英語長文読解問題　フェルナン・ブローデル（歴史学者）

以下は、フェルナン・ブローデルの英語版Wikipediaの抜粋である。英文を読み、問いに答えよ。

問1：彼の著書「地中海」は、歴史学の研究書として、どのような特徴があるか？
問2：彼は著書「資本主義」において、「構造」をどのようなものとして認識していたか？
問3：彼の歴史観は、マルクス主義的唯物論とはどのように異なっているか？

La Méditerranée
His first book, La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II (1949) (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II) was his most influential and has been described as a "watershed".

For Braudel there is no single Mediterranean Sea. There are many seas, indeed a "vast, complex expanse" within which men operate. Life is conducted on the Mediterranean: people travel, fish, fight wars, and drown in its various contexts, and the sea articulates with the plains and islands. Life on the plains is diverse and complex; the poorer south is affected by religious diversity (Catholicism and Islam), as well as by intrusions, both cultural and economic, from the north. In other words, the Mediterranean cannot be understood independently from what is exterior to it. Any rigid adherence to boundaries falsifies the situation.

The first level of time, geographical time, is that of the environment, with its slow, almost imperceptible change, its repetition and cycles. Such change may be slow, but it is irresistible. The second level of time comprises long-term social, economic, and cultural history, where Braudel discusses the Mediterranean economy, social groupings, empires and civilizations. Change at that level is much more rapid than that of the environment. Braudel looks at two or three centuries to spot a particular pattern such as the rise and fall of various aristocracies. The third level of time is that of events (histoire événementielle). This is the history of individuals with names. That, for Braudel, is the time of surfaces and deceptive effects. It is the time of the courte durée proper and the focus of Part 3 of The Mediterranean, which treats of "events, politics and people."

Braudel's Mediterranean is centered on the sea, but just as importantly, it is also the desert and the mountains. The desert creates a nomadic form of social organization where the whole community moves; mountain life is sedentary. Transhumance the movement from the mountain to the plain or vice versa in a given season is also a persistent part of Mediterranean existence.

Braudel's vast panoramic view used insights from other social sciences, employed the concept of the longue durée, and downplayed the importance of specific events. It was widely admired, but most historians did not try to replicate it and instead focused on their specialized monographs. The book firmly launched the study of the Mediterranean and dramatically raised the worldwide profile of the Annales School.

Capitalism
After La Méditerranée, Braudel's most famous work is Civilisation Matérielle, Économie et Capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe ("Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century"). The first volume was published in 1967 and was translated to English in 1973. The last of the three-volume work appeared in 1979. The work is a broad-scale history of the pre-industrial modern world focusing on how regular people made economies work. Like all of Braudel's other major works, it mixes traditional economic material with thick description of the social impact of economic events on various facets of everyday life, including food, fashion and other social customs.

The third volume, subtitled "The Perspective of the World", was strongly influenced by the work of German scholars like Werner Sombart. In it, Braudel traces the impact of the centers of Western capitalism on the rest of the world. Braudel wrote the series as a way of explanation for the modern way and partly as a refutation of the Marxist view of history.

Braudel discussed the idea of long-term cycles in the capitalist economy that he saw developing in Europe in the 12th century. Particular cities and later nation-states follow each other sequentially as centres of these cycles: Venice in the 13th through the 15th centuries (1250–1510); Antwerp and Genoa in the 16th century (1500–1569 and 1557–1627, respectively), Amsterdam in the 16th through 18th centuries (1627–1733); and London (and England) in the 18th and 19th centuries (1733–1896). He used the word "structures" to denote a variety of social structures, such as organized behaviours, attitudes, and conventions, as well as physical structures and infrastructures. He argued that the structures established in Europe during the Middle Ages contributed to the successes of present-day European-based cultures. He attributed much of that to the long-standing independence of city-states, which, though later subjugated by larger geographic states, were not always completely suppressed, probably for reasons of utility.

Braudel argues that capitalists have typically been monopolists and not, as is usually assumed, entrepreneurs operating in competitive markets. He argued that capitalists did not specialize and did not use free markets, and he thus diverges from both liberal (Adam Smith) and Marxian interpretations. In Braudel's view, the state in capitalist countries has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than a protector of competition, as it is usually portrayed. He asserted that capitalists have had power and cunning on their side, as they have arrayed themselves against the majority of the population.

An agrarian structure is a long-term structure in the Braudelian understanding of the concept. On a larger scale the agrarian structure is more dependent on the regional, social, cultural and historical factors than on the state's undertaken activities.

L'Identité de la France
Braudel's last and most personal book was L'Identité de la France (The Identity of France), which was unfinished at the time of his death in 1985. Unlike in many of Braudel's other books, he makes no secret of his profound love of his country in this book and remarks at the beginning that he had loved France as if she were a woman. Reflecting his interest with the longue durée, Braudel's concern in L'Identité de la France was with the centuries and millennia, instead of the years and decades. Braudel argued that France is the product not of its politics or economics but rather of its geography and culture, a thesis that Braudel had explored in a wide-ranging book that saw the bourg and the patois: historie totale integrated into a broad sweep of both the place and the time.

