At the very time when social science at the university was perhaps most clearly organized around history, a historian chose Annales as the forum in which to propose a revision of which the partners were not immediately fully aware. Is this then continuity or discontinuity? The evidence would point to continuity if we remember the emphasis on the need for a historical dimension in all research undertaken in the social sciences. In this sense, collective research in the various cultural spheres were organized in a notably different manner in France from their American homologue, area studies. The two were not, moreover, exactly contemporareous. It is continuity too, if we remember that, from the outset the historians of the Annales have tended to think in terms of stable systems or, as we would say now, of structure, to use terms which Lucien Febvre disliked. This may be seen in such concepts as social system in Bloch(Feuda! Society), the long term of Braudel, and Le Roy Ladurie's"immobile" history. You may say, but what of the analyses of conjoncture, or more precisely of economic, social, and cultural conjonctures(in the plural), also associated with Annales from its very beginning? But it should be obvious that what we call in France"conjoncture" (which is not at all the same thing as English erm"conjuncture") refers to the repeated intervention of cyclical phenomena,the complex interaction of which constitute a model.