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Historians Take Note: Motivation = Emotion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Ramsay MacMullen
Ramsay MacMullen*
Affiliation:
Yale University

Abstract

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The article focuses on motivation, proposing the equation in its title and opposing the contrary view, that what moves people to action is the rational calculation of their material interests. The latter view is most familiar in economics, where it was for generations seen as the best (meaning, most ‘scientific’) mode of explanation. It had a great deal of influence on historiography and found a great deal of support among psychologists also. From these three areas of research it is being challenged, however, even to some extent displaced, in recent decades. The importance of emotions or feelings in explaining behavior is increasingly acknowledged, and the validity of conclusions reached about feelings in historical contexts through the operation of empathy. Illustrations of how this works can be easily supplied.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , August 2004 , pp. 19 - 25
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2004

References

Notes

1. The posthumous Apologie pour l’histoire, ou, Métier d’historien, Paris, 1949, p. 101.

2. Kahneman, quoted in The Jerusalem Report of 10 February 2003.

3. Jack Hexter in the Journal of Modern History, 44, 1972.

4. Works of the 1990s by Michael Bernsen, Werner Röcke, Frédéric Chauvaud…

5. Psychological Bulletin, 127, 2001.

6. La société féodale; la formation des liens de dépendance, 1939 [1949], p. 118.

7. Marc Bloch, L’étrange défaite. Témoignage écrit en 1940, 1957, p. 210.

8. C. Geertz, ‘“From the native’s point of view”. On the nature of anthropological understanding’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28, 1974, 28.

9. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War.

10. In the first chapter of my Feelings in History, Ancient and Modern (Fr. edn, Ramsay MacMullen, Les sentiments dans l’histoire ancienne et moderne), 2003, I supply the findings for this and for the rest of my essay here.