So it's the year 1912 and we are high in the rugged, just totally unforgiving terrain of the Moroccan highlands. Right. The political atmosphere up there at this specific time is essentially a powder keg. Yeah, exactly. Because you have three entirely distinct groups with completely different worldviews just colliding in this one geographic space. And they do not understand each other at all. No, not even a little bit. First, you have Cohen, who is a Jewish merchant. And he relies on these really complex localized alliances to just run his trade safely. Right. Then you have the local Berber tribal leaders who, you know, they govern their people through these ancient. highly formalized codes of honor and retaliation, too. Which is very important to the story. And then suddenly entering the mix, projecting their own entirely alien, bureaucratic and military framework onto this region. You have the French colonial army. Yeah. Represented in this case by Captain Damari. Right. So it is a complete collision of realities. And the spark that sets off this whole powder keg is, well, it's seemingly small. It's a robbery. Just a local dispute, really. Exactly. A neighboring tribe raids Cohen's camp. They steal his flock of sheep, and in the chaos of this raid, two of his guests are actually killed. Which is awful. But now, under the local cultural code, which is this deeply embedded concept called the R -Pact, Cohen has a very specific protocol he's supposed to follow. He doesn't go to the police. No. Because there are no police. Exactly. He goes to the local Berber sheik who he has this formalized pact with, and he demands his claim. Right. And the sheik is culturally obligated to help Cohen secure restitution. He has to do it. Yeah. So they form an armed posse, basically. They ride over to the offending tribe's camp, and the sheik demands the stolen sheep back, plus a penalty. And here is the fascinating part. The offending tribe actually recognizes the legitimacy of this demand. Under that specific art code. Yes, exactly. Under that code, they know they're in the wrong. So they don't fight. They just allow Cohen to walk through their flock and pick out his payment and sheep. So honor is restored. The cosmic balance of the highlands is righted. Everybody is happy or well satisfied. Right. It worked exactly as the system intended. But right as Cohen and the sheikh are riding back with this massive herd of sheep. Enter Captain Dumari. Ah, yes. The French colonial forces arrive. Yeah. And Dumari looks at this scene. And what does he see? He sees an armed posse of locals driving a huge herd of sheep across the highlands. Because to Dumari's, you know, French military, very bureaucratic frame of reference, he isn't witnessing a complex indigenous legal ritual at all. No, he thinks he is witnessing a riot. He thinks it's blatant, chaotic theft. So what does he do? He throws Cohen, the guy who was the victim of the original robbery, into jail. It's just wild. So Cohen sits in this colonial cell just entirely bewildered. I mean, he followed the law perfectly. That's his law, yeah. Right. He did exactly what his cultural reality demanded of him to restore order. Yet here he is punished by this parallel cultural reality that he barely even comprehends. And DiMari eventually lets him out. But the French confiscate the sheep. Of course they do. Yeah. And Cohen basically spends the rest of his life futilely petitioning the French government to get his sheep back. He is completely unable to bridge the gap between his understanding of the event and the official colonial record. It's tragic, honestly. It really is. But the reason we are starting with this story, which is a famous anthropological field note that we'll definitely return to later, is because it exposes the fundamental, just terrifying problem of writing history. Right. Because usually we think of history as this objective recording, like a security camera pointing at the past. Yeah. You just record the treaties, you know, the wars, the dates, the movement of the sheep. And the historian just points at the tape and says, there it is. That's what happened. But if you look at the raw facts of the Moroccan sheep raid, what we might call the thin description of the event, the timeline just reads, 1912, merchant robbed, forms posse, takes sheep, arrested by military. Which tells you. absolutely nothing about what actually happened. Nothing at all. It completely misses the historical truth. The security camera is broken. Exactly. History isn't just a timeline of facts. It's an active, highly subjective, interpretive act. You are looking at this incredibly murky landscape of human thought and culture. And to write history, you have to decide what to look at, and crucially, how to actually look at it. Which brings us to the mission of this deep dive. Yes, because you, the listener, brought us a massive, ambitious challenge today. A stack of sources from four heavy -hitting academic theoreticians. We're talking Maurice Mandelbaum, Quentin Skinner, Clifford Geertz, and Peter Burke. And you want to know how to actually write history using their methodologies, like how to practically apply this stuff. Which is going to require dismantling a lot of our basic assumptions. Oh, absolutely. But we are going