The "New History" in Sociology I Gary G. Hamilton
Carl Becker, in that wonderful little book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, makes an interesting and, for the purposes of this essay, a pertinent observation about the importance of historical studies in the Enlightenment. Using reason to question reason itself, 18th century thinkers became convinced that the laws of h u m a n behavior could not be obtained through the application of mathematical thinking. As Becker shows, however, that these 18th century skeptics found no logical route to certain knowledge through replications of deductive reasoning did not mean that they gave up their search. Rather, they redoubled their efforts in a new location. History, they concluded, would yield the truth that mathematical reasoning could not produce: The past record of all m a n k i n d contains not only the vicissitudes of h u m a n experience, but also the changelessness of the h u m a n condition. The epitome of the 18th century skeptic, David Hume, said it best: "Mankind [is] so much the same, in all times and places, t h a t history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of h u m a n nature" (Becker, 1932, p. 95). Becker calls the history that these 18th century thinkers wrote the "new history." This was history written by philosophers, not by historians. It was history pursued with a disdain for describing events and with an equal disdain for those who saw history as simply a chronology or, in the words of a historian friend of mine, as "just one d a m n thing after another." Their history, the new history, was "to make that distinction, which abstract reason was unable to make, between the naturally good and the naturally bad, between customs t h a t were suited and those that were unsuited to man's nature" (Becker, 1932, p. 108). The world view of 18th century philosophers has, of course, vanished long ago; today we see the world and history and h u m a n fate within a climate of opinion quite unlike theirs. I will argue in this essay, however, that Becker's characterization of the new history in the 18th century provides a way to understand the resurgence of historical studies in sociology in the last decade. To be sure, a great m a n y differences divide th e two eras, differences in the conditions of Politics, Culture, and Society, Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 1987
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intellectuals, in the character of their thought, in all aspects of their lives. But what unites 18th century philosophers and 20th century sociologists and makes their comparison useful is that both sets of intellectuals, sharing a similar faith in discovering human truth, shifted the site of their search from scientistic abstractions to human experience, from positivism to history. Using Becker's characterization of 18th century philosophers enables us to gain a critical perspective upon our own practices that might otherwise be difficult to achieve. I argue that today we have a new "new history," which, like its 18th century counterpart, is animated by those who are basically uninterested in events and chronology, but who quest instead for different and more comprehensive understandings of the past. I place myself among those who aspire to such understandings, understandings cut loose from the presumption that history can only be understood narrowly, as a succession of events. But I ask in this essay, sometimes in a skeptical way, what some of the pitfalls of this approach may be, for they strike me as many and serious. Yet, regardless of the pitfalls, it seems to me that the new history in sociology today, like the new history in the 18th century, is attempting something important and something quite different than narrative history, and it should recognize and approach this task self-consciously. The task is to build a sociology of history, to put together a worthy successor to the philosophy of history that reached such importance among Enlightenment and post-Enlightenmentphilosophers in the 18th and 19th centuries. My first step in arguing for such a sociology of history is to assess, against tile background of Becker's characterization, some of the trends in historical, comparative sociology today. Understanding these trends forces us to see that the new history in sociology is considerably less historical and considerably less comparative than one might otherwise believe based on its label. Instead it contains the promise of being a new theory of society; it should build upon this promise, and it should be evaluated accordingly.
The new history in sociology has many beginnings. It draws upon the legacy of 19th and early 20th century scholars, upon Marx and de Tocqueville, upon Weber and Durkheim. It shows up in the 1960s almost simultaneously in the writings of scholars widely separated in space as well as in interest: Eisenstadt (1963) and Parsons (1966) from a Durkheimian perspective, Thompson (1963) and Moore (1966) and Braudel (1966) from a neo-Marxian perspective, Bendix (1964) and
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Tilly (1964) from Weberian and Tocquevillean perspectives. These and other scholars mark the reemergence of serious social science history, serious in the sense that they all addressed problems that they believed could not be solved within the prevailing models of social science. Although important historical scholarship existed in the social sciences in the 1950s, most notably that of Reinhard Bendix (1956),the one clear point of departure for the new history that would arise in the 1960s and 1970s is C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination (1959), itself a work containing no historical analysis. A virulent critic of post-World War II trends in social science, Mills argued that all valid social science perspectives of mankind needed to be based on history. He made his case by dividing social science in the postwar era into two groups, "Grand Theory" and "Abstracted Empiricism," and by showing that both ignored history. On the one hand, the grand theorists looked for universals of human behavior. Mills singled out Talcott Parsons as the standard bearer for this group and subjected Parsons's book, The Social System (1951), to an attack so scathing that it is still remembered by every social theorist writing since that time. Such universals of human nature as exist in reality, argued Mills (1959, pp. 25-49), are so general as to be meaningless in understanding human life and such theoretical schemes as Parsons's "fetishized 9 concepts." On the other hand, abstracted empiricists accumulate piles of facts, pick and choose from their toolbox of concepts a few that might arrange these facts in a more orderly way, compute the correlations, and explain the results. Survey research, such as that of Samuel Stouffer, was the target of Mill's attack, but just as appropriately he might have aimed at field studies; in field studies participant observers, with their particular research methods in mind, meticulouslyrecorded the daily doings of their subjects and explained their observations from the bottom up with a few sensitizing concepts. Mills charged that abstracted empiricists fetishize "The Method." Mills saw that both grand theory and abstracted empiricism were well suited to each other, were in fact complementary exercises: The more it is abstract and universal, the more theory can be applied equally to all facts and the less theory can be used to make clear distinctions among them. These two brands of social science, writes Mills, insure "that we do not learn too much about man and society--the first by formal and cloudy obscurantism, the second by formal and empty ingenuity" (1959, p. 75). Although he certainly exaggerated the foibles of his colleagues, C. Wright Mills remains one of the most articulate critics of modern professional sociology. He clearly realized that social theorists as well as empirical researchers distrusted and could find no place for history
