Theory Of Historical Change Research Articles

Historical materialism as mediation between the physical and the meaningful

The article argues that historical materialism is not only a theory of historical change but more generally a mediation between the natural foundations of human life and its meaningful symbolic expressions. The article begins with an interpretation of the general philosophical significance of the basic premises of historical materialism as they are sketched in the German Ideology. I argue that these premises point us in two different directions: down, towards a scientific understanding of the natural world, and up, towards interpretations of meaningful human expressions. Reductionist scientific models are appropriate for the understanding of natural forces, but these reveal their own limitations when applied to social life. Social life cannot be understood outside its symbolic expressions, but these are not free floating ideal abstractions, but remain connected to fundamental human purposes and must be understood as such.

Involvement and Detachment

The macro-micro dichotomy prevalent in consumer research has led to methodological issues this article explores. Drawing from figurational theory and using a three-year participant-observation of heavy metal fans as a case study, this article puts forward a potential route for synthesis between dominant micro and macro perspectives. Merging contemporary consumer research methods with broader figurational theories of historical change and figurational methods allows for a more holistic understanding of consumer communities. The methodological approach used elucidates the problematic aspects of studying contexts seen as controversial and, hence, emotionally charged and value-laden. Despite the shared importance that figurationalists and macromarketers hold for developing accounts that recognize the relationship between broader structural processes, the emphasis figurationalists place on attaining a balance between involvement and detachment conflicts with the prominence that macromarketing scholars give to using their research to “serve” society. The implications of this difference are discussed.

“Moving Centers”: Climate Change, Critical Method, and the Historical Novel

Abstract Humanities scholars have given renewed attention to capitalism’s externalizations on our environment. The Anthropocene is a speculative epochal shift proposed by geologists to mark the accumulated effect of human industry on Earth’s future. The Anthropocene adds a layer of geological time to human history, challenging traditional theories of historical change. Drawing on this notion, Dipesh Chakrabarty outlines three theories of history. History 1 and 2 refer to liberalism and its postcolonial and postmodern critique, respectively. History 3, or post-Anthropocene history, marks the horizon of historical consciousness. This article proposes “History 4°” to synthesize History 1–3 into a new totality in which the historical present is defined as internal to an imminent catastrophe. History 4° poses a challenge to the historical novel: somehow it must reveal the intimate causal linkages between human and nonhuman across time, while remaining within the bounds of literary realism. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is read as a contemporary historical novel adequate to this task. The character Sonmi-451’s encounter with a natural landscape ravaged by human industry encapsulates the increasing indistinction between human and nonhuman worlds. The novel’s structure rejects linearity as its protagonists are linked to one another and themselves over all of human history.

L'ereditŕ intellettuale di Alan S. Milward

Alan S. Milward was a contemporary historian who combined the political historian's method of consulting the written record with the economic historian's use of statistical data and the social scientist's preference for general theory. On the strength of the resulting research methodology he produced a series of original histories of Nineteenth and Twentieth century Europe which tackled the big historical issues of his time: the nature of Nazism; of total war; of economic development in Nineteenth and Twentieth century Europe; and the reasons for the sustained economic boom in western Europe after 1945 and for the origins of European integration. In so far as his conclusions on each separate theme challenged the dominant theories, they stimulated considerable debate. Indeed, his implicit theories of historical change and European integration continue to resonate in the current political and economic crises facing Europe. Unlike neo-classical economists, European federalists and many integration theorists, Milward argued that economic and monetary union would not necessarily lead to a democratic political union in Europe and the end of nation-state. Indeed he predicted in 2000 that if the European Monetary Union was beset by asymmetric shocks, it would weaken progressively until its desired effect had been so reduced as to defeat the Union's original purpose. As we live through such asymmetric shocks, Milward's predictions seem to carry more force than any of teleological theories of European integration.

