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The comparative method of sociology, for example, led to initial attempts to integrate particular facts into a more global context. This path gave rise to the “historical synthesis,” the main drivers of which were names such as Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) and Henri Berr (1863–1954), who began to question the idealist philosophies of history. Berr even proposed integrating the particular into the totality, suggesting the interrelation of facts from a globalising perspective, the goal of which was the pursuit of the synthesis. Thus, the synthesis emerged as a scientific hypothesis that enabled a shift from the descriptive to the explanatory, and from chronology to problematisation.
This approach created disciples. Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) followed Berr's lead. Their main initiative was the celebrated foundation of the "Annales School", which undertook a broad renewal of historiography by overcoming the ‘événementiel’ and establishing permanent contact with the social sciences. This evolution mainly affected political history. While on the one hand, economic, social, and demographic history benefited from the methodological advances of economics, sociology and demography, on the other hand, political history was not renewed in the same way due to the absence of the constitution of a political science. Political history, therefore, did not accompany the historiographical renewal proposed by the Annales and entered a depression from which it would take decades to recover.
However, the attack on “traditional political history” was not unprecedented. Its challenge first originated in the Marxist world. In Karl Marx's (1818–1883) view, men are the protagonists of history, but according to particular material conditions of production. Thus, it is through the contradiction between “productive forces” and “production relations” that revolutionary situations are created, i.e., that historical change occurs. According to this perspective, it is not representation that determines reality, but the opposite. In other words, political ideas are not what determine economic realities, but the opposite. The successes and failures of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the final triumph of conservative forces, and the evolution of capitalist societies led Marx to rethink the role of the individual in history. This author relegated individual voluntarism to the background in favour of the masses, or what he called “social classes,” as the main subject of history.
