"The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings"
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Historians love big nouns because big nouns feel like mastery: Nation, People, Revolution, Modernity. Bloch treats that habit as professional malpractice. Calling it the ABC of the job is a deliberate demotion of theory-speak to something a first-year apprentice should outgrow. The line pushes against a kind of historical ventriloquism where abstractions are made to speak, act, and decide, conveniently sparing us the mess of actual lives.
The intent is methodological and moral at once. Methodological, because “large abstract terms” are often shortcuts that smuggle in conclusions before the evidence arrives. They flatten agency, mask contingency, and turn analysis into taxonomy. Moral, because abstractions make it easier to justify cruelty or laziness: if “History” demands sacrifice or “the State” requires discipline, the humans who pay the price become footnotes. Bloch’s phrasing insists that the only “concrete realities” worth the historian’s attention are people with motives, constraints, fears, habits, and contradictions.
The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to deterministic systems. Marxist grand narratives, nationalist myths, bureaucratic categories - all can turn human beings into tokens moved by impersonal forces. Bloch doesn’t deny structures; he demands they be rebuilt from the ground up, inferred from lived experience rather than imposed as a ready-made grid.
Context sharpens the stakes. Writing in a Europe convulsed by total war and ideological mass politics, and ultimately murdered by the Nazis after joining the French Resistance, Bloch knew exactly how abstract nouns can become alibis. His sentence reads like a professional guideline that doubles as an ethical firewall: refuse the language that lets humans disappear.
The intent is methodological and moral at once. Methodological, because “large abstract terms” are often shortcuts that smuggle in conclusions before the evidence arrives. They flatten agency, mask contingency, and turn analysis into taxonomy. Moral, because abstractions make it easier to justify cruelty or laziness: if “History” demands sacrifice or “the State” requires discipline, the humans who pay the price become footnotes. Bloch’s phrasing insists that the only “concrete realities” worth the historian’s attention are people with motives, constraints, fears, habits, and contradictions.
The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to deterministic systems. Marxist grand narratives, nationalist myths, bureaucratic categories - all can turn human beings into tokens moved by impersonal forces. Bloch doesn’t deny structures; he demands they be rebuilt from the ground up, inferred from lived experience rather than imposed as a ready-made grid.
Context sharpens the stakes. Writing in a Europe convulsed by total war and ideological mass politics, and ultimately murdered by the Nazis after joining the French Resistance, Bloch knew exactly how abstract nouns can become alibis. His sentence reads like a professional guideline that doubles as an ethical firewall: refuse the language that lets humans disappear.
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| Topic | Truth |
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