Historicist Time and Pragmatist Time

Yang Zhang, American University

This article contrasts two distinct yet complementary approaches to conceptualizing historical time: the historicist and the pragmatist. The historicist approach, rooted in German historicism, emphasizes the singular nature of historical change, with a particular focus on modernity. In contrast, the pragmatist approach, associated with American pragmatism, considers the processual nature of time, without prioritizing modernity. Utilizing Charles Tilly’s work as examples, the article demonstrates how historical sociology has applied pragmatist and historicist thoughts in varying degrees. It then advocates for a synthesis of historicist and pragmatist approaches to provide a nuanced analysis of social and political change. The article outlines and illustrates several synthetizing strategies, including guiding historical investigation with pragmatist considerations, understanding the micro-interactions that drive historical events, examining the meso-level relational dynamics of historical change, contextualizing interactive processes through historicism, exploring the co-evolution of pragmatism and historicism, and specifying pragmatism as one type of historicism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 50. Commemorating Xiaohong Xu: Class, Culture, and Contingency in Historical Sociology