Annales school

Of course, not all grand sweep accounts of social change are millenarian, racial, or pseudoscientific by default.

Some, like the works of the French post-war Annales School, stand out as hallmarks of historical scholarship.

Yet the point that grand-scale histories and the futures they hint at tend to be made in the image of the present is evidently correct.

It was true for Ibn Khaldun as well.

These institutions were linchpins in the Rockefeller's Marxism-Leninism project, which was an international project of developing a kind of archipelago of institutions that would support research into Marxism, with the ultimate objective being to discredit Marxism-Leninism and to shore up versions of what most people now call Western Marxism, or I prefer to call imperial Marxism, indexing both its source and its general orientation.

And that institution was funded, uh, to the tune of, you know, millions of dollars by Ford and by Rockefeller, and happened as well to be the stronghold for French structuralism, which I was just talking about, as well as the Annales School of Historiography, which originally had Marxist roots, but then moved in an increasingly kind of non-Marxist direction by emphasizing what they call the longue durée, so long periods of history, these kind of static, almost Foucaultian-esque approaches that do focus to some extent on economics, but not as much on class struggle and the kind of dynamism of history as it would be understood in the dialectical and historical materialist tradition.

And if you go through the list, as I have in some of my other, uh, scholarship, of the French theorists and where they were teaching, an incredible number of them were teaching at one point or another at this institution.

And so it shows the kind of prominence, if you will, of the role of Plan Cloven, its impact on the intellectual world, the role of the foundations, and then shoring up an institutional space, which of course was well-funded.

And obviously, uh, academics, institutions, the president of Johns Hopkins University happened to be the brother of Eisenhower, the president of, uh, the country, and a major operative himself because-- And he was involved actually in directly securing the Ford Foundation funding for projects at Hopkins, which is also known for a lot of its cutout work that it does with the military and the larger kind of intelligence complex.

And so all of that has to be taken into account so that you have a broader sense of the ecosystem within which French theory arose.

And the last thing that I would say is that it's fascinating in that regard that in 1985, there was a research paper by the Central Intelligence Agency where they identify the crucial contribution on the part of French structuralism and the Annales School of Historiography, naming specifically Foucault and Lévi-Strauss, to their critical demolition of Marxist influence in the social sciences.

So the CIA was, yeah, you know, at an absolute minimum, applauding the work that was being done by French theory in not only pushing back against, but also in certain cases like that of Foucault and Lévi-Strauss to some extent, vigorously attacking the Marxist framework of analysis.