History of Mentalities

Definition

The history of mentalities (histoire des mentalités) is the Annales-school approach, pioneered by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, that made the "mental" or "intellectual" dimensions of historical social formations — the outillage mental (mental equipment) and mentalité — an object of inquiry in their own right, "without reducing [them] to 'ideas' or to the 'social'" (Schöttler, p. 74). Le Goff defines its plane as "that of everyday life and of automatism, that is, what escapes individual subjects in history because it reveals the impersonal content of their thinking" (quoted p. 75); Mandrou as "the patterns of behavior, expressive forms and modes of silence into which worldviews and collective sensibilities are translated" (quoted pp. 74–75). Peter Schöttler presents it as the first of three concepts for Labrousse's "third level" (between economy and society), alongside ideology and discourse, and documents its central weakness: a rationalist resistance to psychoanalysis.

Key Thinkers

• Marc Bloch & Lucien Febvre — the Annales founders; Febvre's "psychology is the key to history" and the Lévy-Bruhl-derived concept of mentality.
• Jacques Le Goff — the "third level" as "the plane of everyday life and of automatism"; the "myth of the abstract collective subject."
• Philippe Ariès — the "collective unconscious" and depth-psychology variant.
• Michel Vovelle — the critic of Ariès's "air cushion" and the "discipline boulimique."
• Carlo Ginzburg — the two objections: psychologization and "class-neutrality."
• Peter Schöttler — the systematic exposition and critique (no author page yet — see log).
• Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Michel Pêcheux — the alternative concepts Schöttler sets against mentality.

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — the German historiography that shares the "third level" territory.
• Ideology — the Althusserian concept Schöttler offers as a more precise alternative to mentality.
• Historical Anthropology — the broader turn toward the "mental"/cultural in historical study.
• Everyday Life — Le Goff's identification of mentality's plane with the everyday.
• Historical Experience — the subjective dimension at issue.
• Psychoanalysis — the body of theory the mentalities school resisted.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Schöttler's chapter "Mentalities, Ideologies, Discourses" (pp. 72–89): the Annales genealogy; the Mandrou and Le Goff definitions; Ginzburg's critique; Bloch's Les Rois thaumaturges and the rejected psychotherapeutic explanation; Ariès's "collective unconscious"; Vovelle's critique; the concept's relative vagueness.

Open Questions

• Does the mentality concept's "relative vagueness" (Le Goff) make it a productive heuristic or merely a catch-all that re-admits "worldview" and "spirit of the times" through the back door?
• Why did the mentalities tradition refuse psychoanalysis for so long, and what would a psychoanalytically informed history of mentality look like (Bloch's thaumaturgic kings as the test case)?