No abstract

No abstract

History long occupies a vital place in China's fields of social science. Its significance, nonetheless, abated in the late twentieth century, as Chinese social scientists wanted to align themselves with the mainstream scholars in the West, making their productions of knowledge steered from narrations to theorizations. Since the millennium, there have been calls on the return to history (also known as the historical turn). History has been then regaining momentum in the fields of social science both in China and the West. I would like to argue that it is the context of Guo Taihui's latest monograph -Lishi shehuixue de liliang, The Power of Historical Sociology -which ponders the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of such a cross-disciplinary field of study.Intriguingly, Guo contextualizes his exploration in the Western development of historical sociology. He argues that history was once an indispensable part of social scientific inquiries in the West. In the nineteenth century, big name theorists such as August Comte, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Max Weber, though history was treated differently in their works, looked for theoretical insights from the past experiences of human beings (Ch. 6). Meanwhile, there was another push. Those who searched for universal truths demanded that the form of social scientific knowledge could and should be in parallel with that of scientific knowledge. They urged to develop general theories by applying the self-proclaimed scientific methods. Theoretical interpretation, universal and decontextualized, became preferable in the fields of social science. Particularly in the United States in the early-twentieth century, then, social science was not only split into several disciplines but history was also separated from social science in the course of the high academic division of labor. This tendency -combining the preferred form of social scientific knowledge and the diversified institutionalization -was further reinforced and

No abstract