Distinguishing Eternal from Transient Law: Natural Law and the Judicial Laws of Moses

This essay examines two interlinked efforts in early modern Europe and New England to distinguish legal provisions valid across different societies and time periods from those that were local and transitory and therefore not compulsory in the present. Consider, first, the judicial laws of Moses. A minority of Protestants, whom I will call the “Mosaic legalists,” tried to ascertain which Old Testament judicial ordinances were no longer obligatory because they were particular to the Jewish commonwealth, and which were eternally-valid “appendices” to the natural law and Decalogue. The challenge of differentiating the perpetual from the local also occupied early modern students of the law of nature. Whether one believed that God impressed natural law upon the world or that people deduced natural law from a limited set of first principles such as self-preservation and sociability, one faced the problem of distinguishing immutable natural precepts from rules that arose only to address passing issues in a specific territory. Natural lawyers and Mosaic legalists did not use the same techniques for separating eternal and transient precepts. Each had its own “rules of recognition” (to borrow a helpful modern concept). My essay compares natural lawyers’ and Mosaic legalists’ rules of recognition, their ways of telling immutable from transitory precepts. In this, it goes against the dominant tendency of modern scholarship to approach the Mosaic legalists and natural lawyers separately rather than in tandem. Reading the two in unison highlights how the projects faced common intellectual challenges. In particular, both natural lawyers and Mosaic legalists used stadial theories of historical change and both implied that immutable law should be convenient under present circumstances. Both used temporally- and contextually-sensitive categories to locate an “eternal” law. But these emphases, if pushed too far, threatened the natural lawyers’ and Mosaic legalists’ enterprise, so both groups developed stabilizing conventions. The rules of recognition mattered greatly as controversialists deployed natural and Mosaic law in fights over political oaths and allegiance, usury, sabbatarianism, church governance, and a wide range of other issues. Over and again, early modern actors asked the perennial question: What was God, through scripture and nature, commanding us to do? The Mosaic legalists’ and Protestant natural lawyers’ rules of recognition helped answer this most pressing of questions.

Alienation and Fetishization: A Critical Analysis of “‘Radicalism and Innovation’ in the New World Group’s Approach to and Rejection of Metropolitan Intellectual and Political Hegemony

Iberoamericana – Revista Nórdica de Estudios de Latinoamérica y el Caribe, es una revista académica arbitrada, interdisciplinaria y bilingüe. Es administrada por el Instituto de Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Universidad de Estocolmo en colaboración con otras universidades nórdicas con el objetivo de presentar investigación de alta calidad sobre América Latina.La revista publica artículos originales enfocados en temas relacionados con las ciencias sociales y humanidades. Investigadores de todo el mundo son bienvenidos a enviar sus manuscritos en inglés o español.

Medical Dominance and Institutional Change in the Delivery of Health Care Services

This paper puts the theory of medical dominance, as it understood as a sociological theory of historical change, into a broader theory of institutional change of the delivery of medical care. The application of medical dominance theory to three institutional contexts (Australia, USA, and Canada) is reviewed. The possibility of progressive institutional change in the delivery of medical care is addressed, as well as the type of technological innovation that might accompany such institutional change. The concept of medical dominance is useful to explain the dominant characteristics supporting the institution of medical practice. However, an explanatory theory of the evolution of health care delivery should be linked to the instrumentally warranted standards for medical care. These standards are then discussed.

Marx and McDonaldization: A Tropological Analysis

McDonaldization is usually seen as a ‘tragedy’ as humans become more rationalised in their everyday life, but from the view of Marx’s theory of historical change, I suggest that it might be seen as a ‘comedy’. As the world’s labour force becomes culturally the same it may finally gain an ironic awareness that is required for radical social change, thus, global rationalisation may create the conditions for a ‘global Proletariat’. The comedy of McDonaldization is that its repulsiveness as a way of life may actually lead to the possibility of achieving liberation from the domination of global capitalism.

History and Explanation in Archaeology

Pauketat argued (2001: 73–98) that a new paradigm – historical processualism (HP) as operationalized by practice theory – is preferable to processual, behavioral, and evolutionary archaeologies as a source of explanation for culture change. To make his case, Pauketat sets up several contrasts between HP and the other three approaches. He claims that HP is superior because it neither essentializes behavior nor calls on potentially false universal laws to create explanations. He argues that HP holds that human practices – individual, particularistic human behaviors – generate new practices as they are continuously re-enacted and renegotiated, and thus practice is the proximate cause of cultural change. Evolutionary archaeology incorporates such particularistic and proximate causes but goes far beyond HP by providing an explanatory theory that specifies ultimate causes of culture change. It employs Darwin’s scientific theory of historical change, rewritten in testable , archaeological terms. In contrast, HP provides no testable implications of historical change.

