Archaeology, the New Histories, and the History of Ideas

Abstract

It is one of the peculiar facts of twentieth century French intellectual history that the two new strands in historical scholarship, the Annales School and the epistemologists, have by and large ignored each other’s work. Lucien Febvre’s 1939 review of Bachelard’s Psychanalyse du feu (Bachelard 1964) remained the only review of Bachelard’s many books in the Annales, and none of Koyré’s or Canguilhem’s books was ever reviewed in this journal (Chartier 1982: 31). Furthermore, in a programmatic article on how the history of science should be written, “Sur Einstein et sur l’histoire” (Febvre 1955), published in the Annales, Febvre makes no mention of Koyré’s, Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s work. Febvre suggests that the study of the history of science be integrated into general history (ibid., 306). Likewise, references to the works of the Annales historians are missing from the texts of the epistemologists.