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Reproduction, Production, Social Science, and the Past: A Dissenting Review

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Extract

Social Scientists use historical data. Historians use social science concepts. The intersection of these two disciplines, history and social science, has been a vibrant source of research questions over the last fifteen years but also raises the issue of how they are to be interrelated. The search for an answer to this question has resulted in the publication of Theda Skocpol’s Vision and Method in Historical Sociology and Olivier Zunz’s Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, which juxtapose the two words in different order. In Skocpol (1984) history modifies sociology; in Zunz (1985) social science modifies history. Both books are collections of articles. Skocpol’s volume contains nine reviews of the work of masters in this field along with an introduction and conclusion by the editor. Zunz’s has an introduction which reviews the literature of social history in five areas of the world: Western Europe, the United States, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and China. This review highlights the strength of Skocpol’s method and of Zunz’s commitment to analysis of non-Western societies but argues that both authors, in limiting their definition of the field to studies of production, ignore an equally vital topic for social analysis of the past, reproduction.

Type
Comment and Debate Historical Sociology and Social History
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1987 

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References

Cohen, D. W. (1985) “Doing Social History from Pim’s Doorway,” in Zunz, Olivier (ed.) Reliving the Past. Chapel Hill: 191235.Google Scholar
Rowe, W. T. (1985) “Approaches to Modern Chinese Social History,” in Zunz, Olivier (ed.) Reliving the Past. Chapel Hill: 236296.Google Scholar
Skocpol, T. [ed.] (1984) Vision and Method in Historical Sociology. Cambridge.Google Scholar
Taylor, W. B. (1985) “Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into Early Latin American Social History, 1500-1900,” in Zunz, Olivier (ed.) Reliving the Past. Chapel Hill: 115190.Google Scholar