to build a rigorous, practical framework for approaching the past today. Right. We'll start at the abstract heights of how we track the evolution of ideas, then move into the mechanics of how to properly read a text from, say, 400 years ago without just projecting our modern anxieties onto it. Right. And then we'll zoom in on how to interpret nonverbal human behavior. And finally, map how the historical discipline itself has evolved to balance symbolic culture with hard material data. I am so ready. So let's open the cool kit. Let's start with segment one, looking at the basic building blocks of historical narrative ideas. Let's do it. Because if you are a historian looking at a really chaotic century, let's say the 18th century, you naturally want to track. The big concepts that drove the era. Concepts like liberty, romanticism, pragmatism, the big ismisms. Yeah. And Maurice Mandelbaum takes direct aim at how historians traditionally do this. He specifically critiques a very famous methodology developed by A .O. Lovejoy. Ah, yes. Lovejoy's unit idea. Exactly. Can you explain what Lovejoy was trying to do there? Well, Lovejoy's project was massively influential at the time. He essentially wanted to break down the rigid silos between academic departments. Like philosophy and literature? Right. He thought it was absurd that philosophers only read philosophy and literary critics only read poetry because ideas cross those boundaries all the time. That makes sense. It does. He argued that if you take a massive intimidating aphism, like idealism or romanticism, and you look closely at it, you'll find it is actually a complex compound. Like chemistry. He treated intellectual history like chemistry. That is the exact underlying logic, yes. Lovejoy believed these massive systems of thought could be broken down into fundamental, unchanging elements. And these are the unit ideas. Exactly. His methodology proposed that these unit ideas have their own continuous life histories. They just march across the centuries. Okay, so like Plato invents a unit idea, then it goes dormant for a bit. Right, and then maybe a medieval theologian picks it up, rearranges it, and then a 19th century poet uses it again. Got it. And the historian's job, according to Lovejoy, is to track that specific unit idea through time. That was the goal. Okay, I have an analogy for this. Let me know what this tracks. Let's hear it. If I'm trying to write a history of baking using Lovejoy's method, I look at every pastry, every wedding cake, every loaf of sourdough in human history, and I reduce them all down to their basic chemical components. Right, to flour and eggs. Yeah. And then I write a thousand -year history of flour. Which sounds... incredibly tedious, honestly. It does, and that is exactly the problem, right? This is Mandelbaum's core critique, because if you just track the flour, you entirely miss what made the cake a cake. Yes, you lose the recipe. You lose the baker's intent. The flour means nothing without the specific structure it was baked into. That is a perfect way to look at it. Mandelbaum argues that tearing an idea out of its specific philosophical system to treat it as an independent floating unit just destroys the unique pattern of the original thinker. Because they didn't just dump flour on a table. They made something specific. Exactly. When a philosopher builds a system of thought, the connections between their ideas are just as critical as the ideas themselves. Right, because the meaning of a concept changes based on the architecture it sits within. Yes. Like a brick used to build a cathedral serves a fundamentally different purpose and holds a totally different structural tension than the exact same brick used to build a prison. I like that. Mandelbaum points out that thinkers are driven by highly specific, localized intentions. They are trying to solve immediate problems. Or they're mad at a rival. Exactly. Or they're trying to rectify glaring errors they see in the work of their immediate predecessors. So they might take an old concept, sure, but the application and the arrangement of that concept are entirely novel. So by isolating the unit idea... The historian basically strips the thinker of their actual philosophical impulse. Yes. The unique idea becomes this ghostly abstraction with no real grounding in human history. Okay. I see the danger there. But let's pause and look at this practically for a second. Okay. Because if I am an archivist or a historian and I want to write a book about the evolution of the concept of the social contract, isn't it naturally intuitive to trace that single thread from Hobbes to Locke to Rousseau? It is intuitive. Yeah. But if I abandon that thread. What is the alternative? Like, how do I organize the absolute chaos of the archive if I can't track an idea? Well, the alternative requires recognizing the profound danger of what Mandelbaum calls monism. Monism. OK, let's unpack that. When historians try to find a single clean thread to explain a messy historical reality, they often fall into the trap of assuming a single underlying cause dictates everything. And there are a few different flavors of monism, right? There are. Mandelbaum identifies sociological monism as one major pitfall. Which is what exactly? The