Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T22:52:02.041Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Logics of History as a Framework for an Integrated Social Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

George Steinmetz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay surveys the contributions of William H. Sewell Jr.'sLogics of History and concludes that the book sketches a compelling agenda for an integrated historical social science. The author first summarizes Sewell's ontological and epistemological claims concerning social structure and event, history and temporality, and sociohistorical causality. The author then discusses five main areas in which ambiguities in Sewell's approach might be clarified or his arguments pushed farther. These concern (1) the relationship between historical event and traumatic event; (2) the idea of the unprecedented event or “antistructure”; (3) the theory of semiosis underlying Sewell's notion of a multiplicity of structures; and (4) the compatibilities and differences between the concepts of structure and mechanism(here the author argues that social structures are the distinctive “mechanisms” of the human or social sciences). Finally, (5) Sewell's call for “a more robust sense of the social” in historical writing locates the “social” mainly at the level of the metafield of power, or what regulation theory calls the mode of regulation; the author suggests a possible integration of this society-level concept with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of semiautonomous fields.

Type
Special Section: Logics of History
Information
Social Science History , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , winter 2008 , pp. 535 - 553
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2008 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, Andrew (1991) “History and sociology: The lost synthesis.” Social Science History 15: 201–38.Google Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone.Google Scholar
Althusser, Louis (1977) “Contradiction and overdetermination,” in Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Brewster, Ben. London: Verso: 87–128.Google Scholar
Archer, Margaret, Bhaskar, Roy, Collier, Andrew, Lawson, Tony, and Norrie, Alan, eds. (1998) Critical Realism: Essential Readings. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Badiou, Alain (1988) L'être et l'événement. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar
Badiou, Alain (1997) Saint-Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Badiou, Alain (2002 [1998]) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland (1957) Mythologies. Paris: Seuil.Google Scholar
Berridge, Kent C. (2004) “Pleasure, unconscious affect, and irrational desire,” in Manstead, A. S. R., Frijda, N. H., and Fischer, A. H. (eds.) Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 43–62.Google Scholar
Berridge, Kent C., and Winkielman, Piotr (2002) “What is an unconscious emotion? (The case for unconscious liking).” Cognition and Emotion 17: 181–211.Google Scholar
Bhaskar, Roy (1979) The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. New York: Humanities.Google Scholar
Bhaskar, Roy (1986) Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1988 [1984]) Homo Academicus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (1995) The Rules of Art. Cambridge, MA: Polity.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre (2001) Masculine Domination. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre, Chamboredon, Jean-Claude, and Passeron, Jean-Claude (1991) The Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries, ed. Krais, Beate, trans. Nice, Richard. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Boyer, Robert (2004) “Pierre Bourdieu analyste du changement? Une lecture à la lumière de la théorie de la régulation.” CEPREMAP Paper no. 2004-01.Google Scholar
Burawoy, Michael (2004) “Introduction to ‘Public sociologies: A symposium from Boston College, by Burawoy, Michael, et al.'” Social Problems 15: 103–40.Google Scholar
Casanova, Pascale (2004) The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Collier, Andrew (2005) “Critical realism,” in Steinmetz, George (ed.) The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 327–45.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund (1961 [1930]) Civilization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Guilbaut, Serge (1983) How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. New York: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hetzler, Florence M. (1988) “Causality: Ruin time and ruins.” Leonardo 21: 51–55.Google Scholar
Hewlett, Nick (2004) “Engagement and transcendence: The militant philosophy of Alain Badiou.” Modern and Contemporary France 12: 335–52.Google Scholar
Kaspersen, Lars Bo (2000) Anthony Giddens: An Introduction to a Social Theorist, trans. Sampson, Steven. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Laclau, Ernesto, and Mouffe, Chantal (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Moore, Winston and Cammack, Paul. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno (1999) Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lordon, Frédéric (2006) L'intérêt souverain: Essai d'anthropologie économique spinoziste. Paris: Découverte.Google Scholar
Nassehi, Armin, and Nollmann, Gerd (2004) Bourdieu und Luhmann: Ein Theorienvergleich. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.Google Scholar
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1955) Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Buchler, Justus. New York: Dover.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Carl (1985) Political Theology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Carl (1991 [1941]) Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Machte: Ein Beitrag zum Reichsbegriff im Völkerrecht. 4th ed. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot.Google Scholar
Sewell, William H. Jr. (1980) Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sewell, William H. Jr. (1985) “Ideologies and social revolutions: Reflections on the French case.” Journal of Modern History 57: 57–85.Google Scholar
Sewell, William H. Jr. (1992) “A theory of structure: Duality, agency, and transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1–29.Google Scholar
Sewell, William H. Jr. (2005) Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Simmel, Georg (1965) “The ruin,” in Wolff, Kurt H. (ed.) Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics. New York: Harper and Row: 259–66.Google Scholar
Skocpol, Theda (1985) “Cultural idioms and political ideologies in the revolutionary reconstruction of state power: A rejoinder to Sewell.” Journal of Modern History 57: 86–96.Google Scholar
Steinmetz, George (1994) “Regulation theory, post-Marxism, and the new social movements.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36: 176–212.Google Scholar
Steinmetz, George (1998) “Critical realism and historical sociology.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40: 170–86.Google Scholar
Steinmetz, George (forthcoming) “Colonial melancholy and Fordist nostalgia: The ruinscapes of Namibia and Detroit,” in Hell, Julia and Schoenle, Andreas (eds.) Ruins of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Swidler, Ann (2001) Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Turner, Victor W. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine.Google Scholar
Winkielman, Piotr, and Berridge, Kent C. (2004) “Unconscious emotion.” Current Directions in Psychological Sciences 13: 120–23.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj (2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Zolberg, Aristide (1972) “Moments of madness.” Politics and Society 2: 183–207.Google Scholar