Longue durée

The longue durée is a term used by the French Annales School of historical writing to designate their approach to the study of history, which gave priority to long-term historical structures over events. The approach incorporates social scientific methods into history and was pioneered by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the first half of the 20th century. The approach was carried on by Fernand Braudel in the second part of the century. Recent applications of the longue durée may be found in Robert Putnam's and Bent Flyvbjerg's studies of democracy in Italy and Denmark, respectively. Both studies find that a key to adequately understand modern democracy, is the understanding of centuries old, pre-modern structures of governance and how these impact democracy today.

Sources and further reading

Fernand Braudel and Sarah Matthews, On History (The University of Chicago Press, 1982).

Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (The University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Robert D. Putnam with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton University Press, 1993).