Keywords: The history of homeland.
The object of the research is to analyze the conditions "Relationship between the history of the Fatherland and other social sciences". The subject of the research is the consideration of individual issues formulated as the objectives of this research.
The aim of the research is to study the topic "The relationship of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" from the point of view of the latest domestic and foreign research on similar issues.
In the course of the work, a theoretical and methodological analysis of the topic "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" was carried out, including the theoretical aspects of studying the phenomenon "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences", the nature of the topic "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" was studied.
As a result of the study, specific ways of solving the problem "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" were identified and quantitatively substantiated, including some possibilities for solving the problem "The connection between the history of sciences ".
Degree of implementation - proposals and specific activities have been tested in the activities of the organization, which served as the basis for educational practice.
The proposed activities with some specification can be used in the work personnel services Russian enterprises.
The implementation of the proposed measures makes it possible to provide a more accurate understanding of the nature and topical problems "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences."
Review of sources on the topic "Relationship of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences"
The list of references used in the preparation of this work contains 36 bibliographic sources. Let's characterize some of them:
The designated problem "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" is considered in the book "History of the Fatherland in the biographies of participants in the most important events. Biographical dictionary-reference book", published in 2002 and containing 560 pages. From the description of the book, it can be concluded that
The dictionary-reference contains over seven hundred articles about political, state and religious figures who have played a significant role in the history of Russia from ancient times to the present day. The publication is intended for the widest circle of readers - schoolchildren and lyceums, students, teachers, everyone interested in Russian history.
Also, the problems of regulating contemporary issues on the topic "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" is discussed by V.V. Artemov, Yu. N. Lubchenkov in the monograph "History of the Fatherland. From ancient times to the present day." This book was published by the "Academy" publishing house in 2012, contains 360 pages.
The textbook sets out in an accessible form the main events of the history of Russia from ancient times to the present day. The most important patterns of development are revealed Russian civilization... Much attention is paid to the issues of the spiritual life of society, culture and everyday life, the history of the church. Portraits of prominent historical figures... For students of secondary institutions vocational education... The book will be useful for teachers, as well as everyone interested in history.
A number of topical problems were touched upon in the book "History of Russia since ancient times. Book 1". S. M. Solovyov defined the relevance and novelty of this topic in his research, published in 2005 by Directmedia Publishing. The description of the book reads as follows.
Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev is a famous Russian historian. The History of Russia since Ancient Times, created by Soloviev, is unmatched in Russian science. This work has become an outstanding event in Russian society, a phenomenon of a truly global scale. The scientist spent 30 long years of tireless daily work on the creation of a colossal work. And so far, no one has been able to overshadow the glory of S.M. Solovyov, to repeat his civil feat - to study the events of Russian history so carefully, in detail, in detail, to show their internal logic and connection, their causes and consequences, to state the facts so clearly and to investigate in detail phenomena of Russian life.
In addition, when studying the topic "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences", such periodical sources were used as:
- Telephone communication: accounting difficulties. S. Kazantsev, "New accounting", issue 9, September 2007.
- The concept of "dominant position" and its relationship with other categories Russian legislation... Yu.M. Bochenkov, "The laws of Russia: experience, analysis, practice", No. 6, June 2007.
- The firm combines UTII with other modes: distribution of costs. S.A. Soloviev, "Russian Tax Courier", No. 6, March 2007.
- Comparison of leasing with other investment projects. L.G. Kisurina, "Economic and Legal Bulletin", No. 2, February 2007.
- Credit keepers. interview with A. Klychkov, President of the National Bureau of Credit Histories. V. Plekhanov, "Consultant", No. 3, February 2007.
Sample introduction
The presented work is devoted to the topic "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences".
The problem of this study has relevance in the modern world. This is evidenced by the frequent study of the issues raised.
The topic "The connection between the history of the Fatherland and other social sciences" is studied at the junction of several interrelated disciplines. The current state of science is characterized by a transition to a global consideration of the problems of the subject "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences."
A lot of works are devoted to research questions. Basically, the material presented in the educational literature is of a general nature, and in numerous monographs on this topic, narrower issues of the problem "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" are considered. However, it is required to take into account modern conditions in the study of the problems of the designated topic.
The high importance and insufficient practical elaboration of the problem "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" determine the undoubted novelty of this study.
