Toward Unification: Beyond the Antinomies of Knowledge in Historical Social Science

How can we build a unified approach to the historical study of society? This old problem has never been resolved and its pertinence never really agreed on, but it’s firmly on the agenda again, as William Sewell’s new book, among other works, shows. Many new contributory streams to what seems to be a broad river of sociohistorical inquiry have been developed in recent decades, and the questions of if and how they interconnect to form a single river flowing in a single direction or, to put it more philosophically, a single domain of science, is more important than ever. This is because many of these streams, such as historical sociology, rational-choice theory, critical realism, sociobiology, and contextual political analysis, make strong claims to unificatory power. Against these developments, postmodern “interpretism” and skepticism are resolutely unpersuaded of the possibility of unification of social and historical inquiry.