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in their brands of social science. Theorists, whether conceptualizing whole societies or everyday human interaction, had no need of history to construct general theories of society, of human nature, and of the timeless recurring processes that go with each. 2Empiricists criticized historical research because the data were so unreliable and, hence, hardly suitable for rigorous hypothesis testing or for rigorous observations on the dynamics of everyday life. Deriding the social scientist's disinterest in history, Mills argues that "no social science can be assumed to transcend history" (1959, p. 146). Mills, Bendix, and a few other isolated voices supporting historical research in the late 1950s became a chorus in the 1960s, a clamor in the 1970s, and, in the 1980s, a deafening roar. History is "in," and most everyone now claims some affiliation with it. Almost as a sign of membership in the new wave, the new historians join Mills and extend, often uncritically, a blanket condemnation of former practices, of those sins of social scientific thinking that they confidently and contemptuously call "positivism." II What is the new history in sociology? What are the criticisms of positivism? One way to answer these questions is to examine the logic and the theory underlining the resurgence of history in sociology; perhaps the best place to do this is in the writing of Anthony Giddens, a sociologist who some believe to be a leading theorist of the movement to redefine sociological theory. In the past decade, Giddens has produced about a book a year, has published many highly theoretical articles, and was the keynote speaker chosen in 1983 to inaugurate comparative, historical sociology as a newly organized subsection of the American Sociological Association. In all his writings and talks, Giddens gives a skeptic's reading of current perspectives in social science and offers comprehensiveplans to reconstruct existing theory. But even a general survey of Giddens's work shows that his skepticism, as well as his plans, are reminiscent of nothing so much as the critique and suggestions of the 18th century philosopher, David Hume. It is this similarity between the 18th and 20th century skeptics that gives a first clue as to what the new history is about. Like Hume, Giddens is British, currently a Fellow at King's College at Cambridge University, and like Hume, Giddens has an unshakable hold (though often concealed under a cloak of internationalism) on the philosophic empiricism that is so much a part of the English intellectual tradition. Giddens, in fact, places two classical empiricist assumptions and their logical derivatives at the center of his effort to
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reformulate modern sociology. First, he assumes that all things social stem from the doings of knowing actors. This assumption is a complex restatement of Hume's thesis that all knowledge comes from experience, and that humans create the human condition. The second assumption Giddens makes is, in his own words, that "The realm of human agency is bounded" (1976, p. 160). By this Giddens means something similar to what Hume meant when he insisted that human knowledge is necessarily limited and is contained within the world of experience. Based on these two assumptions, Hume and Giddens argue for the inadequacy of theories based solely on either objectivist or subjectivist points of view. They state instead that the truth of human institutions can be discovered only by thinking historically. Hume took as his targets such objectivistinterpretations of society as the social contract theory of Locke and Hobbes and such subjectivist interpretations of society as Berkeley's theory of human knowledge. Hume denounced objectivist theories as being contradicted by empirical evidence, as being impossible to prove, and as denying the origin of knowledge in human experience.~ Hume criticized subjectivist theories as being incapable of generating truth from mere observation. On this point he wrote, "that all our reasonings concerning causes and effects are derived from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cognitive part of our n a t u r e s . . . [W]e may observe, that what we call a mind, is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and supposed, tho' falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity" (1978, pp. 183, 207). Because all experience is bounded by customs, Hume reasoned that the only way to discover truth about the human condition is to recognize that customs themselves are created historically, which is a point he made in his history of England, in his analysis of the creation of the state, and in his explanation of miracles.4 Gidden's arguments are remarkably similar to Hume's, although by no means identical. Giddens, too, attacks objectivist theories for their failure to be empirical and to include human actors as creators of knowledge and of their social world. Based upon this line of reasoning, Giddens rejects a considerable number of classical and current theories because they represent "social theorizing in which human beings are presented merely as objects to themselves" (1982, p. 75). Included among his rejections are the theoretical traditions of Marx and of Auguste Comte, (the latter tradition, incidentally, takes in the works of Durkheim, Parsons, and the French structuralists). 5 Similarly, Giddens chides the subjectivists for equating actor meaning with social explanation, for being unable to deal with power, and for ignoring
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institutions and change. In this group, Giddens places Mead's symbolic interactionism, Schutz's tradition ofphenomenology,Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, and Winch's post-Wittgensteinian philosophy.8 Giddens, like Hume, believes that all human knowledgeis produced socially, and is "bounded" by society itself. Therefore, the beginning of wisdom for both of them is to see that individuals "produce socie t y . . , as historically located actors" (Giddens, 1976, p. 160). Giddens attempts to go beyond Hume by formulating a theory of how meaning, action and history are linked. This is his theory of "structuration," a theory he believes to be his chief contribution to late 20th century sociology. Giddens is often long-winded on his theory; its explication takes a sizeable portion of most of his recent books, and his explanation of it is often obscure. 7 But, the gist of this theory is as follows: (1) Humans act based upon the knowledgethey have of their social world; (2) all knowledge of this world is itself historically produced by actors in specific institutional contexts (structures) that are defined by norms and systems of power; and (3) acting upon such knowledge, individuals validate the reality of the structure even as they are in the process of changing it. Structuration is a historical process, a process by which the past acts upon the present and the present reproduces the past. According to Giddens, this process is the proper focus of sociological theory and the proper topic of sociological investigation. Arriving on the scene so much later and seeming to travel so much farther than Hume, Giddens actually ends up in nearly the same epistemological spot: The way to human knowledge is through history. Giddens says his reformulation of social science aims to restore temporality to social theory, and so reconstituted, he extolls, "'There simply are no logical or even methodological distinctions between the social sciences and history--appropriately conceived" (1979, p. 230, his emphasis). And should anyone misunderstand the appropriate conception of history and social science, Giddens supplied a clarification of this statement three years later: "In saying that the social sciences and history are the same 'appropriately conceived,' I mean conceived of in the context of the theory of structuration" (1982, p. 27).
