Absztrakt

From the 1920s onward, the history of mentalities gained widespread popularity through the influence of the Annales School. Alongside the impersonal forces of society and economy, the forms and content of thought – the mentalities of past societies – came to play a central role in these historical explanations. After the mid-1960s, however, the concept of mentality appeared to have lost its substance. Critics argued that it had become too rigid, too all-encompassing, and that the existence of the monolithic mindsets it attributes to historical eras is unsupported by empirical evidence. From the 1990s onward, Roger Chartier, Bernard Lepetit, and later Paul Ricœur recommended that historians replace the unified, fixed, and finite notion of mentality with the more flexible concept of representation. This shift allowed for the interpretation of social categories in ways that aligned with new developments in social action theory. Even so, overarching unified interpretive frameworks continue to persist, transcending the diversity of disparate situation-bound representations. These frameworks, although not in the “closed” manner proposed by the monolithic concept of mentalities, can nonetheless expose some consistent patterns in mental phenomena.

DOI: 10.52656/KORALL.2025.02.002. 📄 Teljes cikk (PDF)