classic example is the rigid orthodox Marxist framework. Ah. Which posits that the economic base, the material modes of production, completely and unilaterally determines the cultural and intellectual superstructure. So in that framework. Every poem, every religious debate, every scientific discovery is ultimately just a reflection of class conflict and economic conditions. Exactly. It's a monistic view because it reduces all historical causality down to one single root. Which feels incredibly reductive if you were trying to study like a really nuanced theological debate. Very much so. But Mandelbaum also critiques intellectual historians who fall into a different kind of monism, the Geisteschichte approach. Okay. German word warning. What does that mean? It's the idea that an entire era is unified by a singular zeitgeist or spirit of the age. Oh, right. The zeitgeist. The assumption there is that a fundamental invisible set of presuppositions permeated all aspects of intellectual life in a given century. So it acts as the single cause for the literature, the science and the philosophy of the time. Right. You assume that everyone living in the Renaissance was just vibrating with the exact same underlying Renaissance energy. And that energy somehow produced both Machiavelli's politics and da Vinci's paintings. Exactly. I mean, it turns history into a tidy novel with a central theme. You have the Enlightenment chapter, then you turn the page, and oh, here's the Romantic chapter. It makes for a neat narrative, but Mandelbaum argues this forces historical figures to fit molds they never actually belonged in. Yeah, you end up ignoring all the thinkers who absolutely hated the Enlightenment while living right in the middle of it. Precisely. So to avoid mononism, Mandelbaum introduces cultural pluralism. Cultural pluralism, which for the historian organizing an archive, this has to be a radical shift in perspective. It really is. Cultural pluralism demands that we view widespread ideas or presuppositions as the results of diverse cultural activities rather than the single cause of them. Wait, that is a massive inversion of how we usually think about causality. Yes, it is. So instead of saying the spirit of the Enlightenment caused these specific 18th century pamphlets to be written. A cultural pluralist historian says, a chaotic variety of highly specific, localized human debates, economic shifts, and scientific experiments eventually produced a messy pattern that we, looking backward, decided to label the Enlightenment. You've got it. The label is retroactive. The actual history is pluralistic. Wow. OK. So if you were writing history, Mandelbaum's mandate is very clear. Do not force a unified spirit of the age onto your subjects. Let the chaos be chaotic. Yes. Do not assume all thinkers in a given century agreed on some hidden foundational level and refuse to strip their complex, interconnected systems of thought down to isolated unit ideas just to make tracing them easier. You must respect the dense. often contradictory architecture of individual thinkers within their specific pluralistic contexts. Absolutely. Okay, so if we accept Mandelbaum's premise that ideas don't float freely through time and they aren't driven by a magical zeitgeist, we run into a massive practical roadblock. Which is? Let's say we are in the archive room and we pull out a dusty political treatise from the 16th century. How do we actually read it? We can't extract the unit ideas. What are we looking for on the page? That is the perfect transition because this brings us to the methodology of Quentin Skinner. Yes, segment two. And Skinner launches an absolute scorched earth campaign against how historians traditionally read texts. Scorched earth is the right term. He attacks the foundational pillar of the great books curriculum. Which is the belief in the text in itself. Yes. This is the assumption that classic works of philosophy, literature, or political theory contain dateless wisdom. Dateless wisdom, like they are eternal. Exactly. The belief is that if you just read the pages closely enough, employing strict textual analysis, the text will reveal universal truths, completely independent of the messy social or political context in which the author was living. It's the idea that you can sit in a modern coffee shop and have a direct, timeless peer -to -peer dialogue with Aristotle just by reading his words. Right. But Skinner argues that this approach generates massive, embarrassing historical absurdities. Embarrassing is a strong word. I love it. Well, historians who read this way fall victim to what he categorizes as mythologies. Okay, let's walk through the most dangerous ones, starting with the mythology of coherence. The mythology of coherence occurs when a historian approaches a past writer, especially one deemed a genius, with the unwavering assumption that their work must represent a perfectly unified, non -contradictory system of thought. Even though human beings are notoriously scattered, and people change their minds constantly and contradict themselves over the course of a 30 -year career, I contradict myself before breakfast. We all do. But the historian acting under this mythology cannot accept contradiction in a classic text. Because it's a