III
Giddens, a theorist of the new history and author of many books and articles, has yet to write anything that most sociologists or, especially, historians would even remotely call historical. True, he has written several books and articles about dead theorists--Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and others (1971, 1972a, 1972b). But these writings are
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not even intellectual histories, but rather extended descriptions and evaluations of theories. He has also written a book on The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (! 973). This book might conceivably have been about the historical development of classes in modern societies, but it, too, contains an extended assessment of theories. Giddens's forte is theory-talk, a proclivity for protracted discussions about the shortc~)mings of positivist theories of all types, and equally protracted discussions about the proper perspectives nee, fed to understand human life. His own work seems strangely empty because while he requires all sodal science research to be self-consciously.historical, his own work is all theory-talk but no theory. Giddens is not alone here, because more than a few theorists advocatinghistorical analysis have not yet reached the archives. Indeed, so much is this the case that one is reminded of the continuing accuracy of Alfred Cobban's 1964 assessment, of social theory; "The weakness of much social thought, it seems to me, is that it is so largely concerned with packing its bag (or even with working out a general theory about the way in which a bag should be packed) for a journey which is never taken" (1964, p. 23; also quoted in Fischer, 1970, p. 37). Even if we allow that m m w theorists of the new history have not yet begun the trip into history, we should at the same time recognize what Becker so clearly did of Enlightenmenthist,)rians: the trip as planned not only wilt be a short one, but also will cover only familiar ground. It is here, in this realization about the destination and duration of the theorists' planned journey int,) history, that we can begin to understand what the new history might be about and why so much packing is necessary for so slight an excursion. Giddens gives us the second key clue: The present is an historical moment. All analyses of the present should be self-consciously historical. The analyses as well as the techniques and conclusions of analysis are all historical products shaped by, as Giddens would say, "the human agency." History is here and now: an understanding of human behavior today is properly a topic of historical sociology. Giddens reasons that survey research, participant observation, mathematical modeling, and abstract theorizing by whatever name fail to "temporize," fail to place human m~derstandinginto time, and hence fail to be properly sociological. How is the old sociology made new? The late Philip Abrams, an admirer of Giddens and an author of one of the most recent books on historical sociology, gives us the clearest answer: Historical sociologyis not.., a matter of imposing g-rand schemes of evolutionary developmenton the relationship of the past to the present. Nor is it merely a matter of recognisingthe historical background to the
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present, tt is the attempt to understand the relationship of personal activity and experience on the one hand and social organisation on the other as something that is continuously constructed in time. It makes the continuous process of construction the focal concern of social analysis. That process may be studied in many different contexts: in personal
biographies and careers; in the rise and fall of whole civilisations; in the setting of particular events such as a revolution or an election, or of particular developments such as the making of the welfare state, or the formation of the working class. The particular context to which sociologists have chosen to pay most attention is the one I have called the transition to industrialism. But in the end historical sociology is more a matter of how one interprets the world than of what bit of it one chooses to study~ And on that bas~ one can say firstly, that there is no necessary
dLfferencebetween the sociologist and the historian, and secondly fl~a~ sociology which takes itself seriously must be hismricat sociology(1982, pp. 16-17, my emphasis). The new history, then, is also the new sociology. The new history, therefore, is the replacement for Grand Theory and Abstracted Empiricism, both of which have supposedly at last been put to rest. There is "no necessary difference" between history and sociology, wl~tes Abrams. What does the new history, the new sociology, aim to dis: cover? "The continuous process of construction," replies Abrams in his translation of Giddens's theory of structuration. And where is the best location to find this process at work? For this, says Abrams, it is not where you look or when you look, but how you took. At t-his point we should begin to suspect that the theory underlying the new history in sociology is not something that historians or even historically minded sociologists would necessarily warmly embrace, The narrative in the new history, the sense that one thing follows another and that the succession of events is a significant thing to study, quickly recedes in importance and in its place appears a focus on a "continuous process of construction." Although m a n y sociologists and historians might question the necessity of a narrative in a sociology of history~ this new emphasis also prescribes a continuousness to the historical process that m a y not be there in fact. It implies t h a t the present contains the past mad t h a t the past we most w a n t to know is how the present is reconstructed. But w h a t about the discontinuities, about the roads not taken but for happenstance, about the imponderables of a past t h a t was not reconstructed and is forever lost. Accordingly, in this theory of the new history, we now begin to see both a timelessness and a presentmindedness that was not apparent at first glance. People at all times and in all places construct their reahty, and so, to understand this velw real and historically meaningful phenomenon, one has only to look everywhere. And for such a look the present becomes a particularly good place to understand this
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process, because the data are so good. The historical present--the meaningful now--offers so much less interpretive difficulty than a past that must mainly be known through historical documents, which are after all social constructions in their own right, but whose purposes cannot always be ascertained. In fact, in a public lecture, Giddens has said that one of the best places to learn about the historical construction of the capitalist labor process is in Paul Willis's book, L e a r n i n g to Labor. s But this book, although detailed and certainly insightful, contains no analysis of the past at all, and is based entirely on interviews and participant observation. Despite all the claims that historical sociology is off to explore new intellectual territory, one finds the theoretical terrain remarkably similar to the old sociology. The new and the old sociology are, equally, an interpretive analysis of the present. From Giddens's and Parsons's view, the present is general and abstract, and from Willis's and Stouffer's view, it is empirical and detailed. Considering the similarity of the terrain, one suspects that what Cobban interpreted as bagpacking and theories of bag-packing may well have been the most important part of the journey itself; for here, amid all this theory-talk, modern social theorists are trying to make the decision about what it is important to see on the journey into history. These theorists want sociologists to travel over some ground that the positivists had already covered. Charging that the positivists had missed all the points of interest, the theorists reason that what is required is better preparation. A better theoretical grounding and a more appropriate epistemologicalposition than those of the positivists will allow access to the permanent characteristics of the human condition: the continuous process of construction, the unchanging changeableness of society. At this point we should begin to recognize the similarity between this theoretical position and the mentality of the modern tourist. The modern tourist mulls over the guide books, plots out an itinerary, makes choices at home about whether to see the Louvre or Prado, Venice or Florence, and in the end undertakes the trip merely to check whether all those historical things are really there after all. Similarly, long before entering the archives, the theorists lean on their guidebooks-favored theories interspersed with perhaps a few old-fashioned histories written with narrative in mind. They scout for cases that will test their assumptions, cases about which there is plenty of good data, cases nearest the present being the best ones; they take their excursion into history (the historical present included) quickly and with maximum comfort (no need to learn the language or the customs); and when they arrive at their destination, they primarily see what they had planned to see before they left.
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IV
Giddens provides the intellectual justification for the new history, and that justification is theoretical and not substantive. Guided by their theories, the new historians set out to reinterpret known facts. But this view of the new history, the theorists' view, would seem to slight the great amount of historical research now going on in sociology. Therefore another look at the new history in sociology, not at the theory behind but rather at the historical works themselves, is in order, so as to counteract the impression that the new history is more concerned with sociological theory t h a n with anything else. This look is particularly important because it is certain that very few practitioners of the new history seriously study, widely discuss, or take agendas from theorists advocating historical analysis, such as Giddens. Nonetheless, here, too, as one looks over the rapidly growing genre of historical writing in the social sciences, one finds similar underlying preoccupations with theory and with method, and with using both to search for truths t h a t are often present-minded or ahistorical. Although practitioners may not read him, Giddens perceptively understands that the general motivation for bringing history into sociology is theory and not substance. Historical research within the social sciences is now widely accepted; the amount is sizeable and the range of topics extensive. Despite its quantity and breadth, it is clear, once one begins to read the studies that make up the new history, that much of the research clusters around the two types of historical sociology. One type is a cluster of studies that appear to be detailed empirical investigations of some setting or event or period of time. Charles Tilly (1981, pp. 27-29) calls this cluster "social science history," after an association and a journal of the same name. Tilly argues that social science history has concerns quite distinct from the topical concerns of standard history: "The common ground of social science history, in the last analysis, is not substantive." Rather t h a n being committed to specific topic areas, people working in social science history share an orientation, says Tilly, that is "mainly methodological." Social science history is "full of tables and graphs; frequently summarizing results or hypotheses as equations; self-conscious about techniques of analysis; speaking frequently of models, hypotheses, and problems of measurement; obsessed by comparisons over time and space." The three major areas of research where this brand of social science history is particularly active are economic history, demographic history, and quantitative urban history, and the exemplars of this approach include the work of Stone as well as that of Tilly.
