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Andrea Lo Bianco
as it attains a level of description that escapes the clutches of time. […] this objectivization led to a
debasement of time. The resulting dichotomy between time felt and time understood is a hallmark of
scientific-industrial civilization, a sort of collective schizophrenia (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, 213-
214).
History as academic discipline has suffered most the embeddedness of the Newtonian
rationalization of knowledge “which created the foundation for the dominant theoretical
approaches and methodological practices in the sciences and led to the solidification of the
separation of the sciences from the humanities” (Lee, 2011, 166). The great paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould (1989, 51) sums up the alleged intellectual superiority of Science upon
ideography in the modern world, and notably, upon history: “Science has […] tended to
denigrate history [...] by regarding any invocation of contingency as less elegant or less
meaningful than explanations based directly on timeless ‘laws of nature’”. History has been,
from
the very beginning of the rift, in “search of science” (Wallerstein, 2012). The nomothetic
sciences, since the Nineteenth century, has run the mode of knowledge production by
imposing Newtonian-Laplacian precision as fly-wheel for grasping reality.
History alone could not compete with the supposed precision of the nomothetic sciences
in a Newtonian world because of its incapability in formulating universal laws, forevermore
valid in time and space. Why cannot it succeed in producing generalizations? Briefly because
traditional history, as it evolved in Nineteenth century, is the inquiry into “an event [that] is
always concrete and particular; it happened once and will never recur. As such, it is to be
described and explained in terms of the unique constellation of circumstances that precede
and surrounded it, that gave it its distinctiveness and individuality” (Carneiro, 2000, 219).
Thus, “scientific laws cannot refer to specific [events or] individuals, only to classes of
[events or] individuals” (Hull, 1974, 47-48).
Nonetheless its inner motion of Nineteenth century rationalization and objectivation,
history had and has scientific limits in an overall Newtonian culture. Traditional history was –
and up to a large extent is – the study of
evenementielle, as Francois Simiand used to say. XX
century French
Annales’s rebellion (1945-1967 ca.) was to be the program of history
scientific expansion towards the nomothetic sciences, trying to transcend its XIX century
“
événementiel-objective” nature on the one hand, and to react “against the dominant premise
underlying the institutionalization of the social sciences” on the other one” (Wallerstein,
1991, 218; Wallerstein 2012).
Sociology entered in XIX century. It was regarded as a great instrument amidst the
ideographic and nomothetic world of social inquiry, propelling a new insight for investigating
world and society: “The putatively value-neutral social sciences […] seemed to offer the
possibility of a ‘scientific’ or non-value-oriented policy-making process in the service of
‘progress’, [and] came to occupy a tension-charged space” between the two (Lee, 2011, 166).
The ultimate ambition of sociology was to be – and it still is – prediction, the ability to
explain human agency by means of mathematical forecasting models. But, in the long-run of
its own, ambition of this sort has produced, as Andrew Abbott says, the “regression of the
sociologists and others into their methodologically correct analyses of data” (Abbott, 2001,
146).
This struggle for the advancement in nomothetic ranking has been, in short, the reason
that has propelled the fragmentation of the epistemological and scientific field and the motion
towards specialization and technicality within the social sciences. The problem is that such a
specialist movement is engaged in a circular self-sustained logic, breeding an ever-increasing
separation and fragmentation of the scientific field, parceling even more a reality inspected
through analytic micro-spheres that cannot grasp the wider context wherein they come to be
embedded and its own becoming. Durkheim foresaw indeed, that “science, carved up into a