History, Critique, Social Change and Democracy An Interview with Charles Taylor
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6249387 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ulf Bohmann (0000-0001-8843-4118), Darrel Montero (0000-0003-3145-5713), Darío Montero |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 3-15 |
| Publication date | 2014-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Constellations (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1351-0487 • E-ISSN: 1467-8675 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-8675.12069 |
| OpenAlex | W1509594900 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 7 |
In your works, you make a strong claim about the usefulness -if not inevitability -of historical approaches to the social sciences and philosophy.Before we go into more detail -do you think there is a central reason of why to make use of history in general?There is a central reason: the inevitability of the narrative as a way of self-understanding.You could put it this way: as a theory of natural science, the inverse-square law is completely timeless; it does not just apply here and now.You don't need to talk about development.So it may look as though a, let's call it, 'human' way of understanding is subscientific and you should get rid of it.Why I am so and so?Why do I act the way I do?The ideal seems to be to come up with timeless statements of what you believe or what motivates you.But this turns out not to be so.Alasdair MacIntyre says that understanding is narrative and that seems plainly true; but why?It has to do with the manner in which we actually understand things, which is in the order in which we grasp them, moving from an early state of confusion or disorientation, until you get the point.So the issue is: can that understanding be separable from the process of getting at it?In very many cases in life it can't be, because we understand what we now see as a truth as a result of an error-correction in relation to an earlier view.When people say in the modern secular age: "human beings stand on their own feet", this idea is what I would call a 'transitional understanding,' an understanding based on a transition from the old days when we were under the thrall of traditions.Descartes really does this: ordinarily what we believe is what we were told by your preceptors, but I must take a step back and ask "what do I know now?".I get a sense of my own orientation as coming about through that radical shift, and here I discover a method.But the method itself only makes sense in terms of that transition: I'm understanding myself in opposition to a supposed past.There is an inescapable narrative dimension to this.So much so that you upset somebody's view of their history by upsetting their views of the past, which is why 'history wars' are so central to political and intellectual life. So you're saying that just as individual lives and identities are narrative-like, the understanding required in social sciences is narrative-like as well?Yes, there is an element of narrativity that can't be entirely cancelled out.Of course you do have also things like supposedly general laws and they are part of the understanding in the social sciences, but narratives are nevertheless essential.Take economics: the modern centrality of markets arose in history at a certain time, it didn't exist before.Furthermore, the markets themselves are differently embedded in a different society, and all that is understood in terms of transitions from earlier situations.Karl Polanyi re-writes the history of the modern market in a way that was not what the classic economists understood, and this new story upset the whole previous understanding. 1In opposition to the prevailing dictum of 'historical objectivity,' Nietzsche sets the following task for the historian in his second Untimely Meditations 2 : to go beyond the passive observation of the flux of 'events' (Ereignisse) and grasp the 'forces' (Kräfte) that animated the past, assuming what were the 'instincts' of previous generations.Do you see a similitude between Nietzsche's notions and your own concepts in your historically oriented works?A likely candidate could be what you called "idées forces," 3 aiming at the
Citation · Democracy · Library science · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Computer Science · Humanities and Social Sciences · Law · Marxism and Critical Theory · Political Theory and Democracy
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,56 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2022 (6) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |