One of the historians whom I most admire is Marc Bloch. He was one of France's most important medieval historians in the first half of the twentieth century, and he died at the hands of the Gestapo while serving in the Resistance in Paris in 1944. (Carole Fink's biography is an outstanding treatment of his …
Technological inevitability?
Some historians imagine that new technologies force other kinds of social changes, or even that a given technology creates a more or less inevitable process of development in society. Marx is sometimes thought to offer such a theory: "the forces of production create changes in the relations of production." This view is referred to as …
Social science history and historical social science
I talked recently with Tom Sugrue about his approach to historical research, and he had quite a few interesting things to say. (Tom is professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. The interview is posted on YouTube.) …
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Historical comparisons
Historians are sometimes interested in comparing two cases or events in order to discover something of historical importance -- common causal mechanisms, important institutional differences between the cases, or ways in which the cases illustrate some larger historical pattern. For example, Kenneth Pomeranz offers an extensive comparison of European and Asian economic development in The …
Historians and the philosophy of history
How should the philosophy of history interact with the practice of working historians? The philosophy of history is challenged to discover and explore the most fundamental questions about historical inquiry and knowledge. How should this research be conducted? And how should the philosopher's development of the subject make use of the practice of the historian? …
A new philosophy of history?
Why would we want a philosophy of history? And what is wrong with the one we've got? First, why? Philosophers want to know how good the claims are for "knowledge" in various fields. So we have philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, and so on. This is one reason for pursuing a …
Understanding Society 