classic with a capital C. Exactly. So when they encounter a scattered thought or glaring inconsistency in a thinker like Marx, Hegel, or Plato, They don't treat it as historical reality. What do they do? They act as an intellectual mechanic. They invent a conceptual bridge to make the contradiction coherent. Oh, wow. Yeah. They take minor incidental remarks, perhaps jotted down in a private letter or a discarded draft, and they elevate them into a grand, definitive doctrine just to plug the hole in the author's system. That is so intellectually dishonest. Skinner points out that we end up writing a history of thoughts that no one ever actually succeeded in thinking. Precisely. We invent the coherence for them. We polish away all the messy reality of their actual intellectual struggle. So we construct this perfect, crystallized version of Marx that the real, living Karl Marx never achieved. Right. It ceases to be an historical account and becomes an exercise in abstraction. Okay. But as damaging as the mythology of coherence is, Skinner identifies another trap that is perhaps even more prevalent, especially in political history. Yes. The mythology of prolepsis. Prolepsis is fascinating. It's the habit of praising past thinkers for magically anticipating modern ideas. We do this all the time. We do. We look at a text from the 14th century, find a sentence that kind of sounds like modern democratic theory, and we basically pat the author on the head for finally agreeing with us. Skinner highlights how historians have praised Montesquieu for anticipating the modern welfare state. Which is ridiculous. Or how they claim Machiavelli's true lasting significance is that he approached political science just like us. It's anachronistic absurdity. I mean, to claim Montesquieu anticipated the welfare state is to argue he was actively trying to solve a 20th century bureaucratic and industrial economic problem that literally did not exist in 18th century France. Exactly. By committing the mythology of prolepsis. historians pack their bags, travel back in time, and just look for a mirror. We just want to see ourselves. Right. We only validate the parts of historical thought that resemble our current political consensus, entirely ignoring the vast alien context that actually generated their ideas. So if Machiavelli is historically significant, it is because of how radically he disrupted the political thought of the Italian Renaissance. Right. Not because he was a modern political scientist accidentally born in the wrong century. Okay. I need to introduce some genuine friction here. Yeah. Because this is getting intense. Go for it. Let's look at the logical extreme of Skinner's argument. If Skinner insists that we cannot look to Plato for modern ethical guidance or to John Locke for modern democratic solutions because their contexts were totally alien to ours, doesn't that render the study of history practically useless for modern policymaking? That is the big question. Right. I mean, why shouldn't a modern leader facing a crisis of statecraft look to Thomas Hobbes for a roadmap? If there is no timeless wisdom to be extracted, why are these books considered classics at all? That is the existential question for the intellectual historian. And Skinner's defense is that we do not read historical texts to answer our modern questions. OK. We read them to understand what questions they were trying to answer in their own time. Because assuming the questions are the same is the root of the error. Precisely. The assumption that there are timeless questions like, you know, what is the ideal nature of the state is structurally flawed. Why? Because the concept of the state meant something entirely different to Aristotle in a Greek polis than it did to Hobbes during the English Civil War. Right. And something different again to a modern digital democracy. If you assume the question is universal, you strip the historical answer of its actual meaning. So we read the classics to witness the incredible alien diversity of human problem solving. Yes. It frees us from the tyranny of thinking our modern way of framing a problem is the only way it has ever been framed. Wow. OK, so the text in itself is dead. Coherence is an illusion. Prolepsis is a mirror. If we strip all of that away, what positive methodology does Skinner leave us with? How does a historian actually sit down and read a primary source? Skinner demands that we look at writing not as the passive recording of ideas, but as a form of. active targeted behavior writing is an action yes writing is an action to build this framework skinner imports heavy machinery from the philosophy of language specifically the work of j .l austin and john searle oh centering on the concept of illocutionary force exactly illocutionary force this is a brilliant tool it separates the literal meaning of words from the social action those words perform. Let's map out how this works mechanically. Okay. The basic linguistic premise is that when we speak or write, we aren't just conveying dictionary definitions. Right. We are doing something to the world. If I stand by a frozen pond and say to you, the ice is thin over there, the literal meaning is just a statement regarding the physical density of frozen water. Just a fact. But the