Versions of history from antiquity to the Enlightenment

The problems, purposes, and methods of history writing have been the subject of debate for almost three millennia. Should history be political or philosophical? Is the writing of history an art or a science? What are the limitations of history? This book is an intriguing collection of views on these and other aspects of history writing by eminent Western historians from early Greece to the end of the eighteenth century. The book contains major texts from 112 historians, both well-known and neglected, ranging from the mythistories of Homer and Hesiod to the reasoned and philosophical accounts of Vico and Voltaire. These texts discuss, for example, theories of historical change, problems of anachronism, narrative, and gender, questions of origins, causation, and historical patterns, and historical criticism. Donald R. Kelley, who selected and arranged the writings, also provides essays and commentary that give background material on the themes of historiography and on the authors included in the book

Patriarchalism in imperial China and Western Europe

My analysis suggests that Weber's typology of domination - the cluster of patriarchalism, charisma, and law - does not fit Chinese history as it does European history. The typology has particular relevance in Europe because Weber purposefully developed types of domination that reflected and synthesized essential elements of Western historical experience: the struggles between kings and nobles, between popes and priests, between leaders and followers of all types. Deeply aware of the patterns of Western history, Weber understood that his concepts of analysis constituted “historical summaries,” not simply ideas and abstract beliefs but distillations of patterns of actions and of the justifications supporting and channeling those patterns. Roth, “Introduction,” xxx. Although Weber fashioned these ideal types from his knowledge of Western history, he wanted to make them genuinely “trans-epochal and transcultural” so that he could test, through “comparative mental experiment and imaginative extrapolation,” causal explanations about the course of Western history. Ibid. That the generations of students of Western society continue to learn from and struggle with Weber's concepts and historical theories demonstrates that Weber was hugely successful in his work. But are Weber's typologies as useful in the analysis of non-Western societies as they are in that of Europe? I have only dealt with Chinese society, but for this society my analysis suggests that the answer to this question is no. As Weber defined them, patriarchalism, charisma, and law do not apply to China in the way that they apply to Europe. They do not represent summaries of Chinese history; they do not distill the debates and struggles of two millenia; they do not tap those shared understandings that informed Chinese patterns of action. And because they do not gain an equivalent grasp of Chinese as they do of Western history, they are less useful and often very misleading when one uses them to analyze and explain the course of Chinese history. If those concepts do not get at the same reality in China, what is the logical status of the conclusions drawn from using them to analyze China? As I have attempted to show in this paper, they can be used to indicate through comparison what configurations are absent from China. But they are less useful in developing a genuine understanding of Chinese history. Therefore, to understand China, and perhaps most non-Western societies, Weber's typology of domination and particularly his analysis of traditional domination, should not be used directly as a summary of an underlying reality. Weber's warning about the “perniciousness” of Marxian concepts and theories when “they are thought of as empirically valid or real ‘effective forces’” should be applied with particular vigor to Weber's own concepts and theories when applied to non-Western societies. Max Weber, (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1949), 103. But, by equal measure, if one assumes that Weber's typology of domination misrepresents non-Western societies in some regard, it still provides an example of the sort of conceptual framework needed to analyze the historical development of state structures in any society. Weber championed comparative research, because he believed without comparisons it was impossible to examine rigorously the course of history and to develop theories of historical change. Weber rightly believed that comparisons were only possible with generalized historical concepts. But to Weber, historical research does not lead to better or more general sociological theories. Instead, sociology, as Weber put it to a noted historian, “can perform ... very modest preparatory work” to an adequate historical analysis. , lviii. Concepts must lead the way to historical explanations and not the reverse. Similarly, Weber's analysis of the West provides the preparatory work for a better understanding of non-Western society. In this sense Weber's concepts are indispensable for the analysis of non-Western society, not because they are the last word, but because, along with other products of Western sociology, they are the first word, words that are used only to have their meanings altered by subsequent research. This, too, is the conclusion of Wolfgang Schluchter () 17: “Weber did not understand his terminology as a final one. This does not mean that it is unsystematic or only useful to specific problems, but the sequence of terms is not always obvious in its ramifications, and therefore it sometimes needs an explication or interpretation. A critically productive evaluation of Weber's work has to include a clarification of terminology and the investigation of the historic content.”

Time-Scale Factor as Related to Theories of Societal Change

A computer simulation model of theory building was discussed within the framework of Quincy Wright's data on occurrences of wars within the 15–20th century time interval and time series of discoveries of the atomic elements of matter. Several types of theories of societal change as derived from generalizations of longitudinal data were postulated in terms of their underlying geometric forms. The main parameter of the model was the length of the historical period used for abstraction from the observed data. A relationship between the size of this parameter and the geometric form of theories of historical change was observed. Implications of this finding were discussed with respect to models of open systems and both active and fringe periods of closed systems.