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Tilly, however, also includes in social science history a great many who are doing methodologically rigorous social science history but whose approaches are basically nonquantitative. These researchers follow the methodological orientation of British social historians, particularly of E. P. Thompson and E. J. Hobsbawm. This is the so-called history written "from the bottom up." It is folk history, cultural history that is methodologically committed to interpret the meaning and routines of life of ordinary people. With this approach, Thompson (1963) has created an interpretation of the social life of workers in industrializing England, and Hobsbawm (1959) an interpretation of social changes in rural England in the same period. These and other works have spawned considerable literature on working class cultures and on women as historical actors. Certainly of equal importance in this social science history cluster is the French Annales school. Located between the American cliometricians and the British social historians, the Annales historians are equally committedto understanding the texture and meaning of everyday life at specific times and places in the past, even though they are also concerned with long-term trends. Drawing inspiration from the works of Marc Bloch, the Annales school today is best exemplifiedby the scholarship of Fernand Braudel (1966, 1979, 1982, 1984) and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1978, 1979). Viewing these three approaches as the social science history cluster, one should notice that, despite definite differences, the approaches share much in common. To be a part of this cluster researchers must work mainly with original source materials: old census tracts, court records, religious pamphlets. Although researchers may display great familiarity with the secondary sources relating to their topic, these sources are of assistance only indirectly, as interpretive aids or as targets of refutation. The primary sources carry the thesis, whatever it is. The goal of historical analysis, however, is only rarely to fashion a narrative interpretation. Instead the authors' aim, as defined by their particular work, is to give as complete a description of a particular setting or issue as is possible. Historical demographers develop ingenious ways to estimate population size in the absence of reliable census data, and historians of working class cultures find equally ingenious methods to find out what is going on inside the workers' heads. The presumption is that were the passage of time not to constrain data collection, the authors would want the results of social surveys and the conclusions of participant observers as a means to construct a more complete analysis of the topic under scrutiny. In fact these authors clearly attempt to manufacture the equivalent of surveys and participant observers. For instance, in Carnival in Romans
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(1979), a study of a two week period in a town in southern France in the 16th century, Le Roy Ladurie makes a social survey out of tax rolls and participant observers out of witnesses in a murder trial. The arguments practitioners of social science history have among themselves give their own game away. They argue about Methods, about the reliability of their sources, the validity of their sources, and whether their sources actually yield the stated conclusions. Arguing about methods, these researchers reach the tacit agreement that: the better the sources, the more complete the description becomes; the more complete the description, the more justified the conclusion becomes; and the more justified the conclusion, the more praise the scholarship and the scholar can expect. These new historians primarily consider themselves to be historians, in whatever discipline, and to them the role of social science is clear: It serves as the source of methods and concepts, a toolbox filled with things useful in fashioning a description of their topics, in making attributions about motivations, and in pinning down causes that may or may not be factors in some specific event. For these uses, social science plays the same role as it does in the analysis of the present, and were the topics not historical, the entire cluster would surely be mistaken for Mill's category of Abstracted Empiricism, with quantitative social science history lining up with survey research and the nonquantitative with participant observation. Many social science historians attempt to understand the past in the same way--using the same methods, concepts, and concerns--in which social scientists study the present. Therefore, as paradoxical as it may seem at first, Mill's criticism of Abstracted Empiricism also applies to social science history. The more narrowly defined the topic, the more complete the description, and the more exclusive the reliance on primary sources, the more ahistorical and the less comparative social science history becomes. Social science history nurtures ahistorical and noncomparative biases in two ways. First, by using modern theories of society, some researchers succumb to the ever present temptation to interpret the lives of historical actors in present day terms; thereby, they force their subjects to speak for contemporary concerns, making them give clear answers from the past for modern problems or convincing proofs for general theories of societies. Taking solace from the similarity between past and present, these researchers demonstrate that people always act in their own interests, that gender distinctions are always important and invidious, and that the continuous process of construction is indeed continuous. On a particular variable, in regard to a certain theory, the distinctions between the past and present and between one society and another disappear and cannot be easily
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recovered. This approach falls under what David Hackett Fischer (1970, p. 135) calls "the fallacy of presentism," which he describes as "the mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the dead branches of the past, and to preserve the green buds and twigs which have grown into the dark forest of our contemporary world."9 Uncriticallyjoining the present and the past in this fashion is not only ahistorical but also reduces the value of malting comparisons, because the results of such comparisons are not substantive; they are theoretical and are largely determined in advance of any detailed historical research. The second way that. some social sciencehistory writings are ahistorical and not conducive to comparative research is to err in the opposite direction: to immerse oneself so totally in a particular time and place that other times and places are excluded. This is the "slice of life approach," or to borrow Geertz s term, a "thick description" of a time and place. ~oHere the attempt is to present as complete a description of life in a particular historical setting as is possible. This attempt at "total history" is in fact quite the reverse. As Gertrude Himmelfarb (1984) has recently argued, in such histo~ies there is no sense of change, no effort to weigh the importance of different factors contributing to change, and no design to understand in what way that past world has given way to the present. EquaUy, because the effort is to develop a total understanding of a time and place, systematic comparisons with other times and places become virtually impossible. The wholistic approach, the contextual depth, indeed, the thick description provides no analytic basis upon which to make comparisons. All times and all places are totally different. To compare is to violate tha~ totality. In fact, simply to analyse, to divide one factor out from others and to took at it closely, undermines that totality, and thus analysis itself becomes difficult to those methodologically committed to total history. It is for this reason that many historians, including some associated with social science history, particularly Lawrence Stone, have called for restoring the narrative to historical writing because the narrative itself imposes an analytic frame and a mode of analysis. As I will argue later, however, embracing this emphasis upon chronology, upon the succession of people and events, is the wrong analytic frame for a sociology of history. Between overt presentism and total history there still lies an area in which many social science historians are trying to develop sociological theories designed to illuminate the activities of historical actors, while avoiding the fallacies of either extreme. A few of the better known examples will suffice here: Charles Tilty himself is such a historian, his work The Vendee (1964) being a model in this regard; equally E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class
