What difference does it make to a person's personality, values, agency, or interpretive schemes that she was born in 1950 rather than 1930 or 1970? How does a person's place in time and in a stream of historical events influence the formation of his or her consciousness? (I've raised some of these questions in prior …
Ideal types, values, and selectivity
image: cover of Max Weber, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages I've never really understood why the exposition of one of Max Weber's most important methodological ideas, his theory of ideal types, occurs in the context of an essay that is primarily about the role of values in the social sciences. This is …
Feyerabend as artisanal scientist
I've generally found Paul Feyerabend's position on science to be a bit too extreme. Here is one provocative statement in the analytical index of Against Method: Thus science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the any forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not …
Zomia — James Scott on highland peoples
James Scott opens his most recent book with quotations from frustrated pre-modern administrators and missionaries whose territories included the peoples of inaccessible highland regions -- Guizhou, highland Burma, and Appalachia. Scott finds that the geographical circumstances of highland peoples mark them apart from the political organizations of the valleys; states could control agriculture, surplus, and …
Fascist movements
Image: resistance to Spanish fascism, Abraham Lincoln Brigade The crimes of fascist governments in Spain, Italy, and Germany are among the most terrible pages of twentieth-century history. And these governments commonly came to power by long mass-based mobilization by right-wing nationalist parties rather than by seizure of power by a strategically located minority. How was …
The Brenner debate revisited
One of the defining controversies in the field of economic history in the past 35 years is the Brenner debate. Robert Brenner published "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe" in Past and Present in 1976 (link) and "The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism" in 1982. In between these publications (and following) there …
Sewell on history
William Sewell, Jr., is a particularly talented historian of French social history. His study of the guild mentalities of workers in Marseille after the Revolution breaks many preconceptions about "class" and the definition of labor (Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseille, 1820-1870). But he is also a philosophically minded observer and critic …
Koestler’s nightmares
Image: book burning by National Socialist paramilitaries, 1933 Image: Ukraine peasants fleeing famine Image: street battle, Spanish Civil War Arthur Koestler was an articulate witness of the atrocities of the twentieth century; and much of what he witnessed was terrible. Reading his books gives one an intense and personal vision of fascism, dictatorship, mass murder, …
The German debate over method
A prior post described a major debate around 1900 in the French academic world over the terms of exchange among history, geography, and sociology. The debate also involved disagreements among France's academic elites over the structure of the future French university system. This was sometimes referred to as the "new Sorbonne" debate, and it had …
Comparative history
One of Marc Bloch's most important contributions was to reinvigorate the idea of "comparative history." Bloch believed that we could understand French feudalism better by putting it into the context of European legal and property regimes; and more broadly, he believed that the careful comparison of agrarian regimes across time and space could be an …
Understanding Society 