>Doug asked:
>
>
>>Is it a Cox-like shyness about generalizing about patterns
>>of thought, because everything is so incommensurate?
:) that's not what he means!
> From my experience as a history grad student, it's more an apolitical
> disinclination to speculate about what causes major changes. I think the
> last big debate over a question like that among historians was maybe the
> Brenner (from Robert Brenner) debate about the transiton from feudalism
> to capitalism.
This would be how some philosophers of the social sciences I've read characterize tendencies in history as a discipline in the states. The issue was there fairly early on, erupting sometimes during the professionalization of the disciplines as Thomas Haskell has pointed out.
When I was going to do historical sociology around labor unions and their decline, I recall that while I was doing some methodology reviews, I came across these debates in the phil of the soc. sciences about history's role as more about "describing" whereas sociology was supposed to "explain." If this question is actually important to someone, I'll go look it up. And yeah, as someone who almost pursued a history grad degree, I remember being told that I might as well hang up an interest in intellectual history (dead now they told me) because the Cornell dept had gone the way of people's history from the "ground up" and not the type of thing I was interested in. There were two intellectual historians there, but one was bitter and one of my tutor's (a gradstud at Cornell) described him as a misanthropist. Not surprisingly, I declined their offer of admission to the program figuring it was all too likely I'd jump the gorges under normal circumstances, who needed to actually work with someone who hated people?
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