Review article
From the "Dialogue of the Deaf" to Historical Sociology
Vjeran Katunarić
; Odsjek za sociologiju, Filozofski fakultet, Sveučilište u Zagrebu
Abstract
The article presents the results of rapprochement between sociology and historiography, the sciences which have long pursued "a dialogue of the deaf"
(Braudel). Historical sociology appeared in the sixties and the seventies after a long period of the sociological "escape in the present". Using examples of
the contents of the earliest works in historical sociology dealing with the development of pre-modern and modern states-societies (Eisenstadt, Bendix, Anderson and Wallerstein), the author considers three characteristics of historical sociology: a) its intermediary level of generalization (between historiographical particularism and teleology of philosophy of history), b) abandoning the coherence of the paradigmatic social theory in favor of comparative analyses and more elaborate typologies of states-societies, i.e. relativization, and c) the denial of historicistic prediction in terms of classical sociological construction of the unique (evolutionary) model of future society The author discusses the causes and consequences of the shift of time perspective in sociology (futurepresent-past), which he relates to the global context of developmental crisis and withdrawal of the plausibility of optimistic (radical and modernistic) worldviews in the non-Western world. Thus, historical sociology is shaped as an equivalent for a "hereditary" metatheory of society; contemporary social orders and changes are determined overwhelmingly by their long-lasting internal structures and past international positions.
Keywords
sociology; history; historic sociology
Hrčak ID:
154816
URI
Publication date:
31.12.1994.
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