illocutionary force of my statement is a warning. My action is warning you not to step there. So if a historian comes along a century later, reads a transcript of your words, and concludes you were just giving a meteorological lecture on ice density. They have completely missed the reality of the event. They missed the warning. Exactly. Applying this to the archive changes everything. If you find a treatise by John Locke on government, you can't just summarize his chapters. You have to ask, what was Locke doing by publishing this specific argument in this specific year? Yes. Was he mocking a political rival? Was he providing ideological cover for a revolution? Was he advising a monarch? or attacking a specific piece of legislation making its way through parliament? You cannot derive the illocutionary force solely from staring at the text. You have to reconstruct the historical environment. You have to know the drama. You must understand the specific political debates of the decade, the immediate audience Locke was trying to persuade, and the opponents he was trying to dismantle. And this becomes incredibly vital when historians run into what Skitter calls oblique strategies. Ah, yes. Because past authors didn't always have the luxury of saying exactly what they meant. Right. They faced censorship, imprisonment, or even execution. So they used hidden meanings. What happens when the text you are treating as dry, serious philosophy is actually a carefully constructed mask? Skinner points to Pierre Bale for this. The late 17th century philosopher, Bale published these massive, incredibly dense historical and critical dictionaries. I've seen pictures of them. They are huge. They are. And if a historian applies the text in itself method, reading only the literal words, Bale's work looks like a tedious orthodox encyclopedia. Just a really boring reference book. Right. But the illocutionary force was radically different. What's he actually doing? Bale was using the format of the historical dictionary as an oblique strategy to smuggle in highly radical, skeptical, philosophical arguments that undermined religious orthodoxy. So the dictionary format was camouflage. Entirely. By burying his radicalism in footnotes and crossed references, he avoided the censors. That is so smart. It is. But if you don't reconstruct the oppressive censorship environment of 17th century Europe, if you don't know what Bale was actively doing... You miss his radicalism entirely. Think of it like finding a scrap of paper in an archive that contains a record of a single chess move. Knight to E4. Okay, I like this. That is the text. You know what a knight is. You know the coordinates of E4 on a board. You understand the literal meaning perfectly. But you have absolutely no idea what the move meant. Because the move only has meaning in relation to the other pieces on the board. Exactly. Unless the historian reconstructs the rest of the chessboard at that exact moment in time. They have no idea if knight to e4 was a brilliant aggressive attack, a desperate defensive retreat to protect the king, or just a massive blunder. Right. The board is the historical context. The move is the elocutionary force. So to write intellectual history, you cannot just summarize a book. you must reconstruct the chessboard to recover the complex intention of the author. Exactly. But Skinner's methodology, as powerful as it is, relies entirely on the existence of a text. It works brilliantly for literate philosophers like Bale or Locke, who left behind treatises and letters. But history is overwhelmingly populated by people who never wrote anything down. Which brings us right back to 1912 Morocco. Exactly. The Berber sheikh in our opening story didn't write a philosophical defense of his sheep raid. The peasant farmers of medieval Europe didn't publish political dictionaries. Right. How do we read illiterate non -textual history? What happens when your primary source is just human behavior? For that, we turn to segment four and the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Yes. Who provides the framework for the semiotics of culture. OK, break that down for me. Geertz acts as the vital bridge between observing physical behavior and interpreting cultural meaning. He fundamentally rejects older anthropological models. Like what? Well, he argues that culture is not some biological trait inherited in our DNA. Right. Nor is it some mystical, super organic entity hovering like a cloud over a society. Drawing on Max Weber. Geertz famously defines culture as webs of significance. Webs of significance. That's a great phrase. He says, man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. It's a beautiful definition, but Geertz is very strict about where those webs actually exist, right? Yes. He attacks what he calls the cognitivist fallacy. Which is the idea that culture exists entirely inside people's heads as private psychological states. Right. Geertz insists that meaning is public. It exists in the observable space between people when they interact. Okay, to illustrate how a historian or anthropologist can read this public meaning, Geertz borrows a brilliant conceptual model from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. The wink and the twitch. Yes. Let's map this