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(1963) and Michael FoucauWs Discipline and Punish (1979) are examples of social science history in which historical substance and sociological theory begin to merge. In these studies historical research yields substantive discoveries that cannot be derived from a priori deductions, u. In The Vendee, Tilly addresses an historical problem: Why did some areas in France have a counterrevolution in 1793 and other areas did not? In solving this problem, Tilty offers a theory of differential development in provincial 18th century France that is not a narrative, but it is yet useful in explaining these specific historical events, and which is subsequently useful in analyzing social movements of all types. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class is regarded by many as the epitome of the bottom-up approach. Although using material from the daily lives of workers to develop his thesis, Thompson is still rigorously analytic and straightforwardly theoretical. He poses his problem to explain the origins of the English working class in a way that calls for an interpretive solution in which history becomes theory itself. His book is not less than a sociology of class formation that occurs at a particular time and place. To read the book as an attempt at total history, or even as an attempt at induction, is to seriously misunderstand the book and to ignore what Thompson said he was trying to accomplish. Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is among the most important recent models of social science history. This book, ostensibly about the origins of the modern prison system in France, is in fact a highly original attempt to crack the interpretative framework, the mentalities, within which 19th century Europeans functioned both in thought and deed. This is a sociological history of cognition, perception, and their relation to the formation of institutions of political control. It is a work in which historical substance and a profound, subtle theory of knowledge and action applicable to that time and place are so joined that each becomes impossible without the other. In these works the authors have taken the rough middle route, opting for depth in historical analysis and for the highest level of sophistication in theory. What is important here is not their simple combination of history and theory, but rather their use of history to get at theory, which makes history an intrinsic part of theory itself. What they develop are sociological theories of history. None of these theories are derived from previous theories--from those of Tocqueville, Marx, or Nietzsche--and merely tested with historical data. Nor are they derived only from mucking around in historical material. Instead their particular combination of history and theory has led them to develop a distinctly sociological view needed to interpret a historical setting. They focus on the explanation of change, but without adopt-
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ing a narrative approach, in part because a narrative imposes a different discipline upon what should be investigated. Each of these authors discovers in historical substance those features of society that underlay thought and action, those secondary causes, as de Tocqueville once called them, that prepare the ground in advance and shape the course of events without actually causing their occurrence. It is in such discoveries at this level that social science history contributes to a sociology of history, to an historically informed theory of society. But, unfortunately, social science history is at times directed in other ways, so much so that Mills's category of Abstracted Empiricism seems too close a fit. The other type of historical sociology is quite different from social science history. There is no definite label for this cluster that would set it apart from social science history, but it is usually identified simply as "comparative historical sociology," sometimes with a "macro" added to modify the entire phrase. Despite the clumsy string of adjectives, this wing of the new history is, in fact, its core, its predominant focus. The cluster contains m a n y exemplars: Moore's The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), Bendix's Nation-Building and Citizenship (1964), Anderson's Passages and Lineages (1974a and b), Paige's Agrarian Revolution (1975), Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions (1979), and Wallerstein's The Modern World Systern I and II (1974, 1980). These and the m a n y other studies that make up this cluster are histories written by sociologists. Most of these writers openly disavow any standing as historians and claim expertise elsewhere, such as in theory or in understanding "present reality" as Wallerstein (1974, p. 9) puts it. For example, Perry Anderson (1974a) writes in the foreword to the first of his two volume study, "The scholarship and skills of the professional historian are absent from them. Historical writing in the proper sense is inseparable from direct research into the original records of the past . . . . The studies below have no claim to this dignity." Skocpol (1979, p. xi) opens her study with the following disclaimer: "Some books present fresh evidence: others make arguments that urge the reader to see old problems in a new light. This work is decidedly of the latter sort." A disclaimer communicating the absence of "serious" historical research is perhaps wise but entirely misleading. It is wise because these writers based their historical interpretations almost entirely on secondary sources, on histories written by historians. They correctly fear that these same historians, versed in primary sources and in the intricacies of a time and a place, will attack their interpretations piecemeal, pulling a thread here or a seam there, and so unravel the entire enterprise. Although perhaps wise, it is also misleading,
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because these writers, more than almost any historian, are attempting to interpret the past, are attempting to explain how the past has become the present. For the most part, standard historians have given up writing this kind of history, and have embraced substantive specialties instead. They now specialize in 16th-century Florence or in the life of Frederick the Great or in the Reign of Terror. They now burrow into their source material, as they must do for their professional standing, and so leave the explanation of change, which is what many mean by the term history, to whomever would occupy the space. Macro-comparative-historical sociologists have now claimed this space as their own, and by attempting to interpret long term changes, they are doing the most serious contemporary historical research. The sociologists' appropriation of this space indicates not only their confidence in fashioning sociological theory but also their naivet~ in doing historical analysis. These new historians, like their counterparts in the 18th century, dislike detailed chronology and choose notto explain the succession of specific events. Nonetheless many of them do not entirely give up the narrative. Instead many elect to generalize on a grand scale. They are working on nothing less than world history. Their writings contain few methodologicalcomments, and those that do occur refer primarily to the "comparative method.''t2 This method, any primary source research that might have been done, and all case studies complied from secondary sources only serve to advance their theories of history. The theories carry everything, but these writers do not always draw their theories from historical research, from an attempt to decipher the complexity of people and events. Rather, the new historians often take their theories from old theories, concepts, assumptions, and concerns of Western social science that grew up with the discipline in the late 19th century and developedin the 20th. These theories, typically, are not theories of the past, but rather theories of the present read backwards. Nowadays the theory of the present is Marx's theory of capitalism as informed by Polanyi or is Weber's theory of rationalization as reconstructed by Habermas. Whatever theories the new historians seize upon, whether in a revised form or not, they only become contenders if they can explain the historical present, that continuous process of construction making a nebulous past into this specific historical moment. Hence the chief task of the new history, as Giddens correctly sees, is not to study the past but is rather to interpret the present, and in this approach there are dangers. Wallerstein who thrives in the face of these dangers and who is repeatedly criticized by his sociological colleagues for doing so, provides an additional round of clues about the meaning of the new history, and these clues largely repeat those given by Giddens. First,
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Wallerstein acknowledges the presentmindedness of all historical analyses: "Social reality is ephemeral. It exists in the present and disappears as it moves into the past. The past can only be told as it truly is, not was." Accordingly, Wallerstein argues that the scholar's task is to "discern... the present reality of the phenomena he studies . . . . For the proper understanding of the social dynamics of the present requires a theoretical comprehension that can be based on the study of the widest possible range of phenomena, including through all of historical time and space" (1974a, p. 9, my emphasis). Wallerstein's message is clear enough: History is now. Reality is now. The only valid interpretation of the past is one founded on the awareness of the present. On this point, a great many would agree with Wallerstein, including Foucault and Weber, Giddens and Mead, and even Becker himself.13 But what does Wallerstein mean by present awareness? Here we come to a curious point. To establish his awareness of the present, he (1974a, pp. 3-7) turns to autobiography, to his own account of being struck by light. His life story about finding the world system does not figure into this essay, except to say that he discovered it in the present, not in the past, and that his multivolumed account is the present pushed backwards into time in order "to analyze the determining elements of the modern world-system" (1974a, p. 10). This kind of deductive history gives the second clue. Wallerstein, like many other new historians, looks for truths known in advance of his search into the past, and thus invites the "fallacy of presentism" to shape his conclusions. The third clue is that, besides being presentminded and deductive, Wallerstein's analysis of history is theoretical. By Wallerstein's definition, change is never random and never small. Change is always large and important. Change, he says (1974a, p. 7), only occurs in "social systems." And by his reading of the world today, "the only social system in this scheme was the world-system." Chronology, events, people, even whole societies--what Mills (1959, p. 143) called the intersection between biography, history, and society--become unimportant in themselves, and only gain significance when they reveal the characteristics of social systems. At this point, to use Fischer's metaphor cited above, Wallerstein has cleared the past of all extraneous plants, leaving only the buds of what Wallerstein says have grown to maturity in the present, there to be counted as significant. Wallerstein's analysis of history, therefore, is not an exercise in understanding the past at all. It is an effort to work out, on the large scale, a theory of the present. History becomes a source of verification for the truth of this theory. The present being pushed back into time, the theory of the present becomes a singular interpretation of world