Further attention to the issue of the problem "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" is necessary in order to more deeply and reasonably resolve the particular topical problems of the subject of this study.
The relevance of this work is due, on the one hand, to the great interest in the topic "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" in modern science, on the other hand, its insufficient development. Consideration of issues related to this topic is of both theoretical and practical significance.
The results can be used to develop a methodology for the analysis "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences."
The theoretical significance of studying the problem "The connection between the history of the Fatherland and other social sciences" lies in the fact that the problems chosen for consideration are at the junction of several scientific disciplines at once.
The object of this research is to analyze the conditions "The connection between the history of the Fatherland and other social sciences".
In this case, the subject of the study is the consideration of individual issues formulated as the objectives of this study.
The aim of the research is to study the topic "The relationship of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" from the point of view of the latest domestic and foreign research on similar issues.
- To study the theoretical aspects and reveal the nature of the "Connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences."
- To tell about the urgency of the problem "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" in modern conditions.
- To outline the possibilities of solving the subject "Connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences".
- Outline the development trends of the subject "Connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences".
The work has a traditional structure and includes an introduction, a main part consisting of 3 chapters, a conclusion and a bibliography.
The introduction substantiates the relevance of the topic choice, sets the goal and objectives of the research, describes the research methods and sources of information.
Chapter one reveals general questions, reveals the historical aspects of the problem "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences." The basic concepts are determined, the relevance of the sounding of the questions "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" is determined.
The second chapter examines in more detail the content and contemporary problems "The connection between the history of the Fatherland and other social sciences."
Chapter three is of a practical nature and on the basis of individual data an analysis of the current state is made, as well as an analysis of the prospects and development trends "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences".
According to the results of the study, a number of problems related to the topic under consideration were revealed, and conclusions were drawn about the need for further study / improvement of the state of the issue.
Thus, the urgency of this problem determined the choice of the topic of the work "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences", the range of issues and the logical scheme of its construction.
The theoretical and methodological basis for the study was legislative acts, normative documents on the topic of the work.
Sources of information for writing a work on the topic "Relationship of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences" were basic educational literature, fundamental theoretical works of the largest thinkers in the field under consideration, the results of practical research by prominent domestic and foreign authors, articles and reviews in specialized and periodicals devoted to the subject. "The connection of the history of the Fatherland with other social sciences", reference books, other relevant sources of information.
A characteristic feature of the historiography of the second half of the XX century. the use of theories of various levels created in other social and humanitarian sciences for the analysis of the past social reality became. Therefore, in the analysis of modern historiography, the focus of attention is the problem of interdisciplinarity, which in relation to history is distinguished by its clearly expressed specificity and manifests itself in two main configurations. They can be described as “appropriation strategies” on the part of historians and “turning to the past” on the part of representatives of other social sciences. (We will try not to touch upon the topic of "historiographic turns" along and across the studied topic).
Although interdisciplinarity as a theoretical problem of history came to the fore only in the second half of the 20th century, the interdisciplinary approach itself became a distinctive feature of historiography, in fact, from the moment of its formation. Suffice it to look at this direction of historical knowledge back in the 19th century. - whether it is an established Marxist school, geohistory or social = cultural history - to understand that scientific historical knowledge already in the period of self-determination, it relied on the methodological tools of various social and humanitarian sciences, which, of course, turned out to be fruitful only if history retained its own methods of constructing past social reality.
The theme of the place of history in the system of social and humanitarian sciences as a methodological problem was articulated already in the first third of the last century, in particular, by the founders of the “school of the Annals” M. Blok and L. Fevre. However, in the 1930s, most of the social disciplines were in their infancy, and the founders of the "School of the Annals" felt reverence not for the social ones (according to Blok, these disciplines, like history, still survived childhood 16), but for the natural sciences. First of all, they were struck by the discoveries in the field of physics. A fundamentally important consequence of this situation was the relatively equal relations between representatives of the social sciences, including history (the “historical synthesis” proposed by A. Burr was also based on this principle). Perhaps the not so prestigious position of the social sciences at that stage, some ignorance of their achievements or underestimation of their successes gave a very important result. In the first half of the last century, the claims of historians to produce their own theories were clearly higher. For example, the "old" social history that was being created then (A. Pirenne, M. Blok, L. Fevre, F. Braudel) in the sense of theoretical independence, in our opinion, is not inferior to the "new" social history of the 1970s, and, perhaps , and surpasses it.
