HISTORY AND SOCIETY: THE PAST OF THE PRESENT
Author：Ewa Morawska, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
Source：Historical Methods; Summer90, Vol. 23 Issue 3, p128, 3p
Abstract：Opinion. Presents the author's views on the article of Michael Hanagan
about historical sociology teaching. Basis of the author's comments on the article;
Author's comments about the standard textbooks for undergraduate sociology courses;
How to train sociology students more effectively; Another way in getting across the
message that good sociology needs history; Views of the author in the method of
Hanagan in advocating social science.
I agree very much with Michael Hanagan about the mutual advantages graduate
students in history and sociology could derive from joining the forces and fortes of
these two disciplines in a collaborative seminar on methods of research design. I think,
however, that training toward such reciprocal enhancement must go deeper than
research methods--to the underlying philosophical and methodological orientations of
each scholarly enterprise. I also think that this education should begin earlier, at the
undergraduate level, where these general approaches are taught.
Michael focused predominantly on teaching history students. My comments are
from the perspective of a historical sociologist (or a social historian; I see myself as a
two-humped camel) teaching sociologists in the sociology department.
While at the sociology department in Warsaw, Poland, where I received my primary
training, there were among the permanent teaching faculty, five persons pursuing
historical studies, and historically oriented courses, both methodological and
substantive, were required to obtain a diploma. (Marx, by the way, whose teachings
were mandatory and applied in such excess that we developed an acute allergy, was
equally regarded as a sociologist and as a historian). Overlapping of these subjects
was taken as a matter of fact; I, for instance, prepared my master's thesis in sociology
under the supervision of a social historian. In the United States, however, although
historical sociology has become a recognized, even fashionable, specialization among
sociologists over the last decade and a half, it remains marginal vis-a-vis the
disciplinary mainstream, which is still largely informed by the positivistic paradigm
of general science--what P. Sztompka called "sociology above history" or "sociology
without history."( n1)
Not surprisingly, the standard textbooks for undergraduate sociology courses are
also history blind. Basic concepts and explanations of social structure, socialization,
social institutions, power, authority, deviance, etc., usually float free, independent of
time and space, unattached to concrete, historical contexts. When empirical
illustrations are given, they are most often drawn from contemporary American
society, implicitly treated as "the norm." Notions of patterning, interaction,
correlations, and causality that link these constructs into comprehensive entities are
likewise conceptualized in an a historical manner, without accounting for their
inherent temporality and contextuality.( n2) And the classical social theories of the
masters of sociology (Tocqueville, Marx, Weber) are usually stripped of their keen
historical sense and interpreted as general developmental schemes for modernization,
rationalization, or bureaucratization.
It would be bad if historical sociology--instead of becoming a fundamental
principle of good sociological work, regardless of subject--were to find itself an
accepted pursuit within the discipline but confined to the niche of a specialized
subfield devoted to the study of things past. We ourselves, I'm afraid, as historical
sociologists, may be contributing to this undesirable development. I looked through
my own and my fellow sociologists' syllabi for courses in historical sociology (both
graduate and upper-level undergraduate).( n3) I found that almost exclusively we
teach about institutions and movements far away in time and about people long since
gone. For instance, a favorite theme in historical sociology courses--the emergence of
the modern world or social change in the modern era (with varying leitmotifs)--covers
the period from the sixteenth through the nineteenth and sometimes the first half of
the twentieth centuries, as if a "thereafter," namely our present time, does not fall
within the purview of historical sociological interest.( n4) As my teaching experience
has shown, this backward-looking focus does not necessarily instill in students the
reflex of applying the "historical imagination" to contemporary social phenomena
hand-in-hand with C. R. Mills's "sociological imagination."( n5)
It seems to me that training students to intellectually approach the social world,
both past and present, as inherently historical, would be more effective if courses in
historical sociology also included analyses of current social events and processes.
Such historically minded examination of present situations would show students how
and why these situations can be comprehended and explained (like past configurations)
only when their background and location, and sequence, pace, and duration are taken
into account.
