J. H. Hexter - Hexter On Braudel

Hexter On Braudel

Another famous Hexterian intervention in historiography is his article "Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien," which can be seen as a more appreciative, temperate, and intellectually sophisticated antecedent to Hexter's attack on Hill. Here, Hexter dissected Braudel's vast "geohistory," La Mediteranée marvelling at the organization of the Annales School but pointing out the ironic tensions between the Annales' rigorous, collaborative, scientific institutional ethos and its leader's passionate, highly personal, often factually inaccurate or poorly sourced book (for which much of the intellectual labor was carried out from memory while Braudel was in a prisoner-of-war camp). The article also reveals Hexter's satirical touch, as, in its first section, Hexter mimics the quantitative bent of the Annales scholars, representing their output in a series of graphs and tables.