Cassidy Fyden  

History 420  

27 March, 2026 

Second Critical Response 

History involves examining both what people do and the larger forces that shape those actions. It considers how individual choices connect to long-term patterns and how chance events unfold within broader social, economic, and cultural systems. Approaches like the Annales School and Big History show that larger forces shape human actions, but that doesn’t mean individual and group choices don’t matter. Social history, for example, focuses on agency and contingency, emphasizing the meaningful decisions people make in specific moments. The challenge is that this doesn’t easily fit with the massive time scales used by the Annales School and Big History, where slow-moving structures and global systems shape what is even possible over centuries. Historians like Eric Hobsbawm and Fernand Braudel help show how these different levels can work together rather than cancel each other out. For instance, while large economic systems may shape the conditions of life, individuals still make choices within those limits that can have real consequences. Using the work of Hobsbawm, Braudel, Walter Johnson, and David Christian, history can be understood as a multi-layered process in which agency, contingency, and structure all operate at the same time. Individual and collective actions are meaningful, but their significance is clearer when placed within these broader time and structural frameworks.  

Eric Hobsbawm’s From Social History to the History of Society discusses how people’s lives are tied to the society around them. Hobsbawm argues that social history is always connected to economic, political, and cultural contexts and cannot be studied in isolation. Attempting to study society in isolation risks trivialization: “The social… cannot be separated from the other aspects of [human] being, except at the cost of… trivialization.” 1 Moments of conflict such as riots, revolutions, or protests are analytically significant because they “dramatize crucial aspects of social structure because they are… strained to the breaking point.”2    Hobsbawm identifies six areas in which social history developed after 1955, including class studies, historical demography, urban history, mentalities, social conflict, and societal transformations such as industrialization. He argues that understanding class requires considering society as a whole: “Slaveowners cannot be understood without slaves.” 3 This shows that individual actions always take place within larger social, structural, and historical contexts, which is important for connecting social history to long-term approaches.  

Fernand Braudel builds on Hobsbawm’s ideas by breaking history into three different time scales: short-term events, medium-term patterns, and long-term structures. Short-term history focuses on dramatic moments like wars, elections, and revolutions, but on its own it often only captures surface-level change. Medium-term analysis looks at broader economic and social cycles, such as population shifts, periods of growth, or economic downturns that develop over decades rather than days. The longue durée, or long-term perspective, shifts the focus even further. It highlights deep, slow-moving structures such as geography, climate, social systems, and cultural habits, which can last for centuries and shape what kinds of outcomes are even possible. Rather than replacing the other levels, this approach helps show how they all fit together. Braudel points out the tension between fast events and slow historical changes: there is a “living… opposition between the instantaneous and the time that flows slowly.” 4 Events are “an explosion” that “doesn’t last long,” 5 whereas long-term patterns define the deeper meanings of history. In Braudel’s framework, agency and contingency are most apparent in individual events, but these actions always take place within lasting structures. Human decisions are important yet limited in the context of long-term patterns and recurrent cycles like social or economic trends. This comparison clearly addresses the prompt: even while acting within the constraints imposed by long-term frameworks, human activities can have a major impact in the short term.  

Walter Johnson changes the idea of agency when it comes to underprivileged or restricted groups. Johnson criticizes the New Social History in On Agency for defining all human behavior in terms of liberal, voluntarist ideas of self-directed agency, particularly when studying enslaved people, who are frequently taken to be “agents of their own destiny.” 6 Johnson claims that this approach puts liberal assumptions on context structured by violent and coercive circumstances. He presents a more nuanced understanding of enslaved humanity, emphasizing that actions are “at once thoroughly determined and insistently transcendent.” 7 Enslaved people used agency within their tight structural constraints, and everyday acts of cooperation, cultural negotiation, or collective solidarity were as politically meaningful as overt resistance. Johnson’s critique aligns with Hobsbawm and Braudel in suggesting that human action must be viewed in relation to systemic constraints rather than as autonomous, abstract choice. This realization makes it clear how long-term historical frameworks and social history’s focus on agency can coexist: individual acts are important, but only when examined in context.  

David Christian’s idea of Big History takes these ideas to the large time and space scales by connecting cosmology, geology, biology, and human history. He argues that universal history, a complete story of the past from the beginning of the universe to the present, is returning in a new, evidence-based form. This approach combines scientific methods, such as radiometric dating and genetic analysis, with traditional historical methods, focusing on long-term patterns and global connections. Big History demonstrates that human actions always occur within environmental, biological, and cosmological systems that shape what is possible over very long periods of time. In this way, agency and contingency are still visible and important, but they only make full sense within larger structural forces that operate over centuries and millennia. Christian explains that this expanded form of history can shape public understanding of the past by creating “a map of the past as a whole,” allowing people to see themselves “as part of the evolving story of an entire universe.”8 This approach extends the Annales School’s emphasis on long-term structures, showing that even at cosmic scales, human action remains constrained yet consequential.  

Bringing these perspectives together shows an important idea: history works best when we understand it as layered, with individual actions taking place within structural, cyclical, and long-term patterns. Short-term events help reveal human agency and contingency, but they only make full sense within larger social, economic, and environmental structures. Hobsbawm’s focus on social structures, Braudel’s longue durée, Johnson’s critique of liberal ideas of agency, and Christian’s Big History all point to the idea that structures shape what people can do. Johnson shows that people’s choices really matter and can have political impact, even when they face limits. To understand agency, we need to look at the real-world context and power structures that shape what people can do, rather than assuming they have total, unrestricted freedom.  

Reconciling agency with long-term history means that it is crucial to recognize that human actions and large structures shape one another. The event, the individual, and the moments that happen just by chance are all important, but their impacts are shaped by the broader patterns that take place across time and space. Hobsbawm and Braudel show that structures shape what’s possible. Johnson challenges the simplified ideas of agency, and Christian shows that these patterns extend across very large timelines. When combined, these methods demonstrate how structure, agency, and contingency interact throughout a variety of time periods, allowing social history to be included in both Big History and the longue durée.  

  

Footnotes  

1. E. J. Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society,” Daedalus 100, no. 1 (Winter 1971): 25, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20023989.   

1. Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society,” 39.   

1. Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society,” 39.   

1. Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32, no. 2 (2009): 173, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40647704.   

1. Braudel and Wallerstein, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” 174.   

1. Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (Autumn 2003): 115, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3790316.   

1. Johnson, “On Agency,” 116.   

1. David Christian, “The Return of Universal History,” History and Theory 49, no. 4 (December 2010): 7, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41300047.