The Time of History and the History of Times

Abstract

Historiography, more than other human studies, has been confronted with the need to understand the nature of social time. Other disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology, often have pretended to escape time sociology by looking to the eternal verities of social order, and anthropology by looking to the archaic social orders which construed themselves as eternal. True, sociology and anthropology have not totally ignored time. Especially these days, anthropologists have begun to recognize the need to account for contemporary savage societies in relation to developed societies. And sociology was born of the recognition of social change in the industrial revolution. At its inception, it offered counterpoint to historiography by positing social change as a shift over time in broad complexes of often mundane culture, social activities, and institutions. But the main tendency of both sociology and anthropology has been ahistorical, and even anti-historical. Historians, on the other hand, have been concerned in large part with giving accounts of the unfoldings of past events; and this concern has required, at least implicitly, a theory of social time. Too often historians have solved their temporal problematic by the fiat of posing objective, chronological time as the basis for observing the march of events. By way of combatting this solution, theorists of historiography occasionally have suggested that the stuff of history itself is contained in other, potentially non-chronological, temporal phenomena. At least since the beginning of this century, the straightforward chronology of scientific history has been challenged in two alternative developments. On the one hand, certain historians have explored the relativity of multiple scales of objective time. On the other hand, subjectivist philosophers have described the character of inner timeconsciousness, or subjective time; and subjectivist historians have advanced a relativism based on the recognition of multiple social actors with diverse and often conflicting social interests. Each of these intellectual trends has tended to undermine the Rankean epistemology of history; no longer could a history of elites be taken to represent the autonomous unfolding spirit of historical development. But the relativities achieved in subjectivist and objectivist approaches remain incommensurate with one another, for they are based

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