13
The Union of the “Two Cultures”
host of detailed studies that have no link with one another, no longer forms a solid whole”
(1984, 294).
Nevertheless, nowadays, critics of social sciences assert that they have failed because of
their incapability of producing valid generalization and scientific laws. In short, they failed in
being “nomothetic” disciplines, nonetheless their strain towards quantification,
mathematization and prediction. According to these critics, deterministic laws cannot exist
because social action is an interpretation of social instant based on human subjectivity,
imagination and reflexivity. Sociology, likewise history of the event, are both structured on a
purely subjective interpretation since the object of analysis only exists in a specific time and
space and no generalization can be inferred. The particular dominates and runs the overall
direction of their own.
The perception of
this fiasco, according to Collins (1989), stems from a stiffly and
surpassed view of science and its nature compressing scientific knowledge to the logical-
mathematical – nomothetic – formalization. As Mills correctly puts it: “the confusion in the
social sciences […] is wrapped up with the long-continuing controversy about the nature of
Science” (Mills, 1959, 119). When we put aside this old limitation as Collins suggests,
clearing our mind by nomothetic constrains, we can embrace “[t]he emphasis in complexity
studies – on contingency, context-dependency, multiple, overlapping temporal and spatial
frameworks, and deterministic but unpredictable systems displaying an arrow-of-time”, that
is,
change (Lee, 2011, 174). This complexity suggests not only a new way of approaching the
world, but the underlying ability to jump over by closing the divide between the two cultures
within the social sciences – and history is, in my regard, definitively one of them. We need to
start
by posing a new milestone, a basic merger.
Collins defines sociology:
the core activity that gives the field of sociology its intellectual justification is the formulation of
generalized explanatory principles, organized into models of the underlying processes that generate the
social world […].What makes it scientific is its ability to explain the conditions under which one kind
of pattern holds rather than another, in whatever realm those patterns may be found (Collins, 1989,
124, 127).
I concur with him. But, this idea of science/discipline as explanatory instrument of the
social world(s) needs to be injected with the crucial component of temporality (historicity)
and spatiality (globality) “to explain the conditions under which one kind of pattern holds
rather than another, in whatever realm those patterns may be found”. We need more
“contingency, context-dependency, multiple, overlapping temporal and spatial frameworks”.
We need first to deeply incorporate History – space in time – in Sociology – state and theory.
We must not distinguish between them. So, “[w]hat history is, or should be, cannot be
analyzed in separation from what the social sciences are or should be […]. There simply are
no logical or even methodological distinctions between the social sciences and history”
(Giddens, 1979, 230
)
. The distinction was created by the two cultures spread throughout the
western world, engendering the premise for the scientific compression of history and
sociology, constantly reproduced, above the nomothetic and ideographic cultural struggles, in
the basic structural division of synchrony from diachrony.
On the basis of this division sociologists have been content to leave the succession of events
in time to
the historians, some of whom as their part of the bargain have been prepared to relinquish the
structural properties of social systems to the sociologists. But this kind of separation has no rational
justification with the recovery of temporality as integral to social theory [and of social theory as
integral to history]; history and sociology become methodologically indistinguishable (Giddens, 1979,
8).
14
Andrea Lo Bianco
So, in order to pose a new first brick for a new social science – history and sociology
merged – we need to go over two inner points,
one is cultural, the other one structural:
1)
The importance of data and the centrality of nomothetic explanatory models
stemmed from the mathematical rationalization of our thought;
2)
The rift between diachrony and synchrony, or, on other words, “the problematic of
structuring” (Abram, 1982).
I argue that by inserting a fully-fledged method based on the sketch I briefly discussed
above, we may build the first thin layer of a new scientific edifice, a different vision of social
science, not denying time and complexity, inspecting entirety and partiality, passing from
being to becoming. This science may help us explaining “total society” and its parts in the
temporal process of their long becoming, constraining the centrality of the nomothetic
quantification and inserting the “structuring” in the explanation of a phenomenon – the
shaping of world by structures and transforming of structures both occurring as processes in
time. So, we need to conceive a social science simultaneously endowed with an historical and
global character, in the intelligent braudellian vein of using history – as foundation of an
interscientific construction – and globality – as “yearning, in confronting ourselves with a
problem,
to systematically cross the limits” (Braudel, 2001, 96). An historical social analysis
is about the causes of the origin, dynamics and development of a systemic phenomenon as a
whole – causes of the origin, development and interaction of processes, structure(s) and
agents –, in short,
change, using comparisons on large scale, in space and time, to identify
and to validate (or to falsify) them. In this way, we may understand the entire phenomenon
existence, and just in case, trying to pose questions about its future trajectory and
probability
of change.
Herein lies an alternative for a unified historical social science to the predictive, Newtonian model of
social scientific inquiry. It constitutes a mode of constructing authoritative knowledge of the human
world, which
is of engaging in science, by producing defensible accounts and future scenarios, without
chasing the chimera of predictability (Lee, 2011, 175).
All of this may shrink and trim what for the critics is the grievous problem affecting
sociology and history as sciences, and the social sciences in general, that is, their very
ideographic element: the comprehension of sense that man poses to his own agency, which is
what profoundly distinguishes and separates ideography from the aseptic, stolid, timeless-
universal, nomothetic world. We need a third, median way by posing a bridge and by shifting
the standpoint, not from
a micro to a macro view, but towards the interaction of the two. Also,
the median way renounces “the theoretical possibility of the neutral observer, both because
the observation always changes the reality ([…] as in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle),
and because the theoretical frameworks with which reality is observed are social constructions
subject to social revision” (Wallerstein, 2012, 251), that is, a social science embedded in the
real, complex world, “a social science that is neither moral instruction nor value-free”
(Wallerstein, 1991, 181).
I would like to highlight, finally, that data and quantity – and models related to them –
are important instruments, but just for integration. I believe that mathematical data can be the
side support of an organic social scientific edifice which cannot be built only by and upon
figures. We can use mathematics, but not reckoning it as the core of our analysis and the
center – or worst, the goal – of our investigation. A “new science does not say mathematical
calculations are irrelevant. It raises the question whether the relentless quest for precision may