1Over the last 20 years, ideas about the conditions and modes for producing socio-historical knowledge have undergone a significant reorientation. Two sets of factors, both of which are products of internal developments in the social sciences and the more general political context, have produced joint effects. In the political realm, the changes that took place after 1989 coupled with a process of extension and reduction of spaces of reference and action—or “globalization,” to use today’s standard term—have left their mark on research paradigms, giving new currency to the requirement for reflexivity. In the intellectual realm, the “culturalist turn” emphasizing specificity—that is, the irreducible nature of the local—has contributed to refining our knowledge of the differentiated operations of societies and cultures while at the same time bringing about a fragmentation, and thereby a relativization, of knowledge. [3] Moreover, the questions following from the collapse of colonialism have affected the previously dominant position of the Western social sciences. Now suspected of intellectual imperialism and of hatching strategies of political domination, they have seen their universalist ambition weakened. [4] As a result of these developments, there has been internal reorganization within each discipline as well as new stances on the place of the social sciences in the mechanism of the general production of knowledge.

2However, these shifts also raise direct questions about research practices, and, in particular, about ways of approaching sources and fields. The proposal for histoire croisée developed here fits in this general movement. For over 10 years, this notion has been used in many different ways in the social sciences. In most cases, it refers—albeit imprecisely—to a history (or set of histories) associated with the idea of a nonspecific connection and simply points to a configuration of events that is to some extent structured by the metaphor of an intersection. [5] Often these usages evoke plural histoires croisées. However, this common, relatively undifferentiated usage should be distinguished from research practices aiming for a more specific approach. In this case, histoire croisée associates—often at a national level—social, cultural, and political formations assumed to have relationships with one another. [6] Moreover, it reflects on the process of connections in both practical and intellectual terms. As both of these usages are only beginning to become set, this paper aims to clarify them by situating the notion in current theoretical and methodological debates. Specified thus in empirical and theoretical terms, histoire croisée can usefully complete the toolkit of most social sciences disciplines.

3Three introductory remarks will situate our aim. First, histoire croisée belongs to the family of “relational” approaches that, following from the comparative method, studies of transfers, and more recently, “connected” or “shared” history, examine the links between different historically constituted formations, whether materialized in the social sphere or simply projected. As such, it renews the discussions of the last few years on the comparative method, transfers, and more generally sociocultural interactions. [7] In particular, it offers new paths to overcome deadlocked debates between comparativists and specialists of transfers [8] without nonetheless reducing the contributions of these two approaches, which histoire croisée draws from. However, histoire croisée also aims to deal with specific subjects and related issues that escape comparative methodologies and studies of transfers, [9] thus enabling comprehension of new phenomena through renewed analytical frameworks. In this way, it provides the opportunity to explore from a particular angle general issues such as those related to scales, analytical categories, the relationship between diachrony and synchrony, and regimes of historicity and reflexivity. Lastly, it lays out the problem of its own historicity through a triple procedure of historicization of the object, analytical categories, and relationships between researcher and object. It thus offers a toolbox that can be applied beyond the historical sciences to numerous other disciplines with intersecting perspectives of past and present. [10]

The Comparative Method and the Historicity of Objects

4Those who practice the comparative method and try to control for its effects, whether they work on past or contemporary materials, are aware of a number of difficulties that, while they may arise in diverse situations, all concern the tension between method and object. To simplify, we could attribute these difficulties to the fact that, on the one hand, the comparative method is a cognitive process that by nature functions according to a principal of binary opposition between differences and similarities and that, on the other hand, is applied in the social sciences to empirical objects that are historically situated and made up of multiple, interlinking dimensions. The resulting problems of self-monitoring and perpetual readjustment of the approach are not at all insurmountable by themselves. Rather, they form part of the daily work of all comparativists, each of whom addresses them in his or her own way. [11] However, the fact remains that the basic issues persist. For ease of presentation, we will briefly summarize those that feed into the concept of histoire croisée.

5The first issue concerns the position of the observer. If we stick to the basic schema of the cognitive process, the comparative method assumes a point of view external to the objects being compared. In addition, to see correctly and limit optical effects, it will be necessary for the vantage point to be strictly equidistant from the objects in order to produce a symmetrical view. In short, the principle of coherence in the comparative method implies that the observation point be fixed in space and time. In fact, we know perfectly well that with regard to the observation of societal or cultural facts, this vantage point, while theoretically imaginable, is impracticable in research practice. One way or another, researchers are always participant in the field of observation since they have invested the object, not least by the language, the categories, and the concepts he uses, with their historical experience and the pre-existing knowledge they draw upon. That position is therefore decentered. However, it is also subject to variations in time and is never perfectly fixed. The question of positioning thus invites exploration of the corrective procedures that make it possible to account for these dynamics.

6The second difficulty is linked to the first. It concerns the choice of the level of comparison. To give just a few examples, whether it has to do with the region, the nation-state, or civilization, no scale is rigorously unambiguous or generalizable since all are historically constituted and situated with specific content and therefore difficult to transpose into different frameworks. We need only to think, for example, of the problems presented by the concept of civilization, which was developed in particular historical conditions, when we are inclined to establish it as a generic basis for comparison. [12] In practice, it is certainly possible to circumvent this obstacle by integrating a margin of deviation adapted to each case into the comparative grid. However, these deviations risk weakening the relevance of the results, particularly in the case of multilateral comparisons that require consideration of a high number of parameters.

