Micro, market, model: a French test case

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 경북대학교 영남문화연구원
· 수록지 정보 : 영남학 / 19호 / 39 ~ 92페이지
· 저자명 : 마르탱 브뤼겔

초록

There is no French micro history. To be sure, the French have played with scale. Geography was among the helpmates in the birth of scholarly history in the late-19th century, and attention to the inscription of historical processes in the landscape mattered to the intellectual community that included Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. The narrowing of the geographic focus with the coming of age of the Annales' thir dgeneration sharpened the picture to figure out; it increased its complexity. It caught happenings that had hitherto escaped the bird's eyeview: property transfers and demographic patterns thus entered historiographical reality. The movement toward ever smaller spatial units of analysis peaked early in France. There were other village histories but no indigenous tradition that favorably compared to English local history and its effort to elaborate a general approach to local or regional society.
The microhistorical moment passed. The programmatic calls and epistemological insights from the early 1990s remained largely unheeded, at least in France. Some bold practitioners truly experimented. They went so far as to generate the configurations of anindividual's social world on the prosopographic basis of his daily contacts and bureaucratic identifications: the micro thus generated the macro. A few social historian turned cautiously toward the use of social-science and even formal models to build their case.
It is their example that I would like to follow here in proposing the outline of an analytical narrative to test the explanatory power of a formal model. Indeed, the assumptions of neoclassical economics figure prominently among the targets of microhistorical – as well as everyday historical – criticism. Microhistorians of all hues contest the explanatory efficiency of a means-and-end, calculating rationality that progressively led to a market economy. Human affairs and interactions, so the rationale goes, cannot be reduced to a free-standing individual. Different rationalities – family relations, for example, or community customs and patronage – influence opportunities and constraints, and thus the various options (in a positive light) open to, or arbitrages imposed on (the downbeat assessment) the historical actor. Food provisioning at the Saint-Cyr orphanage for the girls of the impoverished aristocracy in the 18thcentury provide the opportunity to expand such investigations into market rationality and its hold on everyday affairs in the long run.

참고자료

· 없음