Understanding Society

Nomenclature isn't everything -- but it is important nonetheless. What we call the areas of research that examine history...

There was in the 1960s a theory of the understanding of language that portrayed the process as a formal act of decoding. Language was descri...

English-speaking philosophers have often made a hash of the philosophy of history. Either they have had such disdain for continental philo...

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) maintained that the human sciences were inherently distinct from the natural sciences in that the former depend ...

Victor Lieberman's  Strange Parallels: Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830  and Strange ...

Is there a place within the social sciences for the representation of concrete, individual-level experience?  Is there a valid kind of know...

image: cover of Max Weber,  The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages I've never really understood why the exposition o...

A prior post described a major debate around 1900 in the French academic world over the terms of exchange among history, geography, and s...

What are the intellectual tasks that define the historian's work? In a sense, this question is best answered on the basis of a careful ...

There is a conception of social explanation that provides a common starting point for quite a few theories and approaches in a range of the ...