7In addition, the issue of scales has a direct influence on the definition of the object of comparison. This definition is never neutral but is always pre-imprinted with a particular representation that mobilizes specific, historically constituted categories. Whether it has to do with objects that appear simple and somewhat obvious, such as “the unemployed person,” “the student,” or “kinship relations,” or rather more complex constructions such as “the teaching system” or “relations between public and private spaces,” we can easily show that the analytical grids diverge not only in accordance with the scale selected but also as a function of the particularity of the fields, designations, and traditions of research upon which the researcher draws. Considerable distortions may thus result, first in cases where for the same object of study, the scale chosen for one of the elements of comparison does not prove necessarily pertinent for the other. This is also true at the level of the very identification of the elements, to which both related categories and distinct scientific perspectives contribute. This raises the problem of the historical and situated makeup of objects of comparison. In order to avoid the pitfall of their presumed “naturalness,” it often proves indispensable to question their historicity and the marks this historicity has made on their characteristics and contemporary usages. [13]

8However, the historicization of objects and problems can give rise to conflicts between synchronic and diachronic logic. The comparative method assumes a synchronic cross-section, or at the very least a stopping point in temporal progression, even if the comparativist approach also deals with the process of transformations or can carry out comparisons over time. In such cases, comparativist researchers are led to fix their object in time and therefore, in a sense, to suspend it. If they venture too far into the description of chronological sequences of events that lead to specific changes, it will be difficult to justify why, in his comparative grid—whether explicit or implicit—they emphasize one element in the process while neglecting another. The result is a quest for an equilibrium that, in practice, often proves fragile and unstable.

9An additional difficulty lies in the interaction between objects of comparison. When societies in contact are studied, we often observe that objects and practices are not only interrelated but also mutually change one another as an aftereffect of their interaction. This is often the case, for example, in the social sciences, where disciplines and schools evolve through exchange, whether in cultural activities such as literature, music, and art, or in practical domains such as advertising, marketing techniques, organizational cultures, or social politics. The comparison of these areas of contact that are mutually transformative through their interactions encourages researchers to reorganize their conceptual framework and rethink their analytical tools. [14]

10The various issues we have just discussed all go back to the problem of articulation between an essentially synchronic analytical logic and historically constituted objects. [15] The challenges they raise cause the researcher to first take the historical dimension into consideration. Although studies of transfers, which are specifically grounded in historical processes, respond to this demand, they nonetheless present further problems.

Transfers and the Issue of Frames of Reference

11Whereas the comparative method tends to privilege synchrony, inquiries on transfers clearly fall within a diachronic perspective. [16] Whichever temporal scale is retained, these inquiries presuppose a process that unfolds over time. By analyzing phenomena of displacement and appropriation, it reconstructs chains of events. As a consequence, it is not based on an assumption of stable units of analysis but rather on the study of the process of transformation. As for the comparative method, the contributions of this research approach have been obvious and the work implemented has proved fertile not only as regards the scale of transfers between national and regional cultures but also in specific fields, including the relations between disciplines, artistic practices, the history of books, and economic history. [17] However, while contributing answers to questions that are a legacy of comparativism, studies of transfers also have blind spots. To simplify, we will limit ourselves here to transfers between national units, while being aware of the structural problems affecting all domains of research on transfers.

12The first problem concerns frames of reference. Although it focuses on transactions between two poles, transfer implies a fixed framework with starting and ending points. Any description or analysis of transfers presupposes a beginning and an end, through which the process being studied becomes intelligible and interpretable. In the case of transnational transfers, these starting and ending points are generally situated internally to the national societies and cultures in contact. As a consequence, situations that originate and result from transfers are grasped through national frames of reference that are stable and assumed to be known, for example, “German” or “French” historiography, urbanization patterns particular to Great Britain or Russia, etc.

13The fixed nature of the starting and ending points is reflected in the invariance of the analytical categories. Moreover, like frames of reference, the categories used to analyze the transfer belong to different national registers. That is, not only the objects of the transfer but also their associated activities—of translation, for example—are understood through concepts elaborated within national disciplinary traditions. Even if it involves measuring a gap, as in phenomena of acculturation or resistance to acculturation, these are evaluated according to static models. The significance of the gap is determined with the aid of categories whose historicity and openness to change are parenthetical.

14More generally, the two preceding difficulties cause a deficit of reflexivity to emerge because of insufficient monitoring of self-referential loops. Moreover, even though at the level of relationships between national units, studies of transfers initially had the objectives of rendering boundaries more permeable and dispelling the myth of the homogeneity of national units, the analytical categories used end up reintroducing—through the group, in a sense—the national references they were supposed to relativize. Clearly, the study of exchanges produces a richer approach of the receiving culture since it reveals foreign contributions and contributes to the historicization of the concept of national culture. However, the very representation of the culture under consideration is not really called into question. Thus, rather than relaxing the national grounding of the historiographies and social sciences, research on transfers runs the risk of strengthening it. More generally, in the sense that the analytical frames of reference are not questioned, studies of transfers are exposed to the risk run by any approach that neglects its self-referential dimension; that is, they merely reinforce the a priori for which they serve as a vehicle.

15Lastly, there is the question of reciprocity and reversibility. Although the research program on transfers did not establish a rule on this point at its inception, empirical inquiries have generally involved simple linear processes from one culture or discipline to another according to the logic of introduction, diffusion, and reception. Even in the relatively rare case of triangular configurations, the object is limited to successive transfers. [18] In fact, situations are often more complex, involving movements between different points in at least two or more directions. These operations can succeed each other over time—in certain cases, this is discussed as re-transfer [19]—but also overlap, partially or wholly, with the understanding that perfect simultaneity is not possible. They can also crisscross each other and bring about specific dynamics through different types of interrelationships. All of these cases resist an analysis that simply establishes a relationship between starting and ending points. Studying these different configurations encourages the development of theoretical frameworks and methodological tools that enable the phenomena of interaction to be addressed, implying a plurality of directions and a multiplicity of effects. In our view, the notion of intersection offers the possibility of thinking about such configurations.