out, because it is basically the master key to cultural history. Go ahead. Imagine two boys standing in a room. Both rapidly contract the eyelid of their right eye. Physically, biologically, if you had a camera pointed at them, the mechanical movement would look identical. Exactly identical. The first boy has an involuntary biological twitch. Right. The second boy is winking to signal a secret conspiracy to a friend across the room. The physical movement is the same, but the reality of the action is entirely different. Because the twitch is biology. The wink is culture. Yes. The boy who is winking is communicating through a shared public code. And Geertz complicates it even further to show how dense the archive of human behavior really is. How so? What if a third boy is doing a burlesqued wink? Like he is exaggerating the movement to mock the second boy's clumsy attempt at winking. Okay, yeah. And what if a fourth boy is at home, standing in front of a mirror, practicing a burlesque wink for later? So you have a twitch, a wink, a parody, and a rehearsal. Yes. And if a historian relies only on thin description, Just recording the physical facts, the timeline of eye contractions, they cannot tell the difference between any of them. To distinguish the parody from the twitch, you must understand the webs of significance. But how does the historian actually do that? What is the practical methodological tool? Gutes calls it thick description. Thick description. Yes, this is the method of clinical inference. Traditional sciences often try to find broad universal laws that apply across all humanity, like a physicist establishing the law of gravity. Right. A cultural historian using thick description does the exact opposite. They are not looking for the universal law of winking. That would be ridiculous. Right. They zoom in. They ferret out the deep, unapparent import of highly specific actions. They diagnose the social discourse of this specific wink in this specific room between these specific people. Let's take thick description and apply it back to our cold open. The Moroccan sheep raid. Let's do it. When we left Cohen, the sheik, and Captain Damari, we saw a collision of realities resulting in Cohen going to jail. If we apply thick description, we can decode exactly what happened. Right. Under thick description, we look past the physical movement of sheep and examine the public codes of meaning. The webs. Yes. The Berbershake and Cohen, the Jewish merchant, were operating under the R Pact. In this specific cultural web of significance, R isn't just a trade agreement. It is a mechanism for maintaining cosmic and social balance in an environment without a centralized state. So when Cohen's sheep were stolen. Honor was breached. Exactly. The subsequent posse and the taking of sheep from the offending tribe was a highly formalized, culturally sanctioned ritual. It was a wink. It was a wink. A complex communication of restoring balance. But Captain Dumari, representing the French colonial frame of reference, lacked the cultural code to read the wink. He was completely blind to it. To his bureaucratic military mind focused on pacification and establishing European law, a group of armed men taking sheep is simply a riot. It's a twitch. Yes. The violence of colonialism in this specific instance was a violent misreading of a cultural text. Dumari imposed his own web of significance over the local one, completely obliterating Cohen's reality. Geertz shows us that thick description isn't just about recording that an event happened. It's about unraveling the colliding dramas of pursuing trade, defending honor, and establishing colonial dominance. Culture, as Geertz argues, is a story a group of people tell themselves about themselves. And the historian's job is to read that story over their shoulders. Okay, so your takeaway from Geertz is this. You write cultural history by doing retrospective ethnography. You abandon the search for universal laws of human behavior. You dive into the microscopic, messy details of local events. You treat public behavior as a text. Yes. And you use thick description to decode the winks from the twitches in the archives of human action. We now have a truly formidable theoretical toolkit. We do. We have Mandelbaum telling us to avoid monism and embrace pluralism. We have Skinner giving us the linguistic tools to recover illocutionary intent and reconstruct the chessboard. And we have Geertz providing the anthropological method of thick description to decode nonverbal public meaning. So what's left? The final piece of the puzzle provided by Peter Burke in segment five. We need to understand how the historical profession itself has practically applied these tools and how the discipline of cultural history has evolved over the last century. Because historians didn't always do it this way. Not at all. Burke provides us with the historiographical roadmap. He outlines the phases of the discipline, starting with what he calls the Great Tradition. The Great Tradition. This was the classic era of cultural history, prominent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was championed by giants like Jacob Burkhart. who wrote the defining work on the civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, or Johann Huizinga, who