Continuing Discussions

Michael:

Below is my original message, sorry it didn't come through the first time.

I didn't know if you intended your message to be a conversation-starter or not. It did get me to thinking, though, and so assuming that you did so intend:

Philosopher Paul Veyne argued that History and Sociology cannot, in a sense, coexist. He argued that if it is true that there are such things as "laws" (in the sense that the optimists of the the Enlightenment meant it) in human societies, then History amounts to Sociology done with lousy methodology. On the other hand, Veyne argued, if we reject the Enlightenment notion that there are such things as natural laws in human affairs, then Sociology has no object and is simply History that is called something else.

To employ more of Veyne's actual language: if society does have a “preponderant order of facts” (i.e. is susceptible to general laws), then history is simply “applied sociology”. If past events are a coherent totality “only in words”, though, “then sociology has no justification, for there is nothing for it between the nominalism of history and the scientific explanation of events by means of the different laws to which each event belongs.” (I'm quoting from Veyne's book Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, which first appeared in French in 1971).

So, (with Veyne's argument hovering in the background) it seems to me that there is little practical difference between "social history" and "historical sociology." Whatever differences there actually are, I would guess, reside in how folks cast what they are doing, at the level of theory. 

My response:

Paul is wrong to dismiss an entire discipline he is both arrogant and silly. Sociology with a historical grounding distorts more than it reveals. History without Sociology is nothing but an excuse for incompetence and laziness. Most PhD's in America are illiterates. The divisions between the disciplines were artificially imposed because of funding wars. With education we are all students continuing to learn. In my own education, Political Economy, Political Sociology, Economic Anthropology, and Cultural Ecology is nothing but continuing interdisciplinary. My education was equally historical, sociological, anthropological, and ecological approach to political science and economics. I have never had any tolerance for either post modern or pure disciplines.

I want to add:

Weber's main academic appointments were in economics; most of the teaching he did, was in economics; and throughout his life he presented himself professionally as an economist. (Max Weber's Vision of Economics Rkbard Swedberg). Sociology is born from a historical understanding of what Weber calls Sozialokonomik" or "social economics."  This would be a sociological grounding of Economic studies. John Maynard Keynes, is an economist with a sociological immigination. Most economists lack this understanding. Any discipline that is not interdisciplinary is both trite and irrelevant including sociology.