Looking into the Concept of Intersections

16In the literal sense, to intersect means “to meet and cross at a point” or “to share a common area.” [20] This results in a point of intersection where events likely to affect the elements in their presence to various degrees may be produced, according to their resistance, permeability, or malleability relative to their environment. This notion of intersection is thus at the very heart of histoire croisée as we propose to develop it. This leads to a series of consequences:

• First, the notion of intersection excludes reasoning based on individual entities considered exclusively in their own right without an external reference point. It breaks with a unidimensional, simplifying, and homogenizing perspective to the benefit of a multidimensional approach that gives establishment rights to the plurality and to the complex configurations that follow from it. From that point on, the research entities or objects are not only considered in relationship to each other but also through each other, in terms of relationships, interactions, and circulation. The active and dynamic principle of intersection is essential here, in contrast with the static framework of the comparative method, which tends to freeze the objects.
• Next, referring histoire croisée to relational configurations and active principles assumes that special attention will be paid to the consequences of intersecting. The view that something is actually happening in instances of intersecting is a strong assumption of histoire croisée that involves the actual intersection as much as its effects and repercussions. It is not limited to the analysis of the point of intersection or a moment of meeting, but instead takes into account more broadly the processes that may result from it, as the term “history” in the expression “histoire croisée” suggests.
• Intersecting is also intertwining, interweaving—in other words, intersecting multiple times—according to temporalities that may not be synchronized. This at least partially process-oriented nature is a third aspect of intersecting. It points to an analysis of resistance, inertia, modifications—of trajectories, forms, or content—or of new combinations that can both result from and be deployed in the intersection. These transformations are not necessarily limited to the elements in contact but can also affect their close or distant environment and manifest themselves according to delayed temporalities.
• Fourth, the intersection may not necessarily leave the implicated or affected entities, people, practices, or objects intact and identical to their original selves. [21] Rather, their transformations are linked to the not only active but also interactive nature of their contact. Moreover, they are most often based on reciprocity (since both elements are affected by the contact) but also by the asymmetry (since not all elements are affected in the same way). In this respect, intersecting is different from intermixing, which emphasizes the specificity of the product of a hybridization and goes beyond the starting units to bring about pre-identified entities borne of the intermixing. [22] By contrast, histoire croisée is interested as much in what novel outcome intersecting can produce as in the way it affects each of the intersecting parties, which are assumed to remain identifiable, even if altered. Therein lies another marker of the concept of intersection.

17One of the ambitions of histoire croisée is to conceive of relational, active, and asymmetrical configurations as well as of openness to change and the evolutionary character of objects and situations, considering not only what is new but also the change itself. In preference to an analytical model that would freeze things, we would want to articulate them and put them into motion, thus offering the possibility of expanding a toolbox that, while integrating the methodological contributions of the comparative method and the study of transfers already discussed, will allow for grasping the complexity of a composite and plural world in movement in a more satisfactory way as well as the fundamental question of change, the critical—though not blind—crux of the comparative methods and to some extent of transfers. [23]

18This relational, interactive, and processual meaning of histoire croisée opens up a multiplicity of possible intersections. We do not seek here to draw up the list or to propose a typology. Rather, we will content ourselves with distinguishing four large families according to the object of the intersection and its operator.

19The intersection that most readily comes to mind is the one intrinsically linked to the research object (1), though it could also be viewpoints and ways of looking at the object (2). In addition, it could be envisioned in terms of the relations between the observer and the object, and thus leading to reflexivity-related issues (3). If we distinguish them for heuristic purposes, these empirical and reflexive dimensions—as well as the different types of intersections that follow from them—are interlinked. The intersection is never presented as a given that it would suffice to point out and record. Rather, it requires an active observer to construct it, and it is in a back-and-forth movement between researchers and their object that the empirical and reflexive dimensions of histoire croisée jointly emerge. Intersecting thus emerges as a structuring cognitive activity that, through various acts of framing, constructs a space of understanding. Through it, a cognitive process articulating object, observer, and environment is carried out. The intersection of spatial and temporal scales, which could be both intrinsic to the object and the result of a theoretical or methodological choice, is a particularly revelatory example of this interlinking between empirical and reflexive dimensions (4).

Intersections Intrinsic to the Object

20Intersections have an empirical grounding and constitute the object of research, merges, partially or entirely, with an individual intersection, or the study of its constituents and how it operates and of its results and consequences. In practice, it is often extremely difficult to dissociate these different aspects and inform them with any precision because the intersections and inter-crossings can never be reduced to linear schemas or simple causality. Depending on the case, one or another of these aspects is located at the center of the analysis, according to the entry point chosen in the intersection process. The emphasis can be placed on the historical dimension constitutive of the intersecting elements and on the history of the intersection itself, as in the research led by Sebastian Conrad on the constitution of Japanese history at the confluence between local tradition and the importation of a national European historiography. [24] The inquiry thus targets the moments or phenomena upstream from the intersection as well as the modes of that intersection. However, it is also possible to be interested in what happens downstream of the products and processes generated by the intersection more or less directly. This is the case in a study by Kapil Raj of the effects of the intersection between Indian and English methods in the birth of a British cartography at the beginning of the nineteenth century. [25] This no longer appears as an authentically “English” work but as the result of a back-and-forth between two distinct traditions that “cross-fertilized” one another. Similarly, Christine Lebeau shows in her research on the figure of the administrator in the eighteenth century how administrative knowledge was constituted in a kind of intersection by the circulation throughout all of Europe of memoranda and documents of various provenance kept in the private papers of the managers of public finance of the period. [26] Whatever the starting point chosen, in these studies, the intersection serves as the basic matrix for the construction of the object that, depending on the case, will be in varying degrees tied to the analysis of moments preceding or following the actual points of intersection.

