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Review
| Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, by William H. Sewell, Jr., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. 376 pages, $27.50, paper.
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| From the Annales school to post-modernists, historians in the late twentieth century altered their definitions of history. William H. Sewell, Jr. joins this journey in his examination of the theoretical underpinnings of history and social science. Sewell uses the theoretical tools of history, sociology and anthropology to attempt a more thorough understanding of social theory and its application to history. Previously published chapters were reworked for this book and all point towards a more complete understanding of the relationship between social theory and historical logic. His examination of the theoretical forest and trees of historical, anthropological and sociological visions of research provides for thought provoking reading. The first section of the book discuss his years exploring the theoretical underpinnings of anthropology and sociology and how those disciplines influenced his ideas regarding the nature of history. Formerly a quantitative historian, Sewell begins his journey in the 1960s with a consideration of how the social sciences have inquired into the sources of historical change. This interdisciplinary study utilizes the historian's sense of social temporalities, the anthropologist's recognition of the power and complexity of culture, and the sociologist's commitment to explanatory rigor. On the one hand, Sewell argues that "culture" and "structure" need to be reconceptualized to account for the unavoidable fact of historical change. On the other hand, the social sciences deal with theory more readily than historians who focus traditionally on ideographic or descriptive explanations. |
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Sewell reasons that historians use social theory to orient their thinking but do not generally debate its finer points, and that social science could benefit from historical habits of mind. He also discusses how historians tend to view change as unpredictable and discontinuous, whereas social scientists use theory to view change as smooth, gradual and predictable. While it may be easy to disagree with that approach, Sewell points out that social scientists tend to work on the most important causal features of world events while historians have a tendency to use multiple causations that tend to lack hierarchy. He notes that social scientists are more willing to confront the big historical questions (e.g., nation-states, dynamics of revolution) than are historians, who at times become mired in archival research and detailed narration. One way of considering these theoretical perspectives can be viewed in the old forest and trees analogy; the social scientists providing the forest from their theoretical perspective and the historians providing the trees. The social scientists try to construct their perspective from a quasi-scientific methodology that Sewell characterizes as "physics envy." He argues that historical analysis would improve this methodology by providing "a more systemic focus on logics of historical change [which] might help to restore a certain rigor to a field that sometimes seems more intent on critique of past errors than on constructing a viable way forward." (18) |
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Sewell's journey takes place in ten chapters. Chapter two is a critical reflection (partly autobiographical) on the history of historical scholarship. Chapters three and four scrutinize sociology's encounter with history and attempts to introduce a more historical temporality into sociological thinking. Chapters five and six consider the collisions between history and anthropology, examining the notion of culture, and how Clifford Geertz takes culture beyond anthropology as a way of explaining cultural and historical change. Chapters seven through nine take up three case studies from different theoretically perspectives. Chapter seven examines the work of Marshall Sahlins, whose work about the impact of the first Europeans in Hawaii develops an anthropological theorization of historical change. Chapter eight considers the storming of the Bastille in 1789 as a model of the modern revolution, and uses the Bastille as an "analytical template for developing a more general theorization of the event." (20) Chapter nine examines the history of the dockworkers of Marseille in the nineteenth century and shows "how human agency, contingency, and inexorable social processes were twisted together in a surprising and dramatic historical sequence." (21) The final chapter attempts to pull it all together within the theoretical framework of the social in social science. Sewell's book is thought provoking and intended to spark discussion. If nothing else is done with this work, Sewell will have succeeded if anthropologists, sociologists, and historians debate the meaning of social theory and transformation and their complex ramifications within historical logic. |
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| Iolaui School, Honolulu |
Deborah Hall |
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