ABSTRACT
The new economic and social history puts cyclical movement in the forefront of its research and is committed to that time span: it has been captivated by the mirage and the reality of the cyclical rise and fall of prices. Nonetheless, the social sciences seem little tempted by such remembrance of things past. Not that one can draw up any firm accusation against them and declare them to be consistently guilty of not accepting history or duration as dimensions necessary to their studies. In truth, the historian can never get away from the question of time in history: time sticks to his thinking like soil to a gardener's spade. For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous', as economists would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times the same color: it is, indeed, the imperious time of the world.