The Intersection of Viewpoints

21Here, we are talking about the domain of intersections between fields, objects, and scales, that is, the domain of things the researcher “intersects,” whereas the preceding intersections were produced without any direct intervention, even if the sole fact of identifying an object as pertaining to the histoire croisée already constitutes a strong intervention on the researcher’s part. For the sake of clarity, however, let us retain this distinction for the moment. In contrast to the preceding type of intersection that researchers can attempt to describe and understand, but whose inner workings they are not necessarily familiar with and a part of which will always be beyond their control, this second type of intersection engages a structuring and voluntarist intellectual act that helps better identify an object as well as a research problem. This raises the question of what constitutes the object of both an empirical and an epistemological point of view. Thus, a study of the reception of Tacitus’ Germania in Europe between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries could not only show historical intersections, namely of the circulation of arguments and their reinterpretation according to national contexts, but it could also emphasize the need to “intersect” different national receptions to create a Europe-wide research problem.

22In brief, the construction of the object, which can be envisioned from a Weberian perspective as the adoption of one or more specific points of view regarding the object, [27] is already the result of different intersections. Moreover, to the extent that it is able to evolve over the course of the inquiry, the point of view that is retained involves new intersections. As a result, researchers are led to take into account the way their own choice integrates (or not) other perspectives in order to bring about intersections between different possible perspectives and to realize, if need be, an act of translation or balancing between approaches resulting from specific perspectives. These different points of view are also socially structured, reflecting particular positions in relations of strength or power. [28] As a consequence, their variation also means, in an empirical sense, that researchers take into account the different social points of view, namely those of the governing and the governed, employees and employers, etc. What is important here is not the reflexive nature inherent in any work involving intellectual positioning, but rather all of the technical acts of intercrossing that constitute it, including, for example, ways of managing the articulation between the plurality of the possible perspectives and the numerous links between these points of view, to the extent that their historical constitution is considered. Thus the framing of the object and the positioning of the researcher are part of a “dual hermeneutic,” [29] where objects and points of view are created in intersecting interactions.

Relations between Observer and Object

23Once we begin to reason in terms of a cognitive approach, the question of the relationship between researcher and object proves inescapable and becomes, in a sense, constitutive of the two preceding types of intersections. First, this question concerns the way in which the initial parameters of the inquiry shape the object, and conversely, the way the characteristics of the object influence the parameters of the inquiry. The question of intersecting relations between observer and object—a question underlying any intellectual approach—is particularly sensitive when researchers work with languages, concepts, and categories outside of their sphere of socialization. [30] In the case of comparisons and transfers, the result is an asymmetry of relations between researchers and their different fields or sources. In all likelihood, a researcher trained in France [31] who engages in Franco-German research cannot treat the two sides symmetrically, if only because of the effects of mastering the subtleties of language and the categories that language conveys, and more generally because of his or her own insertion in French society. It would be vain and naive to try to discard this problem, which is part of any scientific inquiry, once and for all. [32] However, we could try to monitor the instances of the problem by objectifying their many-sided relations to the object while being aware that this objectification will always remain partial, in order to better understand the bias that may be introduced into the results of the inquiry. The ways the researcher appropriates the object, the resistance of the object, the initial parameters laid out by this initial choice, or the way the relations between researcher and object can change over the course of the inquiry, for example through the redefinition of the object or the readjustment of related topics and analytical categories, are all aspects of a reflexive approach in which the position of the researcher and the definition of the object are evolving, and their respective movements is the product of specific interactions. The space of comprehension created by the inquiry does not exist a priori but is constituted dynamically through intersecting relations of one with the other. Thus the empirical and reflexive dimensions are simultaneously configured.

The Intersection of Scales

24The issue of scales allows for the illustration of the way the empirical and reflexivity can interact within a histoire croisée perspective. It also raises the problem of spatial and temporal units of analysis, their reasoned choice according to the object, and the point(s) of view adopted. Addressing the issues of scale, both as a dimension intrinsic to the object and as a cognitive or methodological option chosen by the researcher, implies a break with a logic of pre-constituted scales, mobilized and ready to use, as is often the case for the national scale or for the major dates in the political chronology imposed as natural analytical frameworks and defined independently of the object.

25This problem of scales has already been the subject of innumerable developments. In particular, it has been presented in terms of relations between the micro and macro, and explored, for example, by the Italian microstoria, the French “multiscopic” approach, and the German Alltagsgeschichte. Despite their particularities, [33] these three approaches have the common denominator of the scales issue being primarily a problem of the researcher’s choice at the level of analysis. Thus, the microstoria chose the micro to show how it can enrich and bring about the development of the categories traditionally used by the macro analysis. [34] Its most radical proponents go so far as to bring the set of phenomena back to a micro scale in keeping with the underlying bias that the micro engenders the macro. [35] For their part, the proposals of the multiscopic approaches developed in France seek to escape such a dichotomous perspective by envisioning the game of Snakes and Ladders as a change in focal length in order to vary perspectives on the past. According to this principle, the local appears as a “particular modulation” of the global and, at the same time, as a different version of macrosocial realities. [36] Lastly, the Alltagsgeschichte bases the choice of the micro and the critique of the macro on an anthropology of social relations. [37] However, in returning the issue of scales to an exclusively theoretical or methodological choice, the microstoria, the multiscopic approach, and the Alltagsgeschichte do not really deal with the problem of the empirical articulation and the combining of different scales at the level of the object itself. Scales are as much a matter of intellectual choice as they are of concrete situations particular to the object studied.

26As a general rule, empirical objects pertain to multiple scales simultaneously and escape approaches that use a single focal length. This is the case, for example, of the constitution of the category of “the unemployed” in Germany between 1890 and 1927. [38] Its protagonists act, simultaneously or successively, at different levels: municipal, national, even international, such that these different scales are in part mutually constituted. The scales are not reduced to an external explicative factor but are integrated into the analysis. Thus, from a spatial point of view, they point to the plurality of stages, logics, and interactions related to the object of analysis. [39] From a temporal point of view, they raise the question of the temporalities of the observer, the object, and their interferences at the convergence between the empirical and methodology. The attention given to their combinations and articulations makes it possible to account for the constitutive interactions of complex phenomena that are not reducible to linear models.

