History / Social Science / Theory

John R Hall, U. of California - Davis and Santa Cruz

The Social Science History Association emerged at a positivist moment in history and the social sciences in 1972. At that time, the main enterprises were to integrate social science methods within historical analysis and to nurture already existing practices of comparative history. Within the empirical social sciences, [logical-deductive] theory largely served as a source of testable hypotheses. The reigning “grand” theory in sociology, Parsonian systems theory, admittedly addressed the historicity of systems, but this strand yielded only occasional studies by sociologists such as Neil Smelser, and it was not taken on within social science history. In this Zeitgeist, social theory did not come into play much in the Association’s early years. The exceptions involved debates about “theories of history,” not so much the classical historical varieties, but scholarly revisions of marxist theories of large-scale historical change and in the emergent world-systems theory. With the various [post-modern, cultural, historical, and narrative] turns of the 1980s and ‘90s, general social theory lost cachet in sociology, while in social science history, scholars proposed more circumscribed theories [e.g., of revolution], often examined through comparative analysis. There remains today a relative lack of engagement of theory in historical analysis [one exception being Isaac Reed’s theory of power]. This situation too easily reinforces a sort of “social-science historicism.” In my view, in our current situation, it marks both an intellectual failure to address the epistemology of historical analysis as well as a critical failure to provide historical scholarship with an imago that can offer leverage on alternative possibilities after the collapse of modernity as an ideology and leitmotif of historical analysis. To equip historical analysis with a general theoretical apparatus appropriate to critique, this paper proposes a phenomenological-Weberian approach, grounded in alternative social temporalities and their institutional instantiations.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 56. Theory and Method for Critical Studies I