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history, a Grand Theory indeed. Wallerstein, of course, is quite clear about the grandeur of his effort: "I was looking to describe the worldsystem at a certain level of abstraction, that of the evolution of structures of the whole system. I was interested in describing events only insofar as they threw light upon the system as typical instances of some mechanism, or as they were the crucial turning points in some major institutional change"(1974a, p. 8, my emphasis). This is history in the large. Theory leads the way, and events and all secondary factors structuring those events vanish except when they "throw light upon the system." Although Wallerstein abandons a simple narrative of person and event, he embraces another kind of storyline. It is the unfolding of world history, and he succumbs to all the temptations of so grand a task. And finally a fourth clue: presentminded, deductive, and theoretical, the new history, Wallerstein believes, can also be objective. Just as Giddens hopes to establish new truths, Wallerstein, too, finds objectivity close by. Objectivity, he writes (1974a, p. 9), "is first of all a matter of defining clearly our terms." Second, "objectivity is honesty within this framework [of'present reality']." Third, objectivity is a balancing of analysis "performed by persons rooted in all the major groups of the world-system" (1974a, p. 10). Wallerstein's committed scholarship represents, he says, the under-represented "interests of the larger and more oppressed parts of the world's population" (1974, p. 10). He therefore implicitly claims a greater share of objectivity than those who serve other clients, which is a claim similar to those made by all other missionaries of Western ideas in their dealings with nonWestern societies. Wallerstein's writings have been both bitterly criticized and wildly applauded by comparative historical sociologists themselves.14 It is certain that his writings do not closely correspond to all the works within this cluster. But even if his works do not match, they still provide a caricature of what the new history at this end of the continuum is all about. Presentminded (if not always guilty ofpresentism), deductive (if not always rigidly so), theoretical (always), and objective (hopefully)--allthese are qualities of the new history in sociology that very few practitioners would deny that they strive for. And if the criticisms leveled at WaUerstein by his colleagues are any indication, then the direction of the new history will move toward these qualities and not away from them. His colleagues accuse him of misreading and oversimplifyingboth the present and the past, of being too monocausal in his deductions, of using the wrong theory or not being theoretical enough, and, of course, of not being objective. If Wallerstein errs, say his colleagues, it is not in the enterprise itself, but rather
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in that he has not gone far enough or in a sufficiently sophisticated fashion. At this point the new history comes into focus. The core of the new history is reconstructed Grand Theory, a new positivism with history added as a source of theory and verification. Wallerstein's attempt to replace Parsons by substituting The Modern World System for The Social System is indicative of the goal that many seek: a theory of systems moving in time to displace a theory of a system for all times. The new history, like the old sociology, is indeed a search for truths-not so simple, elegant, universal, or unchanging as those found by the 18th century philosophers, but truths nonetheless. These truths, in the best writings of the cluster, are the same as those uncovered by social science historians. These are discoveries about background factors that precede and influence, but do not actually cause events. Barrington Moore's observation about class structure at the outset of modernization and the form of government arising during the course of modernization; Bendix's account of industrialization, social structure, and the subsequent development of managerial ideologies;1~ Skocpol's analysis of the form and role of structure in setting the conditions for major revolutions--these are well-knownexamples of studies that develop historically rooted sociological theories of background factors, rather than narrative interpretations of world history. Wallerstein's notion of an interlinked world economy is, of course, a background factor in modern history too, but Wallerstein's treatment differs from many others in that he develops a grand narrative interpretation of this background factor, making it determine the course of modem history. At this level of explanation, however, all research is an attempt to construct grand theory, and the temptation is always present to make one's own point of interest so general and so abstract that it can be applied equally to every event, every person and every society, without being able to make clear distinctions among them. The danger is to make the theory explain everything and so explain nothing. In succumbing to this temptation, the analysis is subject to C. Wright Mills's criticism of Grand Theory. Such an analysis "fetishizes concepts," and hence needs a corrective infusion of history. u
"They start out," writes Carl Becker (1932, p. 105) of the new historians in the Enlightenment, "under the banner of objectivity and with a flourish of scholarly trumpets, as if on a voyage of discovery in
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unknown lands. They start out, but in a very real sense they never pass the frontiers of the 18th century, never really enter the country of the past or of distant lands." The reason t h a t they never leave "the battlefield of the present," Becker continues, is that "they are so fully engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Christian philosophy and the infamous things that support it--superstition, intolerance, tyranny." The new historians in sociology today decide often not to leave the present as well, in part because m a n y of them are also engaged in their own life-and-death struggle. Their antagonist is no longer Christianity and the attendant ills of that religion. Instead, the new historians do battle with new evils, new obstacles to correct reason and good living. The new historians do battle with Capitalism and the infamous things that support it--multinational corporations, racism, sexism, and the bourgeois state. IG To continue using Giddens and Wallerstein as archetypes of the new movement, one finds them equally committed to present problems. Giddens works so hard to reconstruct the old social theory precisely so that he can see into the future and help make that future happen. Reconstructed theory is a way to liberation, a means of Praxis. Watlerstein is equally at war with capitalism; he (1974a, p. 10) too is committed to an "image of the good society. To the extent that we w a n t a more egalitarian world and a more libertarian one, we must comprehend the conditions under which these states of being are realizable." The Modern World System is an exposition about "the range of possible developments in the present and the future. That kind of knowledge [is] power." Although they are similar, Giddens's and Walterstein's assaults upon capitalism are slightly different. Giddens takes the Humean stance. He combines reason and critique to create a new epistemology, a new place to stand to generate h u m a n knowledge that can be turned into meaningful action useful in righting present wrongs. Giddens's approach is appropriate to t h a t of a philosopher of the new history. Wallerstein, as the new historian, uses history more directly, and his stance apes no one more t h a n that of Edward Gibbon, the greatest of 18th century historians. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, writes Becker (1932, p. 117), "we seem to be taking a long journey, but all the time we remain in one place: we sit with Gibbon in the ruins of the Capitol. It is from the ruins of the Capitol that we perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.., we sit in the ruins of the Capitol... listening all this long stationary time, to our unwearied guide as he narrates for us, in a melancholy and falling cadence, the disaster t h a t m a n k i n d has suffered, the defeat inflicted by the forces of evil on the h u m a n spirit." We