27The translational scale offers a good illustration of this dual aspect. In a histoire croisée perspective, the transnational cannot simply be considered a supplementary level of analysis that will add to the local, regional, or national according to the logic of a change in focal length. On the contrary, it is grasped as a level constituted in interaction with the preceding levels and that generates its own logic, having further effects on the other logics of space structuring. Far from being limited to an effect of macroscopic reduction, the study of the transnational level makes a network of dynamic interrelations visible, whose constituents are in part defined through the links they maintain and the articulations that structure their positions. [40] Seen from this angle, histoire croisée can forge promising paths for the writing of a history of Europe that is not reduced to the sum of the histories of its member states or their political relations, but takes into account the diversity of transactions, negotiations, and reinterpretations that play out on different stages around a great variety of objects, and whose combination contributes to shaping a European history of variable geometry.

28Thus, the intersection approach argues in favor of going beyond a reasoning that opposes the micro and macro and emphasizes instead their inextricable interlinking. The notion of scale does not refer to the micro or macro but to the different spaces in which the constitutive interactions of the process being analyzed are inscribed. In other words, the scales in question are constructed or mobilized in the context of situations studied. Rather, they are both spatial and temporal, and their variations are not the exclusive privilege of the researcher but are also the work of the protagonists and situations studied. We can see therefore that intersections belong both to the register of the object of study and of the research procedures linked to the researcher’s choice. In its most demanding version, histoire croisée seeks to establish connections between the two registers and thus to network the empirical and reflexivity.

Pragmatic Induction . . .

29But how can these various forms of intersecting be studied or objectified? The example of scales enabled us to formulate proposals that we will now develop further. Emphasizing the need to start from the object of research and concrete situations leads to an inductive and pragmatic approach. From an epistemological point of view, any production of socio-historical knowledge clearly links inductive and deductive procedures, but in varying proportions. [41] In the case of the comparative method, where the deductive part is often significant, the national issues given as preexisting and crystalized in a language as well as in the specific categories of analysis risk partially prefiguring the results. Although histoire croisée does not escape the weight of this pre-established national formatting, its inductive inflection limits its effects through a system of inquiry in which the objects, categories, and analysis grids are adjusted in the course of the research. Thus Nicolas Mariot and Jay Rowell show, in a study on sovereign visits in France and Germany on the eve of the First World War, how the transposition of a research problem and a survey template from one country to the other can be put to the test through an analysis of the progression of visits in each of the two countries. In showing the asymmetry of the situations not only in the progression of these visits but also in their symbolic purpose and by pointing out important gaps between the different ways of conceiving of and categorizing public action or the relations between the center and the periphery, such a test led the researchers to revise the initial problem and reformulate the categories that structured it. [42] Here, the principle of induction makes reference to a process of the production of knowledge whose different elements are defined and repositioned in relationship to one another as needed. In addition, its pragmatic nature should enable us to limit the temptation of a priori constructions and give us the ability to circumvent the pitfall of essentializing categories that are overly fixed.

30As a consequence, pragmatic induction implies starting from the object of study and the situations in which it is taken and deployed, according to one or more points of view defined beforehand, of course, but subject to continual readjustments based on the empirical investigation. Relying on situations enables us to escape from a “comfortable and lazy use of context” [43] in refusing its generic and pre-established nature and by integrating a reflection on the principles that govern how it is defined. Instead, the analysis focuses on the way people are linked with the world, the specific construction of this world, the context produced by this activity in each specific case, and finally, the usages that this construction produces. Paying attention to situations is thus a means of getting away from the external, often superficial, nature of the context to make it an integral part of the analysis. Like the choice of scales, the definition of text is not the privilege of the researcher. Rather, it also involves references specific to the objects and activities studied, and in this form becomes an important dimension of histoire croisée. Thus it integrates the referential dimension of objects and practices analyzed into the work of contextualization enacted by the researcher, taking into account both the variety of action situations in which relationships to the context are structured and the effect the study of these situations exerts on the researcher’s analytical procedures. [44]

31In this sense, the notion of situation designates not only a specific framework of action as defined by Erving Goffman, but also—and this is just as important here—the specific interactions are prevalent in this framework. [45] For its part, reference to action places the dynamic of people’s concrete activities in given situations at the heart of the analysis. Beyond the pre-established constructions, the pragmatic approach thus allows for the identification, on the one hand, of the references and categories actually utilized in the action, and on the other, of the ways in which they are used. [46]

32However, pragmatic induction does not mean limiting ourselves to a micro level or to a juxtaposition of situations to the detriment of all forms of generalization. Generalization is a product of these diverse situations combined with the logic of action specific to them. [47] The emergence of common forms of organization of concerts in nineteenth century Europe can thus be studied from quite varied local constellations as well as through the concrete practices of actors. Institutions such as concert societies or generic figures such as the impresario and the concert agent were born in multiple configurations and according to a logic that cannot be reduced to a linear process of evolution, which some people would have liked to sum up as progressive commercialization or a generalized differentiation of functions linked to the organization of the concert. Rather, the main features are defined through the interaction between the sometimes contradictory expectations and strategies of actors to which they respond while also structuring them at the same time. [48] Similarly, pragmatic induction does not mean being restricted to short temporalities to the detriment of actions of long duration. On the contrary, the long time frame of structures is combined with the short junctures of action in an analysis of social activity based on the study of dynamic relations between action and structure. From this point of view, the activity of persons is seen as both structured and structuring. [49] However, this structuring is determined less by the need for an irreversible process than by the intersection of the actions of constraints and resources that are in part structurally given and in part tied to the contingency of situations. [50] Thus, for example, most of our institutions stem from a dual grounding, both in a lengthy structural history that shapes their logic and functioning, and in singular contexts of action that are decisive for their inception and transformation. [51] The viewpoint of a social pragmatics allows for thinking about the interdependence of these two dimensions, starting from the identification of the shifts and gaps that intervene in the course of the action and that make moments of institutional innovation possible. Attentive to both short-term contexts of action and to the structural conditions that make this possible, such an approach opens up new perspectives for thinking about change and stability jointly.

