After The Nights of Labour (1981, English translation 1989) Jacques Ranciére published a long essay on what it means to write history from below. The main object of The Names of History (1992, English translation 1994) is to challenge the so-called scientific approach that came to dominate French historiography after the Second World War. Taking on the Annales school and then working back to Jules Michelet, Ranciére seeks to understand what is at stake when historians attempt to replace “the primacy of events and proper names” (NH 1) with the study of demographics, economics, statistics and structures of thought. What to many historians and cultural critics may have seemed like a great leap forward in the human sciences turns out, on Ranciére's reading, to be a deeply flawed approach to history. While the Annales school famously refused to study the lives of kings and diplomatic history, their approach nonetheless ended up overlooking the men and women who, for Ranciére, are responsible for historical change. From his earliest texts through his more recent essays on literature and art, Ranciére has argued that democratic politics comes not from institutions, disciplines or specialists, but from concrete individuals, often from the working classes, who are engaged in struggles and who remain conscious of their thoughts, words and deeds. Writing history from below means two things for Ranciére. It means recovering the thoughts and speech and writings of these individuals and it means remaining aware of how the construction of knowledge can result in the silencing of democratic movements, aspirations for equality and new forms of thought.