studied the Middle Ages. But their methods were very different from Geertz. Very. The historians of the Great Tradition were pioneers, absolutely, but their methodologies were largely intuitive and highly elitist. Elitist how? They looked almost exclusively at high culture, the grand paintings, the epic poetry, the elite philosophy, and they intuitively read the spirit of the era off of those masterpieces. Oh, kind of like the zeitgeist thing Mandelbaum warned about. Exactly. Burckhardt essentially treated the entire Renaissance state as if it were a single unified work of art. Which produces a really beautiful narrative. But Burck details how the great tradition ran into a buzzsaw of criticism by the mid -20th century. Yes, primarily driven by Marxist historians like E .P. Thompson. Right, because the Marxists looked at this intuitive reading of elite culture and argued it was fundamentally dishonest. Thompson famously referred to this holistic concept of culture as a dumpish term. A dumpish term. Yes. He argued that by treating an entire period as one unified culture, the great tradition was lumping vastly different human experiences together. Effectively erasing the harsh realities of economic deprivation and class warfare. Exactly. You cannot take the culture of a wealthy Medici prince in a Florentine palace and the culture of a starving, illiterate peasant in the fields and lump them together as the Renaissance. That makes perfect sense. The Marxist critique demanded that historians acknowledge that culture is fragmented by class and often used as a weapon of oppression. And this critique forced a massive adaptation in the field, leading directly to what Burke identifies as the anthropological turn in the 1970s. Oh, right when Geertz was publishing. Exactly. This is the exact moment when the theories of Clifford Geertz infiltrated the history departments. Historians realized they could no longer just study the Mona Lisa. They had to study the peasants. And to do that, they had to zoom way, way in. Which birthed the movement of microhistory. Yes. Instead of trying to write a sweeping history of the entire continent of Europe, a historian would spend years writing a thick description of a single village. or even a single peasant. Burke highlights absolute classics of the genre, like Carlo Ginsburg's book, The Cheese and the Worms. I love that book. It is a masterclass in historical anthropology. Ginsburg didn't study a pope or a king. He studied a single 16th century Italian miller named Minocchio. And how did he study him? He didn't write books. No, but he talked. By rigorously examining the detailed records of the Inquisition that interrogated Minocchio for heresy, Ginzburg uncovered the Miller's incredibly eccentric home -brewed cosmology. Right, the cheese thing. Yes. Minocchio believed the universe formed out of chaos, like cheese coagulating from milk, and that angels appeared within it like worms. That is just incredible. By zooming in on Minocchio or by studying the detailed interrogation records of the villagers in Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie's Montague, historians were finally doing retrospective ethnography. They were. They were looking at the winks and twitches of the lower classes, recovering voices and webs of significance that the great tradition had totally ignored. But the evolution of the discipline didn't stop with microhistory. Burke tracks the subsequent shift toward the end of the 20th century into what became known as the new cultural history. Okay, what defined that era? It was defined by a heavy focus on practices and the rise of theoretical constructivism. Let's define these because they represent a major shift in how we view reality itself. The focus on practices was heavily influenced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu argued that culture isn't just a static collection of paintings or books. Culture is an active process of reproduction. Reproduction, like reproducing the social order. Exactly. Bourdieu mapped how the French bourgeoisie maintained their elite status, not just through raw economic capital, but through cultural capital. They utilized an educational system and a highly codified set of cultural tastes. what art they liked, how they spoke, even how they held their silverware. These practices seemed autonomous, but they actively served to gatekeep power and reproduce class hierarchies. Culture is a weapon of distinction. Which leads directly into constructivism. Right. They actively construct that reality. Burke uses the example of a book called Inventing Ireland. Yes, that's a perfect example. The constructivist argument is that... There is no essential, objective, biological Ireland existing out in the world waiting to be described. Right. Rather, the very concept of Ireland, its national identity, its borders, its meaning was actively constructed, negotiated and fought over through literature, political pamphlets, maps and cultural symbols. So under the new cultural history categories like gender, race. national identity, and even madness are viewed not as fixed biological facts, but as cultural constructions. They are texts written by society. Okay, here's where I have to introduce a massive existential pushback. I figured you