But in the last half century, historians have practically not produced their own "historical" theories. Examples of several important exceptions that have appeared, however, quite a long time ago, are E. Kantorovich's Two Bodies of the King (1957), a book that laid the foundation for the "ceremonialist" trend in historiography; F. Braudel's theory of three levels of social change (1958); the theory of childhood in the early modern era by F. Aries (1960); The Long Middle Ages by J. Le Goff (1985). Basically, creating large conceptual works, historians began to solve the problem of theoretical renewal, referring to the theories of various social and humanitarian sciences. This process was later called the “appropriation strategy”.
The strategy of appropriation is implicitly based on the idea that history, which can be viewed as a social science analyzing past, no longer existing societies, can naturally rely on the theoretical apparatus of the social sciences dealing with the present. Since the 1960s, the updating of historiography has been taking place at a high rate and the following model of interaction has developed throughout it: this or that social science - the corresponding historical subdiscipline - the choice of macro = (later and micro =) theory - its application to historical material.
This model turned the relationship between history and the social sciences that existed in the positivist paradigm. If in the XIX century. it was assumed that historians should collect empirical material for the social sciences in order to develop theories on its basis, but now, on the contrary, social sciences are becoming suppliers of theoretical concepts for history.
The rise in the popularity of theoretical knowledge and the degree to which historians are familiar with modern social concepts (no matter how superficial it may be) is explained by a whole complex of obvious prerequisites. The social sciences and the humanities themselves had to not only establish themselves, but also develop sufficiently so that from them it was possible with greater partiality and analysis to choose theories that promise new perspectives in the study of the past. In addition, the theories developed in social science and their authors should have become sufficiently well-known or even popular. And, finally, the dissatisfaction necessary for the creation of new scientific knowledge, the feeling of another epistemological "crisis" - disappointment in old approaches, a feeling of exhaustion of possibilities, must be constantly reproduced.
The “appropriation strategy” that has emerged in historiography over the past half century is faced with several dangers, each of which is associated with the loss of the “sense of time”.
First of all, a kind of “theoretical lag” is often observed in the works of historians; the use of rather old and no longer quite adequate theories from the point of view of modern science. It happens that the focus of historians is on the "classics" who have lost their relevance in the context of their discipline. Not to mention the enduring popularity of K. Marx, conceptual historical works are full of references to the works of S. Freud, E. Durkheim, M. Weber, L. Levy = Bruhl, the early works of N. Elias, etc. Typical example- work in line with "historical memory", a new direction in historiography, whose representatives generally ignored modern social psychology, choosing as theoretical basis the concept of "collective memory" by M. Halbwachs, developed in the first half of the last century 17.
The reasons for such a time lag are different: information gap; difficulties associated with orientation in a "foreign" discipline and the ability to assess the potential of new theories; professional unpreparedness for mastering complex concepts, etc. But, as far as we can judge, this is not the specificity of history. For the same reasons, a "bad mix" arises in many interdisciplinary fields.
At the same time, there are a sufficient number of examples “ quick response»Historians on innovations in social sciences and humanities. So, in due time the theory of modernization, world-system analysis, the concept of symbolic power penetrated into historical research almost without delay. Some theories of contemporary social and cultural anthropology were just as quickly assimilated by historians. The same can be said about the "linguistic turn" in historiography. Today we have many interesting examples of constructing microhistory in the image and likeness of microsociology and microeconomics using the corresponding concepts 18.
In addition to the “theoretical lag” within the framework of the “strategy of appropriation”, there is potentially (and is often realized) the threat of anachronisms caused by the application of theories focused on the functioning of one type of society (of one time) to societies of another time, which we have already discussed above.
Anachronisms of this kind have been observed in various fields. As a result, many historians who have tried to combine proven methods of working with historical material and theoretical models of the social sciences have met with failure (as, indeed, a number of sociologists who have come up with the macrotheories of historical sociology). In those sections of historiography, where impressive results were initially obtained, over time, the question arose about the limits of applicability of the theories created to explain modern society to societies of the past. In general, it turned out that very few of social theories may with apply successfully to the study of past societies.
It is useful to look at the problem of interdisciplinary synthesis from a different perspective - after all, other social sciences also have their own fields of study related to the study of the past (history).
