Some afterthoughts on culture and explanation in historical inquiry

History and Theory

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 348-363

  Lorenz, Chris ^a  

^a VU UNIVERSITY AMSTERDAM   (Netherlands)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33745271186     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00135     Document Type: Review

References (38)

1. Anne Kane, Ft.Worth-Social Science History-paper (original version), 1. All parenthetical page references in my text are to the versions published in this issue of History and Theory
2. "Can Histories Be True? Narrativism, Positivism and the 'Metaphorical Turn,'" Histoiy and Theory 37 (1998), 317-320
3. Cf. John R. Hall, Cultures of Inquiry. From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research (Cambridge, Eng., 1999). In this book Hall distinguishes four basic discourses in the field of sociohistorical inquiry: 1. The discourse on values; 2. Narrative discourse; 3. Discourses of social theory; and 4. Discourse of explanation and interpretation. He emphasizes that in the practice of inquiry these discourses usually form mixes and bricolages
4. Cf. Hall, Cultures of Inquiry, 67: "At the extreme, the intrinsic narrative is a story told in the first person, from one or another subjective viewpoint in the course of unfolding events." Hall, however, acknowledges on page 93 that even in intrinsic narrative "at least some narrative connections are extra-intrinsic products of inquiry, not derivatives of causal or meaningful sequences in unfolding history." This, however, does not lead him to a reconsideration of the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic narratives
5. P. Abrams, Historical Sociology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 305
6. Hall in Cultures of Inquiry draws heavily on White's and Ricoeur's theories of narrative, although he does not deal with this aspect of their theories.
7. For an overview of the positions in narrative theory, see Lorenz. Konstruktion der Vergangenheit, 127-189, and History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, ed. B. Fay et al. (Oxford, 1998)
8. L. Mink, "History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension," in History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, ed. Fay et al., 121-137
9. See Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. S. Friedländer (Cambridge, Mass., 1992)
10. and C. Lorenz, "You Tell Your Story, I Tell Mine: Some Reflections on Truth and Objectivity in History," Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 10 (1999), 563-585. Interestingly, Hall could have referred to Droysen, who held that a narrative representation of history is dependent on the possibility of reconstructing a continuous development, and that continuity presupposes a continuous record
11. See J.-G. Droysen, Historik, ed. P. Leyh (Stuttgart/Bad Canstatt, 1977), 234
12. Cf. Hall, Cultures of Inquiry. 91: "Narration, both in lifeworldly conduct and in inquiry, is a narration of narration, the interpretation of preinterpretations."
13. Jon Elster, Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, Eng. , 1983), 84ff
14. In Cultures of Inquiry Hall connects configurational history firmly to social theory. See, for example, the scheme on 206
15. See for instance Hall, Cultures of Inquiry, 217: "The identification of the sociohistorical object and the component changes theorized as its basis yields an analytic framework for the causal or interpretive investigation of configurational change by throwing into relief the issues that need to be pursued. "
16. In Cultures of Inquiry, 98-103, Hall deals with several authors who claim that narrative per se is explanatory, but refrains from presenting his own position, as far as I can see
17. For a recent overview of the debate and for a defense of the mechanisms view, see Axel van den Berg, "Is Sociological Theory Too Grand for Social Mechanism?," in Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, ed. P. Hedström and R. Swedberg (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), 204-237
18. See also E. Kiser and M. Hechter, "The Role of General Theory in Comparative-Historical Sociology," American Journal of Sociology 97 (1991), 1 -30
19. Abrams, Historical Sociology, 188.
20. Cf. Hall, Cultures of Inquiry, 150-151, for his view on explanation and interpretation. Remarkable, given the traditional positions and debates, is his almost complete identification of both intellectual operations. The only distinction he makes is with regard to their criteria of evaluation: "the difference between interpretation and explanation does not derive from logic. Rather, the two projects operate under different conditions. Under a regimen of interpretation, multiple criteria for adjudicating among accounts coexist, leaving the validity of any single account open to external challenge, even when it is sustained internally
21. see my Konstruktion der Vergangenheit, 83-189, for the numerous traditional arguments against the identification of explanation and interpretation
22. See Van den Berg, "Social Mechanisms," 205: "More and more, it seems, what passes for 'sociological theory,' or, more ominously, 'general sociological theory,' deals with matters of epistemolo- gy, ontology, and philosophy of science, at the expense of the more mundane business of theorizing about the social world. 'Sociological theory' nowadays seems to be theorizing about theorizing, not attempting to formulate coherent accounts of things happening 'out there.'"
23. For a recent overview of the varieties of comparative history, see Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansatze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung, ed. H-G. Haupt and J. Kocka (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 1996)
24. For Ankersmit's position, see my article "Narrativism, Positivism and the 'Metaphorical Turn,'" 317-324
25. Jonathan Sperber brought up this problem in a review of recent studies of the German bourgeoisie. In some of these studies, an ideal type was used that specified a democratic political orientation as one of the characteristically bourgeois values. However, empirical research brought out that for much of the nineteenth century the major part of the German bourgeois had other political preferences than the ideal type specified. He, justifiably, asked what explanatory uses such comparisons between an ideal type and empirical phenomena have. The problem is that "as was often the case with Max Weber himself, conclusions are built into the definitions" and "we are left with arbitrarily assigned ascriptive characteristics." See J. Sperber, "Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and its Sociocultural World," Journal of Modem History 69 (1997), 271 -297, and esp. 285-286
26. Abrans, Historical Sociology, 276.
27. W. Schluchter, The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber's Developmental History (Berkeley, 1981)
28. Cf. J. Habermas, "Geschichte und Evolution," in Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1976), 200-260
29. See R. Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural History," in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. V. Bonnell and L. Hunt (Berkeley, 1999), 73
30. See Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor," 62-68.
31. See my "Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality: A Plea for 'Internal Realism'," in History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, ed. Fay et al, 342-377
32. See L. Griffin, "Narrative, Event-Structure Analysis and Causal Interpretation in Historical Sociology," American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993), 1094-1133
33. R. Franzosi, "A Sociologist Meets History: Critical Reflections upon Practice," Journal of Historical Sociology 9 (1996), 354-392
34. New Methods for Social History, ed. L. Griffin and M. van der Linden (Cambridge, Eng., 1999)
35. A. C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge, Eng., 1965)
36. R. Bates, A. Greif, M. Levi, J.-L. Rosenthal, and B. Weingast, Analytic Narratives (Princeton, 1998), reviewed by Brian M. Downing, History and Theory 39 (2000), 88-97
37. Bates et al. , Analytic Narratives, 10
38. Rejecting the Hempelian covering-law theory of explanation has turned into something like a ritual beating of a dead horse. See W. Salmon, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation (Minneapolis, 1990)