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The Growth of Nations: Some Recurrent Patterns of Political and Social Integration*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
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At many places and times, tribes have merged to form peoples; and peoples have grown into nations. Some nations founded empires; and empires have broken up again into fragments whose populations later attempted again to form larger units. In certain respects, this sequence appears to describe a general process found in much of history. This process shows a number of patterns which seem to recur, and which to a limited extent seem to be comparable among different regions, periods, and cultures.
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- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1953
References
1 The alternative views that all history is random, or that all important historical events are unique, involve grave philosophic difficulties. Historians who criticize the search for certain historical uniformities by their colleagues use in effect other uniformities which they prefer. Similar considerations apply to much of the debate about uniformities in other fields of social science. All knowledge involves the matching of patterns, and thus requires at least some similarities between some aspects of the events or processes studied. It thus requires some degree of relative uniformity among the processes to be investigated, in order to enable each science to proceed beyond the relatively simple and the relatively uniform to the recognition and study of those situations which are relatively complex and unique. Simplicity and uniformity, in this view, are not sweeping metaphysical assumptions about all aspects of all processes. They are properties of those aspects of processes which were first selected for investigation, or first investigated with success. With the growth of each science, this concern with the simple and the uniform reveals itself as a steppingstone to the study of more difficult matters. Cf. Pledge, H. T., Science Since 1500, New York, 1947Google Scholar, which supersedes, in this respect, the view of Burtt, E. A., The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, London, 1932Google Scholar, and Randall, J. H. Jr, The Making of the Modern Mind, 2nd ed., Boston, 1940, pp. 227–29.Google Scholar
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