Linguistics and the Study of French Socialism: A Bibliographic Essay

Abstract

Patrice L.R. Higonnet has recently written that “history… implies both the selection of facts and the integration of concrete events in some theoretical setting.” Such a statement is worthy of quotation only because of its banality; today historians are constantly exhorted to use coherent theory in their selection and sorting of “facts.” Yet even a cursory survey of historical analyses of French socialism reveals that historians have often used the fuzzy logic of uncritical empiricism, which describes but does not adequately explain, or the rigid logic of dogmatic theory, which explains on the basis of inadequate description.