conceptualize which risks it becoming something else, be it Marxist
determinism, Weberian abstraction, or structural atemporality." ¹ A de-
cade later, the same criticism was even heard from anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose seminal work on structuralism pulled
some historians of society toward the atemporal. Pointing to similari-
ties between the genealogy of the few and the collective biography of
the many, Lévi-Strauss concluded that "between narrative history and
the new history--one recording the daily activities of dignitaries, the
other attentive to the slow demographic, economic and ideological
changes that have their origins in the very foundation of society--the
distance does not appear to be so great any longer." ²

Mapping a new course for social history, however, is no obvious or
simple task. Indeed, a vocal minority in the history profession has
recently advocated a disengagement from the distracting apparatus
and theory of the social sciences and a return to rejuvenated forms
of traditional narrative. Critics point out that social history, instead
of enlarging history, has instead fragmented it. As a consequence of
opening fresh areas of knowledge and adopting new methods, his-
torians have lost their ability to recapture the totality of the past
through evocative and richly textured narrative. If the trend is not
reversed, these critics fear, history--traditionally the broad domain
of the generalist--will remain divided into separate specialized fief-
doms. Lawrence Stone believes the new integrative narrative should
concentrate on the unified theme of mentalité, the complex recon-
struction of vanished mind sets. ³ Others propose a less psychological
but more intellectualized history. Thus François Furet advocates "a
problem-oriented history that assembles its elements on the basis of
questions that arise from an explicit conceptual framework." ⁴ This
variant distances itself from both narrative history and empirical ven-
tures and especially from the massing of large numbers of individual
observations which enable the social historian to discriminate be-
tween the particular and the common. To the five historians who
wrote this book, these prescriptions for historical study do not con-
cern themselves enough with issues of fundamental causation and
change. We think that a rejuvenated social history has a major role to
play in resolving these issues, and we are concerned that the gains
made in the last thirty years not be lost.

How, then, do we conceive of social history? Our collective defini-
tion, which we owe to Charles Tilly, could be more properly called a
"theory" of social history. The role of social history is to connect

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