P. CHAUNU. De Vhistoire a la prospective. Paris. "Robert Laffont". 1975. 398 p. The French bourgeois historian, professor of the Sorbonne Pierre Chaunu belongs to the direction of the so-called "quantitative" or "serial" history. Since 1964, he has headed France's first research center for "quantitative" history at the University of Caen. The most famous of his works are "The Atlantic and Seville" (12 volumes, 1955-1960), "The Civilization of Classical Europe" (1956), "European Civilization in the Age of Enlightenment" (1971). "From History to the Future" is one of the last books of Shonuh, in which he, as well as the author of the book, wrote the following works: in the previous monograph " History, Social Science "(1974), he refers to the methodological aspects of historiography. His works to a certain extent characterize the state of modern French bourgeois historiography, the results of many years of efforts of a number of its representatives to overcome the limitations of positivism of "event" history and to find some "new" methodological approach outside of Marxism. Perhaps the main direction of this search, both in French and in the whole of bourgeois historiography, lies in the application of quantitative methods. Shonyu's book is also significant as an example of the contradictory attitudes generated in the West by the profound socio-economic upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s, which were reflected in the social sciences, in particular in history. Reflecting on the fate of historical science in the "atomic era", Chaunu again raises a problem that worried French scientists, especially those who were at the origins of the Annals school, and above all M. Blok: why do we need history? As Shonyu writes, recreating life in the spirit of L. Ranke in the modern era is an unacceptable luxury (p. 73). He calls for overcoming the vices of traditional positivism, which did not allow us to look at history as a whole process with its inherent laws. A truly scientifi ... Read more