L'Identité de la France was much coloured by a romantic nostalgia, as Braudel argued for the existence of a France profonde, a "deep France" based upon the peasant mentalité, which despite all of the turmoil of French history and the Industrial Revolution, has survived intact right up to the present.

Historiography
According to Braudel, before the Annales approach, the writing of history was focused on the courte durée (short span), or on histoire événementielle (a history of events).

His followers admired his use of the longue durée approach to stress the slow and often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human beings in the past.[15] The Annales historians, after living through two world wars and massive political upheavals in France, were very uncomfortable with the notion that multiple ruptures and discontinuities created history. They preferred to stress inertia and the longue durée, arguing that the continuities in the deepest structures of society were central to history. Upheavals in institutions or the superstructure of social life were of little significance, for history, they argued, lies beyond the reach of conscious actors, especially the will of revolutionaries. They rejected the Marxist idea that history should be used as a tool to foment and foster revolutions. A proponent of historical materialism, Braudel rejected Marxist materialism, stressing the equal importance of infrastructure and superstructure, both of which reflected enduring social, economic, and cultural realities. Braudel's structures, both mental and environmental, determine the long-term course of events by constraining actions on, and by, humans over a duration long enough that they are beyond the consciousness of the actors involved.

単語の解説

1. Imperceptible - (形容詞) ほとんど感じられない、ほとんど気づかれない、認識できない。

2. Intrusions - (名詞) 侵入、侵害、不法侵入、立ち入り、押し付け。

3. Rigid - (形容詞) 厳格な、柔軟性のない、硬直した、曲がらない。

4. Articulates - (動詞) 明確に述べる、はっきりと述べる、結合する、つながる。

5. Panoramic - (形容詞) 全景の、パノラマの、広範囲の、多角的な。

6. Monopolists - (名詞) 独占者、独占資本家、独占業者。

7. Entrepreneurs - (名詞) 起業家、企業家、興業家。

8. Inertia - (名詞) 惰性、不活発、不活動、不変。

9. Superstructure - (名詞) 上層構造、上部構造、上部建築。

10. Bourg - (名詞) 町、小さな町、市、村。

11. Patois - (名詞) 方言、地方言葉、俗語。

12. Bourg - (名詞) 町、小さな町、市、村。

13. Totalité - (名詞) 全体性、完全性、全体、総体。

14. Historiography - (名詞) 歴史学、歴史書、歴史研究。

15. Ruptures - (名詞) 断裂、破裂、分裂、途切れ。

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解答と解説

問1：彼の著書「地中海」は、歴史学の研究書として、どのような特徴があるか？

フェルナン・ブローデルの著書「地中海とフィリップ2世の時代」は、単一の地中海ではなく、多様な海域が存在するという考えに基づいています。ブローデルにとって地中海は、さまざまな海域の集合体であり、人々が旅行し、漁をし、戦争をし、その中で溺れる場所でもあります。彼は、地中海と平野や島々が連携していることを強調し、境界に固執することが状況を歪めると述べています。さらに、彼は3つの時間のレベルを議論し、地理的な時間、社会経済的な時間、そして事件の時間の重要性を強調しています。彼のアプローチは独自で幅広く、社会科学の洞察を利用し、長期の概念を使用し、特定の出来事の重要性を軽視しています。

問2：彼は著書「資本主義」において、「構造」をどのようなものとして認識していたか？

ブローデルは「資本主義」において、長期的な経済サイクルや社会的構造を強調しています。彼はヨーロッパにおける12世紀から始まる資本主義経済の長期的なサイクルを追跡し、さまざまな都市や国家がそれぞれサイクルの中心として続いてきたことを示しています。彼は「構造」という言葉を用いて、組織された行動や態度、慣習だけでなく、物理的な構造やインフラストラクチャーなど、さまざまな社会的構造を表現しました。また、ブローデルは、資本家は一般に独占業者であり、競争的な市場で活動する起業家ではないと主張しました。彼は、資本主義国家における国家は競争の保護者ではなく、独占業者の保証人であると述べています。

問3：彼の歴史観は、マルクス主義的唯物論とはどのように異なっているか？

ブローデルは、マルクス主義的唯物論とは異なり、物質主義を強調しつつも、インフラストラクチャーと上部構造の両方が同等に重要であると主張しました。彼は、歴史は意識的な行為者の手によってではなく、環境や社会的構造によって決定されると考えています。したがって、彼の歴史観では、革命家の意志などの断片的な変化よりも、社会の最も深い構造の持続性が重要であるとされています。