“Big and Small Truths” in the Work of Historians and Sociologists

Abstract

This is one of those books not written by a sociologist but nonetheless highly enlightening for sociologists, or at any rate those among them whose interests are not limited to present-day American society and are not single-mindedly committed to quantitative methods. It will be of special interest to those drawn to the larger, timeless, and theoretically challenging questions of social existence and human interactions the kinds of questions which preoccupied Durkheim, Marx, and Weber. It will be of particular interest to American sociologists who think of themselves as public intellectuals rather than social scientists not that these categories are mutually exclusive. This volume also includes some interesting reflections on the professional insecurities of historians which unexpectedly parallel those of sociologists, for example: . historians today. . . suffer from a sort of double insecurity. First, the discipline is not very clear where it sits in the world of scholarly categories. Is it a humanity? Is it a social science?. . . This sense of insecurity goes a long way to account for the fascination. . . with theory, with models, with 'frameworks'. These tools, such as they are, offer the reassuring illusion of intellectual structure. . . (pp. 261-62). Sounds familiar does it not? Tony Judt, a British historian who passed away in 2010, was educated in Britain and France, taught at Oxford and Cambridge as well as the University of California, Davis and Berkeley before moving to New York University, where the spent the bulk of his academic career as founder and director of