. . . and Reflexive Induction

33As the example of scales illustrates, this pragmatic induction is also reflexive. This is one of the points that distinguishes histoire croisée from the comparative method, which ideally postulates the existence of an external viewpoint allowing for both the construction of comparable objects and the application of common analytical questions to them, as well as from studies of transfer that most often do not call into question their referential presuppositions. Here, we do not address the basic issue, which has been debated for over a century in the social sciences. [52] Instead, we will content ourselves with underlining some ways in which histoire croisée can contribute to meeting the challenge of reflexivity. Both pragmatic induction and procedures of historicization associated with histoire croisée generate forms of reflexivity. Linked to the logic of action, pragmatic induction leads to readjustment of the principles and logic of the inquiry over the course of their use. As for historicization, it puts varied spatiotemporal scales in contact with different regimes of historicity and observation points that are themselves historically situated.

34An “histoire croisée” of disciplines thus allows for the illustration of some aspects of an issue such as reflexivity. When we consider the interlinking of the German and American historiographies after 1945 from a German, American, or French point of view, we reach perspectives and interpretations that are quite different. Emigration and the exile of German historians to the United States, the re-importation in post-1950 Germany of theories that were originally German but that had in the meantime been acclimatized and Americanized, as was the case for large sections of Weberian sociology, combined with theories of reception such as that of the Chicago School, created many interlinkings requiring reevaluation of points of view from which different interpretations were developed. As a result, common terms such as “German sociology” become fluid and difficult to use without caution, not to mention complex notions such as Historismus and its translations (historicism, historicisme, istorismo, etc.), each of which involve different perceptions, traditions, and methodologies. [53] As a consequence, today’s researchers may consider their own analytic concepts and instruments to be the result of a complex process of intersection, where national and disciplinary traditions are amalgamated into varying configurations and to reintroduce the corresponding viewpoints into their inquiries.

35The publication and reception of Edward Said’s Orientalism illustrates another way of addressing the question of reflexivity in terms of intersections. [54] Said himself being in a dual situation of hybridization and exile resulting from his family-related and intellectual socialization, [55] Said tried to re-elaborate the global vision of an “Orient” developed at the end of the eighteenth century by “Occidental” societies in search of cultural otherness. [56] By itself, its construction is already the result of a dual intersection, at the level of the inquiry in intersecting “Oriental” and “Occidental” viewpoints and with regard to the object because the representation of the Orient produced by Occidental societies implicitly contains the reflexive image of the Occident. However, the critical reception of the book also suggested other types of intersection. Thus, Orientalism would be inscribed in a movement of “Occidentalism,” that is, a representation of the Occident produced by non-Western people who, by reversing them, would take up structural characteristics of Orientalism such as the construction of an otherness, the dichotomous principle, and the tendency toward totalization. [57] In the history of concepts, this type of reversal has been called “asymmetrical counter-concept” (asymmetrischer Gegenbegriff) by Reinhart Koselleck. For Koselleck, fundamental concepts often generate opposite concepts that are asymmetrical because they are secondary and thus clearly subordinate to the primary fundamental concepts. [58]

36However, in the perspective of histoire croisée, the interactions and effects of reflexivity induced by the “double mirror” system are emphasized. Knowing whether the Orientalism of the Occidents only reflects their own representation of the Occident, or if the Occidentalism of the Orientals only reverses the principles of the Orientalism of the Occidents is of little importance. Rather, histoire croisée seeks to show the thick fabric of inter-crossings, starting from references actually mobilized by each intersection in the development of their respective representations. In doing so, it does not close itself off in a relativist space of indecision or infinite speculative relations, where the different positions cancel each other out. On the contrary, it proposes to use the intersection of perspectives and the shifting of points of view to produce its own specific knowledge effects. Thus the reflexivity it leads to is not an empty formalism but a relational field creating meaning.

The Work on Categories

37Furthermore, Said’s Orientalism illustrates the analytic impact of the categories being used. Here we are talking about another point raised by histoire croisée. Before the pitfall of asymmetrical comparisons, which postulate the similarity of categories on the basis of a simple semantic equivalent without questioning the often divergent practices they encompass, or negative comparisons, which gauge a society based on the absence of a category that is retained because of its pertinence in the initial environment of the researcher, a quite specific vigilance is imposed. This vigilance can be exercised through systematic work on the categories, in the dual sense of categories of action and categories of analysis. [59]

38If all reasoning proceeds by categorization, this often remains implicit, whereas making it explicit is necessary for any comparative research. [60] Knowing what we are talking about and where we are coming from is a dual challenge that is central to histoire croisée. Because the categories are both the product of an intellectual construction and the basis of action, they pose the question of the relationship between knowledge and action in an inescapable way, both in the situations studied and at the level of the protocol of inquiry. Through the attention paid to them, a potential path is forged to join the empirical and reflexivity.

39However, this taking into account does not focus so much on categories by themselves as on their different constitutive elements and their arrangement. However, these elements and arrangements are open to variations and fluctuations that invite a break with the intangibility of the categories and taking their openness to change into consideration. Here, escaping the essentialism of categories assumes reasoning in terms of the situated process of categorization, with the process reflecting back both the temporal and spatial interactions constituting the category. Categories such as landscape, unemployment, culture, old age, sickness, workers, executives, etc. are historically dated and partially structured by the related issues that directed their composition. For the landscape and its equivalents, which are always rough approximations in other languages and cultures, this constitution has been gradual and has put into play within each national entity a plurality of logics of categorizations specific to different groups, places, and people involved in the process, such as artists, botanists’ associations, local beautification leagues and societies, neighborhood associations, etc. Only a situated approach would enable elucidation of the specific issues of categorization that succeeded in prevailing at the level of these different groups at diverse times and that, while not perceptible today, contribute nonetheless to shaping the patrimonial practices that are current in France and Germany. [61] The process-oriented approach thus enables better detection of the implications of the categorical divisions, in particular by questioning their diverse, partially stabilized components. As a consequence, reference to categorization implies reasoning not in an abstract and general way but in association with the study of systems of action, interpretive schemas, and procedures for generalization that contribute to the institution of a generic category. [62] Beyond the interest that it presents for the analysis and comprehension of relations between persons or entities not sharing the same systems of reference, such a categorical approach makes it possible, thanks to the introduction of a diachronic dimension, to escape the influence of implicit and reductive cultural models. This dimension is a starting point to explore the problems related to historicization and to the way histoire croisée relates to the field of history.