might. Because if we follow the new cultural history to its logical extreme, if everything is a cultural construction, right? Just a text to be deconstructed. Yeah. Don't we lose our grip on hard material reality? It's a very real concern. I mean, a war is not just a cultural construction of national identity. It is flying shrapnel and physical death. Famine isn't a text. It is biological starvation. If historians abandon quantitative data and objective facts for purely symbolic interpretation, aren't we just writing literary fiction? That exact anxiety triggered the final movement Burke discusses, the revenge of social history. The revenge. Yes. A significant faction of empirical historians felt the cultural turn had gone entirely too far. They feared the rise of a post -social history where everything was treated as a floating symbol. Causing historians to just, you know, forget about hard social structures, physical violence and material deprivation. Exactly. So how does the discipline course correct without losing all the incredible tools Geertz and Skinner just gave us? How do you reconcile the symbolic wink with the physical reality of starvation? You synthesize them. Burke points to historians like Daniel Roche in France as the model for this synthesis. How do you do? Roche didn't abandon the study of cultural ideas, but he applied rigorous quantitative methods to them. He grounded the symbolic in the material. He literally brought math back into the humanities. He did. Roche demonstrated that you can study the cultural impact of the Enlightenment not just by deconstructing Voltaire's illocutionary force, but by going into the archives and counting exactly how many physical copies of Voltaire's books were owned by urban artisans versus rural nobles. Wow. He mapped the material transport of ideas. The revenge of social history served as a vital anchor. It reminded cultural historians that what meaning is constructed Those constructions happen in a physical world governed by real economic and material limits. So you need the thick description to decode the wink. Yes. But you also need the quantitative data to know exactly who in the room possesses the social and economic power to wink in the first place. Beautifully put. Yes. But we have covered an immense methodological landscape today. Let's synthesize this entire deep dive into a unified practical guide. Okay. If you are sitting down tomorrow to write history, here is your definitive four -part toolkit. Step one from Maurice Mandelbaum. Reject monomism. Do not organize your archive around a magical unifying zeitgeist. And do not strip complex philosophical systems down to isolated unit ideas. Employ cultural pluralism. Treat historical eras as chaotic, contradictory patterns resulting from diverse, localized human struggles. Exactly. Step two from Quentin Skinner. Stop reading classic texts as if they contain timeless answers to your modern anxieties. Abandon the mythology of coherence and the mythology of prolepsis. Treat writing as an action. Reconstruct the political chessboard of the era so you can uncover the author's hidden illocutionary intent. Perfect. Step three from Clifford Geertz. When your archive consists of human behavior, recognize that meaning is public. Treat rituals, riots, and daily interactions as texts. Employ thick description to perform retrospective ethnography, decoding the layered wings from the biological twitches within colliding webs of cultural significance. And step four from Peter Berg. Remember that culture is not a monolithic, dumpish term. It is actively constructed, fiercely contested across class lines, and constantly deployed as a weapon of social reproduction. But heed the revenge of social history. Always anchor your symbolic interpretations in hard material quantitative reality. Balancing these four imperatives is the supreme challenge of the historian. It is how you move past the broken security camera and begin to actually map the murky waters of the past. But as we close this deep dive, I want to leave you with a final provocative thought. Oh, let's hear it. We spent this time learning how to navigate the subjective nature of history. We've learned that meaning relies entirely on recovering lost intentions and performing thick descriptions of faded cultural webs. Right. And we've also acknowledged via the constructivists that our own modern cultural lenses are heavily constructed by our present politics, our class dynamics, and our current anxieties. The historian is just as entangled in webs of significance as the subject they are studying. Exactly. So here is the question for you to mull over. If we accept that the past is fundamentally an alien country, And if we accept that every tool we have for translating it is built out of our own modern biases. Is the very act of writing history ultimately just a way of constructing our own present identity? Yes. When we deploy sick description or recover illocutionary force, are we genuinely accessing the reality of 1912 Morocco or 16th century Italy? Or at the end of the day, no matter how rigorous our methodology, are we really just telling ourselves a story about ourselves? That's the terrifying thought. We aren't looking at a recording of the past. We might just be looking into a mirror.