Another way to get across the message that good sociology needs history, one that
is more aggressive than confining it to specialized Historical Sociology (HS) seminars,
it to make whatever courses we teach explicitly historically minded, especially at the
undergraduate level. In my department, for instance, tenured faculty tend to shrink
from teaching introductory sociology (or, let's say, do not regard it as their highest
priority). I regularly teach and enjoy teaching this course (perhaps motivated by a
touch of missionary zeal) with the goal of "historicizing" sociology when students
first encounter it. And I attempt to do the same with my other undergraduate courses:
urban and community sociology, ethnicity and race in sociological perspective,
contemporary Communist societies (the latter subject, however, may soon become
antiquated). One difficult with teaching sociology cum history--and this, unfortunately,
applies as much to my HS graduate seminars as to undergraduate courses--is that so
many American students appear (at least to a European) extraordinarily innocent of
quite basic historical and geographic knowledge, a failing for which, I imagine, the
high schools are to blame. So far I have not found a satisfactory solution as to how to
effectively teach efficiently and coherently, in one short semester, configurations of
events that are both sequential in time and place specific, along with diverse
applicable concepts and theories.
I also have a dream, namely, a required course for sociology majors (perhaps
historians would also consider this idea) titled Society and History, which would
address the major epistemological, theoretical, and methodological problems involved
in historically conscious sociological practice. The course would draw on reflections
by sociologists and historians concerning their respective professions. ("Why aren't
you dreaming up a similar course on psychology?" inquired my friend from that
discipline. "And geography, too" added another, whose department has just been
closed down. Why not indeed, but we must take things one at a time.) Right now I am
designing a Society and History course to be tried out next fall on first- and
second-year undergraduate students.
My last comment is a pebble tossed into the historian's garden. In advocating social
science methods for historical research, Michael shows, I think, subdued symptoms of
an unreconstructed fascination on the part of social historians with standard
sociological techniques of quantitative data analysis as more suited for their evidence
than traditional narrative. In the last few years, however, these techniques have come
under convincing attack by historical sociologists for their distorting ahistoricism.( n6)
Although these improved, historicized methods of quantification are still in the
making, it would be good if careful attention to this ongoing work were paid in our
historical sociology/social science history courses.
NOTES
(n1.) Sztompka, P. 1986. The renaissance of historical orientation in sociology.
International Sociology 11(3):321-37.
(n2.) For a critique, see, for instance, Abbott, A. 1983. sequences of social events:
Concepts and methods for the analysis of order in social processes. Historical
Methods 16(4):129-47; and 1988. Transcending general linear reality. Sociological
Theory 6(Fall): 16986; Ragin, c. 1987. The comporative method: Moving beyond
qualitative and quantitive strategies. Berkeley: California university Press; Issac, L.,
and L. Griffen. 1989. Ahistoricism in time-series analyses of historical processes:
critique, redirection, and illustrations from U.S. labor history. American Sociological
Review 54(6):873-90.
(n3.) Roy, W. G., ed. 1987. Comparative historical sociology: Teaching materials
and bibliography. Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association.
(n4.) There are, of course, historical sociological studies that bring their analyses up
to the present time, such as, Wallerstein, L 1974. The modern world-system. 3 vols.
New York: Academic Press; Chirot, D. 1986. Social change in the modern era. New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; Castles, F. G. 1985. The working class and welfare:
Reflections on the political development of the welfare state in Australia and New
Zealand, 18901980. London and Boston: Allen & Unwin; McAdam, D. 1982.
Political process and the development of black insurgency, 1930-1970. Chicago:
university of Chicago Press. But, excepting Wallerstein's opus, such works are seldom
found in the HS syllabi.
(n5.) Mills, C. W. 1959. The sociological imagination. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.
(n6.) See note 2. Also, a session entitled ``Possibilities and impossibilities in social
science history,, held at the annual meeting of the Social science History Association
in Washington, D.C., in November 1989, was devoted to the issue of historicizing
social science methods of data analysis.