Theories of Society in Historical Context(s)
Enlisting Intellectual and Conceptual History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2824293 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A He (0000-0003-4143-0448, University College Dublin, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 62 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 486-500 |
| Publication date | 2025-08-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0147-2011 • E-ISSN: 1936-4725 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s12115-025-01092-x |
| OpenAlex | W4409063868 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
The way in which theorists of society think about their own subject's emergence and development demands some form of historical contextualization: a discussion of how societal conditions of a given period and author-audience networks relate to the theoretical output produced. Furthermore, the observer will have to be aware of his or her own vantage point at the moment of historical contextualization. Alas, at present, there seems to be no agreed approach in relation to the process of how best to contextualize societal ideas historically. An anything-goes attitude often allows for free-floating associations across time and space, amounting at times to the promotion of "unit ideas" which assume core semantic meanings independent of historical and societal conditions. Also often at work is a "presentist" disposition, that is, timeless seeming snapshots of the modern sociology of knowledge (often of Bourdieuan provenance). Despite their obvious differences, both - unit ideas and presentism - involve subtle, even unconscious, problematic constructions such as prolepsis, reprojection, and other "stabilizing" tricks of the sociological trade and toolbox. I suggest in this paper that studying the insights of two particular approaches from without the sociological/social theory/sociology of knowledge tradition, namely intellectual and conceptual history, would allow for a better understanding not only of how theories of society emerge but also how societies generate knowledge about themselves. I conclude that were social scientists to heed more to the warnings of intellectual and conceptual history, the historical contextualization of theories of society and the historical understanding of their conceptualizations could become better structured and more self-reflexive endeavors. This does not necessarily imply that intellectual and conceptual history would entirely replace sociological approaches; I only argue that it would help them to become more thorough undertakings, more attuned to important paradigmatic shifts and new constellations when these present themselves, and help to avoid presentism wherever it raises its untimely head
Conceptual framework · Conceptual history · Context (archaeology) · Economic history · Epistemology · Intellectual history · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · History · History, Culture, and Diplomacy · Law · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
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