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sit as well with Wallerstein, as he narrates in The Modern World System, in an equally shadowy way, the long fall into capitalism. Unlike Gibbon, however, Wallerstein (1974b) provides a summary of the grand piece even before the entire work is complete; with no reference to Gibbon but with Gibbon surely in mind, he entitles his synopsis, "The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System." And he (1974b, p. 415) ends this article with words that Gibbon would have understood: "[W]e are men with hybris and original sin and therefore seek the good, the true, and the beautiful." The danger is present in the new history not to make it about history at all, but rather to use it as a way to smuggle into the social sciences-into the unending discussions of reflexivity, relativity, and situational realities--a new absolute. The danger is to use the new history as yet another way to find universal truth, as yet another attempt to proscribe the future. Just as the 18th century philosophers denied religion while worshipping Nature, so the temptation is present today to destroy science and positivism while clinging tightly to the illusion of truth through history. Many want both their theory and their truth. This is the real danger of the narrative in historical sociology: to be so obsessed with the present that the present becomes the only acceptable version of the past. At this point historical sociology becomes neither history nor sociology, but rather begins to take on utopian aspirations. In the words of Carl Becker (1932, p. 140) such new historians are "primarily concerned with the present state of things, which they wished to change; and they needed good reasons for their desire to change it. They wished to justify their discontents, to validate their aversions; and they accomplished this object by enlarging the socially specious present, by projecting the present state into the centuries, where it could be seen to be but a passing unhappy phase of the universal experience of mankind."
I believe it is deceptively difficult to unite sociology and history. It is reasonable, even logically necessary, for theorists to call for a merger of the two, but to accomplish the merger is another matter. The difficulty arises because there is not one but two quite dissimilar mergers that the new historians in sociology have been working on, and both mergers have their problems. On the one hand, when social science historians attempt to join sociology and history, the resulting interpretation of the past is largely that of an historian. Social science methods become the means of
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delivering a more detailed, a more empirical look at the past. This very emphasis on method and on thick descriptions of the past opens this approach to the kind of controversies found in such ahistorical areas of sociology as survey research and participant observation. Indeed, despite a great deal of creative work in the area, social science history has an air of Abstracted Empiricism about it. On the other hand, going to the other extreme produces more sociology than history. Works in historical, comparative sociology sometimes contain much theory and httle substance. The theories informing these works are often ethnocentric and present-minded;their first test of adequacy is in present-day Western society, as an update of the theories of 19th and early 20th century thinkers or as an explanation of how the world arrived at the state that it is in today. Being theoretical explanations of the present, this type of sociology often does not lend itself to the further burden of explaining the diversity of the past. The resulting interpretation of history becomes, thereby, a Grand Theory of world development. It is an interpretation detached from historical detail. It is tempting to think of these two attempts to merge sociology and history as representing two ends of a continuum. Moreover, I suspect that most historical sociologists would place their own work somewhere in the middle, between the two apparent extremes. However, it is incorrect to believe that there is a broad middle ground where a sensible merger between the two extremes can be reached. There may be something resembling a broad middle ground, but this is an open field for the most damaging criticism that can be leveled at historical sociology, namely that historical sociology is not a legitimate field at all, but rather consists entirely of historical perspectives on substantive subfields already well mined by previous sociological research. Hence, the argument is made that what appears to be historical sociology is really just a historical look at social stratification, at organizations, at family and kinship, at anything on which one might want to obtain a sense of the past. Between the two extremes, historical sociologyis simply swallowed up by the subfields of the discipline, where it is recognized that the inclusion of a historical perspective broadens subfields without challenging the internal boundaries of the discipline. Neither social science history nor comparative, historical sociology fit neatly into the subcategories of sociology, and in fact their boundaries are broader than those usually ascribed to sociology itself. Rather than seeing these two types of historical sociology as two ends of a continuum, one perhaps ought to view them as components of an internal tension in all social science explanations. Guenther Roth has written (1968: xxxvii), "Sociologists live, and suffer, from their dual
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task: to develop generalizations and to explain particular cases. This is the raison d'etre of sociology as well as its inherent tension." The new historians in sociology do not attempt a merger between generalization of theory and explanation of particular cases, for that is an impossible goal. We should see, instead, that there exists in historical sociology a legitimate division of labor between developing generalizations and explaining cases, and we should build upon this fact. On the one hand, there are those who quite rightly work on particular cases, whether by using social science methods or by emphasizing chronology and causal explanations of sequence. This approach remains and must remain more historical than sociological. The merger between the two disciplines that occurs at this level is generally in the service of making historical explanations ever more particular. Sociology often supplies a methodological thrust to the endeavor, but sociological theory carefully applied to specific contexts is also important. On the other hand, there are those who, again quite rightly, attempt to develop historical generalizations either in the form of world history or in the form of typologies and developmental models. I do not want to detract from the importance of historical analysis to the task of making such historical generalizations, because it is essential. Nonetheless, at this level, the most important contributors will be from comparative, historical sociologists and their contribution will be largely theoretical and broadly interpretative. To generalize about history requires, of course, a deep awareness of the past, but it also requires an even greater sophistication in theory. Therefore, historical sociology needs both Giddens and Wallerstein. If I singled their works out for special scrutiny, it is only because their works contain the depth of vision required to move us towards self-consciously developing a sociology of history, an effort that would amount to fashioning a legitimate heir to the philosophy of history produced in the 18th and 19th centuries. This merger of history and theory is a huge task, because it involves not only a rethinking of history, but also a redoing of sociological theory, most of which is presently Eurocentric and ahistorical. The two types of historical sociology are both distinct and necessary. Neither should be seen as a substitute for the other, and both are complementary exercises in developing more objective views of the past. Although complementary and necessary, both types of historical sociology are also given to specific kinds of excesses, a few of which I have tried to spell out in this essay. These excesses are not distinct to historical sociology, but have been common in social science for a long time, as long as there have been thinkers who wanted both to explain
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a n d to g e n e r a l i z e , a n d to be objective a s well. T h e s e are w o r t h y exercises, a n d we s h o u l d n o t be p u t off b e c a u s e t h e s e t a s k s are h a r d a n d are n o t a b o v e criticism. I u s e d C a r l B e c k e r ' s book, The H e a v e n l y C i t y o f E i g h t e e n t h C e n t u r y P h i l o s o p h e r s as t h e v e h i c l e in t h i s e s s a y to a c h i e v e a critical p e r s p e c t i v e u p o n o u r c u r r e n t practices. It is a g o o d vehicle for this p u r p o s e , n o t o n l y b e c a u s e it d e a l s i n s i g h t f u l l y w i t h t h e n e w h i s t o r y in t h e E n l i g h t e n m e n t , b u t also b e c a u s e it p o k e s f u n a t itself. T h e b o o k is a m o d e l o f t h e v e r y t y p e o f h i s t o r i c a l w o r k t h a t B e c k e r satirizes in t h e Enlightenment, an historically informed theory of knowledge with no h i s t o r i c a l a n a l y s i s . B e c k e r r e c o g n i z e s t h i s fact, a n d in so d o i n g prov i d e s t h e f i n a l clue a b o u t t h e m e a n i n g o f t h e n e w h i s t o r y in sociology. O n t h e fly l e a f of t h e c o p y o f The H e a v e n l y C i t y w h i c h h e g a v e to his colleague, T. V. S m i t h , B e c k e r wrote, " T h i s c e r t a i n l y i s n ' t h i s t o r y . I h o p e it's p h i l o s o p h y , b e c a u s e i f it's n o t it's p r o b a b l y m o o n s h i n e - - o r w o u l d y o u s a y t h e d i s t i n c t i o n is o v e r s u b t l e ? " (Quoted b y P e t e r G a y , 1968, p. 27). T h e n e w h i s t o r y in s o c i o l o g y is n e i t h e r h i s t o r y n o r a s u b s t i t u t e for h i s t o r y . I h o p e it is sociology.
