Febvre's Climate of Sciences. When Human Geography Met Intellectual History

Although Lucien Febvre left exemplary works of economic and social history and of intellectual and religious history, to dissociate these two aspects of his work would be to overlook his most important methodological contribution in this second area: the concept of the "climate of science" or the "climate" of intellectual activity. In order to reconstruct its development from the 1920s to the 1940s, it is important to show how Febvre constructed a synthesis of proposals formulated by the philosopher Henri Berr, the psychologist Henri Wallon and the physicist Paul Langevin. He was opposed to Ratzel's deterministic approach to human geography and he considered that all innovative human activities were the result of probabilities of options within a spectrum of possibilities that it was then up to the historian to reconstruct.