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10 Kellenbenz, “Technology in the Age of the Scientific Revolution,” 264–65, 178; Braudel, The Mediterranean, 369, and see also 282, 363, 367.

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12 Geertz, Clifford, Peddlers and Princes (Chicago, 1963), 2.Google Scholar

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16 Spagnoli, Paul, “Review,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1974), 665–66Google Scholar. See, generally Henry, Louis, Anciennes Familles Genevoises (Paris, 1956)Google Scholar; Hollingsworth, T. H., The Demography of the British Peerage, supplement to Population Studies, 18 (1964)Google Scholar; Wrigley, E. A., “Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 19 (1966), 82–109CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Goubert, Pierre, “Historical Demography and the Reinterpretation of Early Modern French History: A Research Review,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1 (1970), 37–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wrigley, E. A., “The Process of Modernization and the Industrial Revolution in England,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3(1972), 256CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Laudrie, Le Roy, “A Long Agrarian Cycle,” 148Google Scholar; Wells, Robert. “Family History and the Demographic Transition,” Journal of Social History, 9 (1975). 1–19CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Hareven, Tamara, “Introduction: The Historical Study of the Family in Urban Society,” Journal of Urban History, 1 (1975), 259–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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19 Davis, Natalie Z., “Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France,” Daedalus, 106: 2(1977), 87–114Google Scholar; quotations on 87, 108, 90, 108.

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23 As early as 1938, Lucien Febvre called for attention to such an “histoire des mentalites collectives.” See Stone, Lawrence, “The Disenchantment of the World,” New York Review of Books, 17 (December 2, 1971), 17.Google Scholar

24 Thomas, Keith, “An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, II,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1975), 102–3Google Scholar. Natalie Z. Davis similarly pronounces the confidence of early modern French families “curious” and devotes much of her elegant and intricate investigation of other transitions, in other essays, to the discovery of reciprocal influences between mental set and material circumstance; see Davis, “Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny,” 90, and Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975). Any number of other scholars are, of course, at least as equivocal regarding the relation of psychological and structural elements; see, e.g., Shorter, Edward, The Making of the Modern Family, (New York, 1975)Google Scholar, and Stone, Lawrence, “The Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England: The Patriarchal Stage,” in Rosenberg, Charles, ed., The Family in History (Philadelphia, 1975)Google Scholar. Still the most sophisticated effort to identify structural factors behind motives and mentalities is Weinstein, Fred and Piatt, Gerald, The Wish to be Free: Society, Psyche, and Value Change (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969)Google Scholar.

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26 In the specific instance of early modern Europe, such skepticism would seem especially urgent, since, as La Roy Ladurie has said, “from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century, the economy was the handmaiden rather than the mistress, the follower rather than the leader.” “Motionless History,” 133. And of course the very point of invoking economic rationality as a mark of modernity for Max Weber was that the primacy of purely economic calculations of advantage was so distinctive and, in truth, aberrant among men.

27 Service, Elman, Primitive Social Organization (New York, 1964), 178–84Google Scholar; Sahlins, Marshall, “The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion,” American Anthropologist, 63 (1961), 323Google Scholar; Smith, Anthony, The Concept of Social Change (Boston, 1973), 132Google Scholar. Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer (Oxford, 1940), 148Google Scholar; Geertz, Clifford, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 407Google Scholar. Smith, The Concept of Social Change, 78; Wiener, Jonathan, “Modernization Theory and History: Achievements and Limitations,” paper, Social Science History Association meeting, Madison, Wisconsin, April, 1975, esp. 10–11, 18–19Google Scholar. DeMause, Lloyd, “The Formation of American Personality through Psychospeciation,” Journal of Psychohistory, 4 (1976), 2Google ScholarPubMed. Even explanations that claim an empirical foundation because they can be construed as tests rather than applications of their premises almost invariably fell short of their ideal in practice. This is because few devotees of a theoretical position truly do abandon their postulates under pressure or even suppose that it is their postulates that are up for empirical examination. There are always fudge factors available, and it is always possible to asperse the observed variance from expectations rather than from the basis of the expectation itself. In the revealing words of Daniel Lerner, lamenting the disturbingly wide variety of modernizing patterns of traditional societies, these “deviations from the regression line,” as he calls them, arise because “people don’t do what, on any rational course, they should do.” Lerner, Daniel, The Passing of Traditional Society, rev. ed. (New York, 1964), viiGoogle Scholar. For a symptomatic instance in the realm of modern econometric orthodoxy, see Fogel, Robert and Engerman, Stanley, Time on the Cross (Boston, 1974)Google Scholar and the authors’ essentially unrepentant response to withering criticism.

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