobiology Debate by Ullica Segerstrale. Claims were staked on either side of the evolutionary approach to understanding human behavior, in the manner of thesis and antithesis, along fairly sharp political lines. Synthesis was achieved in the end, and value was ascribed to aspects of both approaches, for scientific rather than political reasons. As an outsider I wonder if I am drawing too much of an analogy between this debate on scientific perspective and the shift in perspective between the Great Man theory and the Trends and Forces approach.

It's taken me sometime to do some research on that but I thought it vaguely fitted with May 1st and it made a very good topic for our ongoing MM series because it really goes to the heart of some very interesting issues, namely, how are we as historians in our theoretical and methodological approaches influenced by the world around us and the diverse models and approaches to society and gaining insight that surround us.

Let's start with some basics: The Great Man Theory of History was popularized by Scottish Author Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s and as you can imagine, it revolves around the idea that history is "but the biography of great man" as one of its proponents put it. This heroic view of history that emphasizes the great deeds and wisdom of individual men and seek through them to understand history was indeed something very 19th century (I'll get to that) but far from being a paradigm for long. Far from being the most prominent paradigm for long it was both Marx as well as several non-Marxist authors who refuted Great Man History the latest from the 1860s onward, among them Herbert Spencer as well as one of the most important fathers of modern approaches to history, Leopold Ranke.

Here's where it gets a bit tricky though: Carlyle, Spencer, Ranke, and Marx were not all on the same side of how to approach history, nor were they all with Marx in his critique of capitalism and thinking in offering an alternative approach to society. What they all share, however, is their reverence to a specific form of Enlightenment philosophy for which I'll use Hegelian as a chiffre because Hegel has formulated it in the most "pure" form.

The Enlightenment in both its English and French schools brought us many things that still form to a certain extent the basis for both Capitalism and Communism as ideologies (including such philosophical constructs like the individual or the notion of a larger changeable society itself) but the Hegelian view (which, again I am using as a chiffre since something like Whig History functions similarly to Hegel but does not reference Hegel) is a particular sub set of Enlightenment that underwent some major transformations in the 20th century. But more on that later.

First, what is the Hegelian view or paradigm?

The Enlightenment tried in the beginning to classify, categorize, and deduce the patterns and laws that reality follows. What worked out very well for the natural sciences was also tried for history. Enter Hegel: In its simplified form, Hegel tried to formulate a pattern of natural laws for history. Hegel proposed that every society, every historical formation has a base (economy, the legal system, basically things that are structural) and a superstructure (philosophy, religion, political thought etc.) that are in a dialectical relationship (these are Marxian terms, Hegel's terms are a bit more obscure). A dialectical relationship is a relationship in which thesis and anti-thesis form a synthesis, meaning that they form a cohesive rational unit that evolves through the tensions between the two until they are resolved.

To simplify it, Hegel believed that the basic law of history was that the basic law of history was that history would always become more rational, enlightened, and progressive by way of a "world spirit" (Weltgeist) acting through the superstrucutre and through a dialectical process leading to a more rational and progressive synthesis. In short, Hegel formulated the historical law that societies would always become more progressive and rational throughout the ages.

This, essentially, is also the view of Whig history, and several other schools of history, whether they are Carlyle, Spencer or Ranke. Whether if through Great Man or politics or any other factor, history was set on a path to progress naturally towards a more rational and enlightened stage.

Even Marx could not escape the basic Hegelian paradigm. Explicitly referencing Hegel, Marx posited that it was not the superstructure (though, philosophy, religion) that drove history forward, it was the base, specifically economics. In his historical materialism, economic and class conflict formed the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic structure in history. From slave economy to feudal economy to capitalist economy to – ultimately – Communism.

This view, whether in its Marxist interpretation or in its non-Marxist interpretation was pretty all pervasive for the field of history until about the First World War. Here we encounter the Hegelian water-shed and in its wake, what can be broadly described as social history, the trends and forces view of history.

The experience of the First World War in many ways set back the Hegelian paradigm because how could a world that was constantly evolving towards becoming more rational, enlightened etc. produce such a war (and not end in revolution in the Marxist view)?

Such an experience lead to a re-consideration of how history worked and if it really followed a law, at least for some (the complete rejection in the West would take until the end of the Second World War). And here we meet the first iteration of social history.

Let me preface this by saying that when we talk about social history, there are several iterations and different schools of social history throughout history and while some are explicitly Marxist (Hobsbawm and the historians group of the British Communist Party for example) others are not – and so was the first the first real historical school that can be called social history, the French Annales school.

Named after the Annales d'histoire économique et sociale journal, this particular school of historiography originated in the early 20th century in France and is associated with a particular approach to history: Social history.

Unlike "classical" – e.g. German – historiography or Marxist historiography, which placed emphasis on class history, the Annales School in its origin in the 1920s combined several approaches to history, including geography, classical history, meaning historical hermeneutics, and sociology in their approach to history. Most famously associated with this school is historian Marc Bloch, a medievalist from Strasbourg University.

Bloch for example used this approach in his at the time ground breaking study French Rural History (Les caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, 1931). Among his approaches was for example, to look at the material remains of French medieval agriculture – in his case hedges in Normandy – in order to learn more about French society at the time. From this study, he was able, among other things, to gauge the impact of attempted agrarian reforms and how these reforms contributed to the later French Revolution.

Another concept that Bloch and the Annales School spearheaded and that has left its trace in how today's cultural history is practiced are what he termed mentalités. Functioning as a sort of psychology of an epoch, Bloch and his fellow historians of the Annales School looked at how rituals, myths and other sources of collective behavior changed and reflected while at the same time influenced historical societies. Though the study of how these myths and rituals, for example, influenced the relationship between king and commoner in pre-modern England and France, Bloch became the father of what we now would characterize as historical anthropology.

As the description of mentalités reveals, Bloch (and later Fernand Braudel) still looked for patterns in history. But what they rejected was the idea of history following a law or a fixed set of rules. Around the same time, there are also several Marxist writers associated with the Frankfurt School that started rejecting such notions, foremost among the Walter Benjamin.