Social Science: Making Sense of Change

Abstract

The classical European tradition of social science is (formally) an interpretive–critical exercise turned (substantively) to the elucidation of the dynamics of complex change, and it takes its initial and enduring form in the efforts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social commentators to comprehend the sweeping changes that enfolded their inherited forms of life, changes which in retrospect have come to be labelled the industrial and democratic revolutions. These intellectual resources (sets of concepts, available explicit theories and the particular lessons offered by unfolding events) together comprise a living tradition; the tradition is diverse and continually made and remade in debate, and it provides a largely taken-for-granted intellectual apparatus. It is one that European social theorists by default inhabit (which is not to say that they cannot work within and with reference to other traditions, thus, obviously, for British scholars, American work, but to do so requires an active process of intellectual/cultural relocation). The tradition is a local tradition, and whilst it does not make claims to universality, it does make claims to generality in the sense that the inherited conceptual apparatus can be writ-large and it can offer readings of the patterns of lives of others. But these last-noted procedures are of restricted intellectual value as the resources of the tradition unpack more directly and plausibly as an interpretive–critical invitation to dialogue; that is, one local culture can reach out to other local cultures.

A full-length treatment of the theoretical arguments made here is given in P.W. Preston 2009 Arguments and Actions in Social Theory, London, Palgrave.