Historicizing

40From what precedes, it is clear that histoire croisée urges the researcher to question historicity’s objects as well as its approach. However, if, as we have said, the approach thus proposed affects all of the social sciences, why retain the generic term “history” in these conditions? In fact, several reasons motivate this choice. The first reason is the historicization of the knowledge movement in the social sciences in which most of our disciplines are found to be engaged. Beginning at the start of the nineteenth century, reinforced by the successive crises of different positivisms, and accelerated by the recent challenges to scientific objectivism, [63] historicization is today an inescapable dimension of the production of knowledge in the social sciences, in which all the social sciences are engaged, even those that, like economics, have the tendency to think of themselves as being sciences of the present. Seen from the angle that interests us here, historicizing means articulating the fundamental aspect of reflexivity and the multiple temporalities that enter into the construction of the object when envisioned as a production situated in time and space. Histoire croisée participates in this enterprise in opening paths to rethinking, in historical time, the relations between observation, the object of study, and the analytical instruments used. Thus the reference to history is justified by the attention brought to the process of constituting both objects and categories and by the inception of configurations of analysis and action. Here again, what is at play is less the temporal dimension by itself than the incidence of a plurality of temporalities involved in the identification of objects and the construction of the related issues. This reliance on history therefore encompasses a substrate common to disciplines that, in one way or another, are confronted with the historicity of their materials and tools. Finally, the term “history” also refers to the narrative, descriptive, and comprehensive component of all empirical social sciences. This narration can be carried out in the present to describe a situation, or applied in the past to render some constitutive aspects of the object of study intelligible. [64] As long as they are controlled at the analytical level, the arrangements of storytelling can make a fertile heuristic contribution across the social sciences. [65] One of the challenges of histoire croisée is to reconceptualize certain aspects of these multiple relations between history and the social sciences.

41Historicization engages researchers as well as their relationship to the object. It therefore targets both the phenomena of the past and how to address them by establishing a link between the two dimensions. Referred to the object of study, historicization intervenes both upstream and downstream from the intersection, understood as the point of intersection and contact. Upstream, it covers the historical dimension constitutive of the intersecting elements and of the history of the intersection itself. The object is the vector of an intersection and is constructed from the perspective of the intersection. In particular, this implies that the intersection is not considered an abstract figure given in advance, but a temporal development deploying its own historicity. Downstream, historicization covers the consequences of the intersection. At this level also, the historical inscription follows a logic of contextualization with a double meaning; that is, taking into account the historical constitution of the object, it explores the effects that the object exercises upon an environment to whose transformation it contributes, with multiple aspects referring to a complex history, allowing for the interrelations and interdependence of its different components. However, histoire croisée should not be confused with a complete history. Rather, in starting from the dynamic of social activities in relation to a specific object of study, it targets specific phenomena to the exclusion of other forms of interaction that do not pertain to the intersection. This starting point means that the object of study is not a definitive form set down in advance. Rather, it is about circumscribing and specifying that object through the inquiry. This implies, among other things, that the categories used are not given once and for all, but are also subject to historicization. Here, we recognize the principle of the inductive approach used in different temporalities of history.

42Because it is an emphasizing process, histoire croisée is an open approach that takes into account from an internal perspective the variations in its components and from an external perspective its specificity in relation to other possible histories. It is similar to a history of problems and questionings that seeks to avoid the double essentialism of an objectification by the facts, that is, what would be directly accessible to the observer, and of a reification of structures that would determine the results of the inquiry in advance according to a tautological principle. In contrast to an essentialist perspective, the notion of intersection first identifies an interaction that then—and this is one of the decisive characteristics—modifies the interacting elements. In this sense, it points toward a “second-degree” history. Thus, in a histoire croisée of the disciplines of the social sciences, historicization covers not only the phenomena of categorization and conceptualization specific to each discipline or subdiscipline but also the work of translation between the ensembles it deals with as well as the movements and transformations induced by the interactions at the border.

43Thus at the level of questioning, it can explore the paths through which the problems are formulated and in turn interact within varied institutional configurations of one discipline or country to another. [66] A histoire croisée of a differentiated construction of the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century in Europe, an object that escapes both a comparativist approach and research in terms of transfers, can thus illustrate the modes of composition of that questioning as well as the game of transactions that nourish it. [67] Finally, via the bias of the variation of temporal scales and reflexivity-related issues, it allows for the inscription of the object in questionings about contemporary usages in reference to the Middle Ages and in its relations to conceptions of modernity. More generally, rather than bending its materials to fit functionalist or structuralist paradigms, histoire croisée seeks to adapt its analytic instruments to the specificity of its object. As a problem-oriented historical inquiry covering the entirety of questions common to different disciplines, it is thus inscribed in a process of historiographic re-elaboration, of which it constitutes one of the links.

