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The criticisms against traditional political history were numerous and continued to accumulate. It struggled to withstand the crossfire from Marxism, the Annales, structuralism, and the new economic history. After all, it was psychological and ignored social constraints, it focused on the short-term while neglecting the medium and long-term, it was qualitative and disregarded the quantitative, and it was descriptive and narrative, lacking analysis and explanation. Finally, as its last "sin", it was deemed ideological rather than scientific. Nevertheless, political history survived. It persisted in the Anglo-Saxon historiographical tradition through prominent figures such as A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990) and Richard Cobb (1917-1996), illustrious representatives of the Oxford historiography, from where the former was expelled for his controversial interpretations of the origins of World War II, and where the latter established himself as a practitioner of "history from below." The Hispanist Raymond Carr (1919-2015) may also be included in this same vein. All of them wrote a history that was more psychological and inclined to ignore social constraints, focused on the short-term, paying little attention to the medium and long-term. It was a qualitative history that disregarded the quantitative, a descriptive and narrative history that ignored analysis and explanation. Ultimately, it was an ideological and non-scientific history.
Political history mounted a counterattack. A new political history emerged in the 1970s, fuelled by the combination of historical, theoretical, and historiographical factors. Historically, the advent of the "post-industrial" era raised the question of a return to the event. The logic of accumulation—a dominant economic concept in industrialising societies—gave way to post-industrial societies, where control, information technology, and specialised policies across all sectors resulted in a metamorphosis of politics. Theoretically, the dichotomy between a technocratic ideology, which viewed politics as an illusion (subordinating politics), and a legal formalism, which considered everything to be politics (stifling politics by centring it absolutely), was transcended. Finally, on a historiographical level, a new paradigm emerged that fostered the development of new fields, leading to a shift from total history to the fragmentation of the historiographical field.
