Three VISIoNS of hISTory aNd Theory

how can we develop a viable vision of relations between history and social theory? A comparison of three recent books clarifies the stakes and possibilities of the question. Peter Burke’s History and Social Theory looks out at social and cultural theory from the viewpoint of historical practice, sorting theoretical resources chiefly by their contribution to that practice. Julia Adams, Elisabeth Clemens, ann Shola orloff, and their contributors focus on historical sociology, but range widely in their search for valid uses of theory. robert Goodin, Charles Tilly, and their collaborators seek to move beyond the confrontation of modernism and postmodernism by taking seriously how the contexts of political processes affect those processes and scholars’ understanding of them. We might call the three visions of relations between history and social theory as practical sense, cultural phenomenology, and systematic constructivism. although Burke labels his book a second edition, it actually comes third in a line descending from his compact 1980 essay on sociology and history. That first book appeared in an open University series called Controversies in Sociology, edited by T. B. Bottomore and M. J. Mulkay.1 Sociology and History called for an end of the “dialogue of the deaf” between historians, on one side, and sociologists and social anthropologists, on the other. It did so chiefly by enumerating a number of sociological and anthropological topics—the comparative method, models, structure and function, social roles, and so on—of relevance to historical analysis. But it also offered brief explications of herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, fernand Braudel, William h. McNeill, emmanuel Le roy Ladurie, and Nathan Wachtel, asking whether the four historians were pointing toward models of social change “which would take more account of diversity and of long-term trends than previous models have done, and specify the alternative paths and the constraints more clearly than before.”2