Reaggregating

44However, the fact that histoire croisée is a problem-oriented historical inquiry does not confine it to a relativist spiral. It is true that the interrelational network woven by phenomena of intersection leads to articulation of the relative position of actors as well as descriptive and analytical categories, and thus to situating these in relation to each other in a process of deconstruction. In addition, taking into account intersections and their inscription in history relativizes the positions of some of them as well as their respective conceptualizations. However, far from leading to historical relativism, [68] this relativization, which is at the root an establishment of contact, produces meaning. By starting with the gaps between the different possible points of view, showing their differences and the way they are historically constituted, often interdependently, histoire croisée offers the possibility of reaggregating these elements and producing the specific effects of knowledge. [69] Thus, the study developed by Heidrun Friese on the paradigm of the Mediterranean space in the social sciences is at once a deconstruction of the homogenizing paradigm promoted by Anglo-American anthropology in the 1980s and a recomposition of the different constitutive elements of the representations of the Mediterranean, starting from an analysis of the internal diversity of the Mediterranean space and its role as crossroads. [70]

45Even if it does not lead to historical relativism, neither is histoire croisée part of an infinite historical logic of regression. Historicization is not to be confused with a contextualization that would always drive the historical investigation further in order to arrive at a more detailed representation of the past and of its relationship to the present. On the contrary, it is constructed and circumscribed in terms of an object and a related issue allowing for the identification of the relevant temporalities and thus the delimitation of the process of historicization. The inquiries carried out for the last decade in Germany on the theme of “the historicization of historicism” have changed the status and usages of the notion of Historismus, which from a label applied in an often controversial manner, has become a historical object in itself. In a double movement of internationalization and disciplinary decompartmentalization, it has been shown, on the one hand, how the German debates on historicism have been linked to the general discussions on the relationships to history in other European countries, and on the other, how the different disciplines, from economics to theology to linguistics to history, have reacted, each in its own but nonetheless interrelated way, to the question of the historical constitution of knowledge. [71] Suddenly, the questions initially asked as part of a controversy internal to the corporation of historians, in which the proponents and denunciators of Historismus were in opposition, have found answers through intersecting historicization whose limits were in a way self-imposed in the sense that the problem was shifted and reconfigured in function of the results of the inquiry. Even if the delimitation of historicization is not always easy to determine in the abstract, in practice, its handling is regulated by criteria of appropriateness between question and answer, and in general this does not pose a real problem. [72]

46Once this specification has been made clear, it becomes possible to examine anew the relations between diachrony and synchrony, whose coordination remains delicate both for the comparative method and for the study of transfers. When it covers the facts of social life, each act of the production of knowledge combines not only coordinates situated in time and space but also synchronic and diachronic representations of the event. [73] As a cognitive operation, the identification of an object or process pertains to synchrony, with the local act of locating or establishing a link, for example, functioning according to the principle of immediacy and tending to leave out the temporal dimension. On the other hand, as actions situated in time, these operations necessarily present the idea of a diachronic progression, of which they constitute one of the temporal points. One of the contributions of histoire croisée is that it enables the articulation of these two dimensions, whereas the comparative method privileges synchronous reasoning and studies of transfer are attached to the analysis of diachronic processes. By contrast, in histoire croisée, the synchronic and diachronic registers are constantly rearranged in relationship to one other.

47Here, we are close to what Kosellek calls the “non-contemporaneousness of the simultaneous” or the “simultaneity of the non-contemporary,” [74] that is, the intercrossing of different historical temporalities that, by separating themselves from a common measurement standard, are interpenetrating to the point where it is no longer possible to represent them in a linear and unidimensional way. [75] If for Koselleck, these phenomena are above all correlated with scholarly practices and with differentiated perceptions of progress among intellectuals, it is also possible to analyze them through other social groups, by intersecting, for example, the experiences of personal time among farmers and workers, or across different generations. However, following from Koselleck’s considerations, the proposal also proves fertile for the history of scientific disciplines in which, despite the representation of a unique temporarily inherent to the idea of progress, the activities of different disciplinary communities spread over varied institutional, political, and cultural spaces are far from being regulated by a common temporality. Like spaces, these temporalities are constructed in relation to one another. Here, the idea of an external clock independent of the respective disciplinary dynamics is erased to the benefit of the study of specific temporalities and their logic of differentiation.

48Moreover, the analysis of these differential and interlinked temporalities leads to approaches that have been recently developed under the name of “connected” or “shared history.” With these trends, histoire croisée shares the idea of reconnecting separated histories, specifically by following the compartmentalization produced by the rapid expansion of national historiographies. However, whereas these approaches are located primarily in a perspective of re-establishment of a buried reality, histoire croisée also invites researchers to take into account their own involvement in the process under study. The attention paid to the plurality of possible points of view and to the gaps produced by languages, terminologies, categorizations and conceptualizations, traditions, and disciplinary usages adds a supplementary dimension to the inquiry. Unlike the simple restoration of what is already there, histoire croisée emphasizes what can generate meaning in a self-reflexive approach.

49As we have seen, intersecting pertains to both the subject and the procedures of research. It acts as an active principle whereby the dynamic of the inquiry unfolds according to a logic of interactions and the different elements are constituted in relationship to and through each other. The taking into account of this part of active inclusion and of its constitutive and transformational effects is at the heart of histoire croisée. It implies mobile grounding processes linking the observer to the object and the objects to each other. The elements of the space of comprehension thus configured, in which the observer is an active participant, are therefore not fixed but defined based on their dynamic interrelations. The result is a process of permanent adjustment that simultaneously targets the respective position of the elements as well as their engendering processes.

50Beyond these distinctive traits derived from the concept of intersection, histoire croisée also invites a rethinking of the fundamental tension between the logical operations of the production of knowledge and historicity of both the object and the approach that produces this knowledge. We have seen that, for questions such as the choice of scales, the construction of context, or the process of categorization, histoire croisée invites a back-and-forth between the two poles of inquiry and the object. In questioning in a systematic way the relations between these two poles, it seeks, in choosing its fields, to respond to the question of the historical inscription of knowledge produced by the social sciences. The epistemological challenge remains—and will continue to remain—whole. However, the implementation of the research agenda thus sketched out leads to the opening of new sites of inquiry capable of modifying the conditions in which the intellectual experience is conducted.