Tuesday 14 September 2010

Meta-Mentalities

One objection, which is not infrequently heard in Britain, ought not to be taken too seriously; it is that the French treat mentalities as impersonal forces. In Britain it is obvious that there are no such forces, but only men thinking, as Herbert Butterfield put it. Or as Vivian Galbraith used to say, with provocative sexism, in his Oxford lectures in the 1950s, 'History is just chaps.' To the French, however (if I dare attempt an act of empathy with them), it is equally obvious that the term mentalité is not being used to describe a thing or a force, but rather to characterize the relation between beliefs, which is what makes them into a system. The beliefs are 'collective' only in the sense of being shared by individuals, not in the sense of standing outside them. The contrast between the British intellectual tradition of methodological individualism and the French tradition of holism is so strong, and goes back such a long way, that one is tempted to call the difference itself one between two different mentalities.
Peter Burke, "Strengths and Weaknesses of the History of Mentalities," in Varieties of Cultural History (Oxford, 1997), p.170.

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