Notes 1. The title of this essay is a play on Carl Becker' s use of the term "new historian" in the The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. Becker was well aware that the term was also used to identify, in the 1920's and 1930's, the pragmatist historians, of which Becket was one of the most prominent members (Strout, 1958). I should note, however, that two other articles have appeared with similar titles (Jones, 1983; Himmelfarb, 1984). An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1984 meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association, and was later published in Taiwan in Tunghai shehui kexue xuebao (Tunghai Journal of Social Sciences) No. 3, May 1985,pp. 97-120.For comments leading to the present version, I want to thank Carol Conell, Wally Goldfrank, Beverly Lozano, Richard Madsen, Leon Mayhew, Marco Orru, William Roy, Guenther Roth, Theda Skocpol, Judith Stacey, Bernadette Tarallo, and John Walton for their comments on the first draft. Many disagreed with the opinions expressed in his essay, so I alone bear the responsibility for what is written. 2. For an excellent analysis of the absence of history in Parsons's and Schutz's sociological theories, see David Zaret (1980). 3. The following is an example of Hume's criticism (1958, pp. 162-3) of objectivist theories: "All the philosophy.., in the world, and all the religion, which is nothing but a species of philosophy, will never be able to carry us beyond the usual course of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behavior different from those which are furnished by reflexions on common life. No new fact can ever be inferred from the religious hypotheses; no event foreseen or foretold; no reward or punishment expected or dreaded, beyond what is already known by practice and observation." 4. For Becker's comments on Hume's interpretation of history, see Beeker 1932, pp. 71-88, 108-110. 5. Giddens's criticisms of 19th and 20th century sociologists are found in all of his books, but the main criticism of the Marxian tradition is found in Giddens (1981), of Durkheim in Giddens (1971,1972,1976,1977) of Parsons in Giddens (1976,1977) and of structuralism in Giddens (1979).
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6. These critiques are mainly found in Giddens (1976). 7. For the clearest statements on the theory of structuration, see Giddens (1979, pp. 49-95, 1981, pp. 26-29, and 1982, pp. 18-39). 8. Giddens made this comment in a talk given at the University of California, Berkeley (1980). 9. For excellent discussions of presentism as applied to the history of thought, see Seidman (1983) and Jones (1983). Seidma:n, in particular, identifies the critical issue, that researchers need to go beyond both presentist and historicist interpretations of the past to achieve a more satisfactory basis for historical analysis. This basis he finds in postpositivist theories of science. In substantial agreement, I argue here that historical analysis and theoretical sophistication must be combined to develop a sociology of history. 10. For a critical discussion of Geertz's approach, which also applies to this approach to historical analysis, See Shankman (1984). 11. For a fine analysis of Tilty's and Thompson's combinations of theory and history, see Skocpol (t984). Also see Roy (1984). For Foucault's analysis in Discipline and Punish, see Goldstein (1984). 12. For one of the more recent efforts to develop comparative and historical methodology for sociology, see Skocpol (t984). For additional writings on comparative methodology, consult Skocpol's bibliography (1984, pp. 392-403). 13. Becket's (1959, p. 132) thoughts on this subject merit repeating: "The history of any event is never precisely the same thing to two different persons; and it is well known that every generation writes the same history in a new way, and puts upon it a new construction." 14. For an excellent critique of Wallerstein, as welt as a bibliography of other critiques, see Skocpol (1984, pp. 276-312). 15. Analyses of the historical methodology of Moore and of Bendix are also found in Skocpol (1984). 16. I should note that, although capitalism is a principal target in recent times and corresponds to the prominence of neo-Marxian theory in sociology, the earlier generation of comparative, historical sociologists, including Bendix and Moore, attacked totalitarianism and all the features of modern life that supported it.
References Abrams, P. (1982). Historical Sociology. Somerset, England: Open Books. Anderson, P. (1974a). Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: NLB. Anderson P. (1974b). Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: NLB. Becker, C. L. (1932). The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers. New Haven: Yale University Press. Becker, C. L. (1959). What are historical facts? In Hans Meyerhoff(ed.), The Philosophy of History in Our Time. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor. Bendix, R. (1956). Work and Authority in Industry. New York: Wiley. Bendix, R. (1969). Nation.building and Citizenship. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Braudel, F. (1972). The Mediterranean. Two volumes. New York: Harper and Row. Braudel, F, (1979). The Structures of Everyday Life. New York: Harper and Row. Braudel, F. (1982). The Wheels of Commerce. New York: Harper and Row. Cobban, A. (1964). The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, D. H. (1970). Historians" Fallacies. New York: Harper and Row. Gay, P. (1968). Carl Becker's Heavenly City. In Rockwood, R. O. (ed.) Carl Becket's Heavenly City Revisited. Cornell, NY: Archon Books. Giddens, A. (1971). Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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