9
The Union of the “Two Cultures”
Thus, how could we analyze an historical system? Comparisons and
longe durèe are
tools for increasing the depth of our analytic enterprise. Historically grounded comparative
analyses of “big structures” and “large processes” (Tilly, 1984) in time and space, or, in our
words and differently, of systemic structures and processes, push at the core the inquiry into
the
cumulative consequences of state and variation in time and space of agents – and the
qualitative and quantitative variation of their action and interaction – and systemic regions as
well as their own interaction, and by interrelating these moments or results with the main
variance-causing evolutionary processes, we could better enlighten the entire historical
processual trajectory of system existence, making the historical outcomes of its development
– and hence of the developmental path of its own agents and constitutive regions – clear. As
Charles Tilly says: “Only in building better theories by means of comparisons on [huge] scale
[…] will we manage to shift that curve of theoretical return from finer comparison” (Tilly,
1984, 144). Hence,
[c]omparative historical analysis is distinctively appropriate for developing explanations of macro-
historical phenomena – or systemic one – of which there are inherently only a few cases. […].
Comparative historical analysis is, in fact, the mode of multivariate analysis to which one resorts when
there are too many variables and not enough cases […]. [They] does provide a valuable check, or
anchor for theoretical speculation. It encourages one to spell out the actual causal arguments suggested
by grand theoretical perspectives, and to combine diverse arguments if necessary in order to remain
faithful to the ultimate objective – which is, of course, the actual illumination of causal regularities
across sets of historical cases.
(Skocpol, 1979, 36, 39)
On the ground of this “huge” work of comparison lies the crucial temporal perspective
of “longe durèe”, the long-run analysis of the existence of “big structures” affected by, and re-
acting on, “large processes” and agents. It is an inquiry into the continual change of the
historical continuum; the discontinuity inspected within the long continuity of History that
draws and qualifies the organic existence of an historical system; the time of structural
change, a long structural but dynamic time.
A fully-fledged historical social science of this sort may be the medium for jumping
over the grievous historical cultural and scientific divide among the
sciences which study Man
and Society, occurred in XIX century – a third, median way. It could stand potentially “for a
junction between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing” (Prigogine & Stengers,
1984, 23), or, in other words, between what the XIX century German
philosopher Windelband
called “nomothetic” science and “ideographic” disciplines (1894). Nomothetic knowledge
production triumphed over Ideography in XIX century thanks to its pure Newtonian
complexion. The “microscopic dissection of objects” in Arthur Eddington’s word (Eddington,
1954 as quoted in Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, 9), exactly the Newtonian strategy to
scientifically analyze reality (and to make it less complex), became the dominant, and for the
most, the only way of studying our reality.
But, as far as I am concerned, the historical social science I hope for may grant us to
move on the centrality of this
artificial “microscopic dissection of [historical social] objects”
by injecting complexity,
a new kind of scientific thrust and perspective in
the social sciences
2
.
3. Between the “Two Cultures”? History, Science and the Social Sciences
Thus:
We can construct new worlds but only on the basis and within the framework of what our predecessors
have constructed for us. On that basis and within that framework the content of our activity may re-
make or un-make the institutions that surround us. This shaping of [agents] by structure and
10
Andrea Lo Bianco
transforming of structure by [agents] both occur as processes in time. It is by seizing on that idea that
history and sociology merge and that [science] becomes capable of answering our urgent questions
about the world is as it is (Abrams, 1982, 3).
I contend that to grasp the world we need to inspect it in time and space of its own
organic and multidimensional complexity. We need to put away the idea of discipline as a
“self-contained and isolated domain of human experience which possesses its own community
of experts” (Deflem, 2013, 162). This inward disposition began to develop within the XIX
century hierarchical split between nomothetic sciences and ideographic disciplines, what C.P.
Snow termed as “Two Cultures” (1961). In order to deeply fathom our complex order of
worldwide continuous change, we need to commence by adjusting the mind, the idea
underneath the practice, or, in other words, the inner division of labor among the sciences and
the division of knowledge within them. Indeed, the divide is not only scientific, but first of all
cultural, civil.
C.P. Snow talks about two cultures, two communities, the mathematical and the literary
one, that, because of a specific movement inherent in western development – nowadays
spanning the entire world – have
almost ceased to communicate at all […]. [T]he intellectual life of the whole of western society is
increasingly spilt into two polar groups. When I say intellectual life, I mean to include also
a large part
of our practical life […]. [Thus, this] polarization is sheer loss to us all. To us as people, and to our
society. It is at the same time practical and intellectual and creative loss and […] it is false to image
that those three considerations are clearly separable (Snow, 1961, 2, 4, 12).
What was the
peculiar and
specific movement within the Western World that has
typified its historical trajectory, making the spread and consolidation of its culture an
historically unique instance of worldwide human experience? It was exactly the great thrust
towards the ever-increasing commodification of everything (the ends) by means of the
rationalization of thought and agency, or, in other words, the advancement of capitalism as a
worldwide social system through the assumption of competitive production as
foremost
instrument of socialization.
It is not simply a coincidence that the triumph of the nomothetic sciences temporally
corresponded to a substantial mutation in the way human being related to the world that
surrounded him. Since the Nineteenth century, a new breed of rationality has
started to run the
direction of society as a whole, notably, in Western world, a rationality engraved within the
social deepening of the world economic nature. Karl Polanyi explores the brutal penetration
of the economy within the society in his amazing book
The Great Transformation (2001).
Polanyi talks about what I would term as
the wares fiction principle, the structural social
principle of capitalism as world system.
The crucial point is this: labor, land, and money are essential elements of industry; they also must be
organized in markets; in fact, these markets form an absolutely vital part of the economic system. But
labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; […] In other words, according to the empirical
definition of a commodity they are not commodities. The commodity description of labor, land, and
money is entirely fictitious. […]. Nevertheless, it is with the help of this fiction that the actual markets
for labor, land, and money are organized (75-76).
Thus, the modern world system is built entirely upon a structural fiction and by means
of this man modifies his own thought and agency, tending towards the ever-increasing
commodification of everything, of man, nature, life.