the expanding social sciences, principally from anthropology and so-
ciology but also from such fields as linguistics and psychoanalysis,
and added significantly to the list of accepted auxiliary sciences. This
methodological exploration was also advanced by the timely appear-
ance of computers, which allowed social historians to redefine the
concept of an archive and to make sophisticated connections be-
tween sources not achievable by traditional methods. Third, and in
retrospect most important, social historians actively participated in
the new pluralist vision of the 1960s. At stake was more than a simple
enlargement of history's vision. By devising methods which allowed
them to build judgments from thousands of observations of ordinary
people, they could investigate groups heretofore ignored or at best
misunderstood. For the first time, historians could divide the social
structure into an infinite number of segments and explain the posi-
tive role of diverse communities within the society at large. They
could, for example, envision the "proletariat" as a group of heteroge-
neous and often conflicting human beings, not simply as the idealiza-
tion projected by the international labor movement. Historical dis-
course gained strength and credibility from concrete and manifold
details of people's existence. No longer an abstraction, "the people"
began to reassume the garb of life.

But in the excitement of innovation, social historians neglected
some essential concerns. For one, social history was never fully expli-
cated. Admittedly a multifaceted venture, it soon became whatever
social historians chose to write. While it is true that strict definitions
tend to reduce the scope of investigation or prevent the uncovering
of important evidence, in this case the absence of a clear program,
except that of enlarging the scope of history, led to fragmentation and
a diminished focus. Furthermore, the search for ad hoc methodolo-
gies has often superseded the search for answers to large historical
questions. In the process, social historians' use of theories from the
social sciences became increasingly uncritical. In 1974, when Jacques Le Goff
and Pierre Nora edited Faire de l'histoire, a collection on the
newest of the "new" history written in France up to that time, they
realized that they could not impose a framework on the varied re-
search then underway and grouped the contributions under the ru-
bric of "new problems," "new approaches," and "new objects." They
particularly warned, however, against the submission of history to the
social sciences. As they put it, "the new history, besides its important
critique of historical events and facts, has developed a tendency to

-4-