The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

Bloch was trying to reinvent history as a social science but he departed significantly from Durkheim in his refusal to exclude psychology from history; Bloch maintained that the individual actor should be considered along with social forces. [citation needed]
Bloch's most important work centered on the study of feudalism.

Bloch was a quintessential modernist. Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (French: [maʁk blɔk]; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian who cofounded the highly influential Annales School of French social history.