ABSTRACT
This chapter parallels raised by Alan Bullock in his response to the 'New History' of Fernand Braudel and Annales School in France. Bullock queries whether 'getting beneath the surface of history' is an over-rationalized version of history that is more a retreat from reality than a penetration of it to a deeper level. Renier's version of history in his account of its purpose and methods neither ignores the importance of science to the historian, nor the importance of what the sociologist Dennis Wrong calls 'the persistence of the particular' in human experience. Consequently, Barkow headed into the social sciences and history ought to receive some training in evolutionary biology and psychology but this 'does not mean that our students must begin by becoming biologists or psychologists anymore than biologists must begin by becoming chemists'. Recognizing this to be the case, therefore, demands a framework of explanatory pluralism for a coherent and persuasive account of human behaviour.
