A generation later, the model had changed, I have already said to what extent the field of social sciences had, between 1930 and 1960, regrouped itself, at least in France, around the field of history. But what is even more important is that the basic referent was no longer method, but the object of study, man. The French university system has maintained the custom, which I believe to be unique, to refer to what is called elsewhere the social sciences as the sciences of man, or human sciences. The unity of the field concerned was thus transferred to the objects proposed for study as it is perceived in various scientific practices. The object was assumed to be held in common and became the potential focus of collective research projects. The model for interdisciplinary exchange was no longer methodological standardization; it became diffusion, either of concepts or of facts. The various scientific practices no longer needed to follow a single pattern; they could capitalize on a common holding from which each could borrow as he needed. This capitalization was carried ou in a kind of optimistic per spective insofar as the assumed unity of man created the hope, at least as an asymptote, of general reconciliation. This model seemed to be implicit in Febvre's well-known conception of zusammenhang. It set forth a sort of placid interdisciplinarity, of which it is not surprising to note historians were to be the chief beneficiaries, in terms of both intellectual vision as well as institutional dynamics. Moreover, history provided a wide experi- mental field for conceptual imports, while speaking in the least abstruse scientific terms. Fernand Braudel wrote courageously in his 1958 article, at a time when the prestige and accomplishment of history might have war ranted a more triumphant tone, that"history, perhaps the least structured of the social sciences, accepts lessons from all its neighbors and makes an effort to circulate them.