In principle, when an interdisciplinary direction arises, two disciplines are involved in it, and its creation and functioning can either take place autonomously within each of the two disciplines, or only in one of them. "Division of labor" in related sciences between specialties and specialists, in in this case historians and non-historians, happens very differently. Let us explain our thesis on the example of such a pair of disciplines as sociology and history, which, respectively, produce social history and historical sociology. Representatives of historical sociology either make specific historical problems the subject of sociological analysis, or propose theories of the synthesis of sociology and history, continuing in a sense the work of the first generation of sociologists of the 20th century. or even traditions laid down in the 19th century.
As the American sociologist P. Berger wittily noted, “It is believed that sociologists are divided into two subspecies. The larger group consists of people who have close relationships with computers and other computing devices; these people carry out costly surveys in very specific areas of social life; they report the results of their research in barbaric English; from time to time their findings are relevant to one or another public policy issue. A smaller group consists of people who got into sociology due to a biographical error (they should have ended up in philosophy or literature); these people mostly write books about theories proposed by long-dead Germans; their theorizing has nothing to do with public policy, and it is good that this is so ”19.
However, despite the atypicality noted by Berger, this minority is held in high esteem in their corporation and does not seek to join the workshop of historians. It is interesting that even in some cases known to us, when a scientist with a history education came up with a major theoretical concept (for example, I. Wollerstein, S. Eisenstadt, G. Diligensky), he smoothly (and willingly) moved into the ranks of sociologists 20. We can only guess what played a greater role here: the sensitivity of the theorizing historian to recognition by the sociological community, or the underestimation of his contribution by the historical workshop, or something else, but this is a fact. The very process of such initiation is described in several lines by the French historian F. Aries. He notes that after the publication of his research "Child and family life under the Old Order "(1960)," sociologists, psychologists and even pediatricians have reoriented my book, drawing me along with it. In the United States, journalists called me "French sociologist" and one day I became an "American sociologist" for a famous Parisian weekly! " 21.
The process of "crossing the border" by individual defectors is objectively facilitated by the fact that the delimitation of disciplinary areas at the level of results, i.e. the finished study often really looks artificial. How conventional the division into different variants of historical = sociological synthesis is, can be judged by the works of N. Smelzer "Social changes in the industrial revolution", C. Tilly "Vendee", S. Aisenstadt "Revolution and transformation of societies", B. Moore " Social preconditions for dictatorship and democracy ", M. Mann" The origin of power in society "and many others 22. They can be reasonably attributed to any category, although in general social history differs from historical sociology precisely in that it uses theories developed by sociologists. Social history can be more focused on the period and country, historical sociology - on the concept and problem. In part, this is a question of the scientist's orientation: whether his task is to contribute to history or to sociology, with all the normative restrictions that come with it.
On the whole, although the relations of history with other social sciences have evolved in different ways in different periods, the largest representatives of historiography have always believed in the "common market" of social sciences 23. This belief persists today, only euphoria about the unlimited possibilities of universal laws, historical synthesis, mathematical methods, strong theory, etc. has diminished. The idea of the nature of our knowledge about the past, and about the past itself, has changed, which is no longer what it really was, and not even a reconstruction, but an image, representation or construction. The number of topics and plots that are interesting and accessible to the historian has increased many times over. The construction of more bizarre, previously not obvious connections between elements of different subsystems of past social reality has begun and is actively continuing. Although interdisciplinary interaction is not one-sided - the historical approach is preserved as a general scientific method, and historical reality itself is tangibly present in all social and humanitarian sciences - it is history that is the main discipline that creates scientific knowledge about the past.
* Savelieva Irina Maksimovna- Doctor of Historical Sciences, Director of the Institute of Humanitarian Historical = Theoretical Research of the State University - Higher School of Economics.
Poletaev Andrey Vladimirovich - Doctor of Economics, Professor, Deputy. Director of the Institute of Humanitarian Historical = Theoretical Research of the State University - Higher School of Economics.
1 See, for example: Faire de l'histoire. Eds. J. Le Goff, P. Nora, t. 1 - 3. Paris, 1974; La nouvelle histoire. Eds. R. Chartier, J. Le Goff, J. Revel. Paris, 1978; International Handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory. Ed. by G.G. Iggers, H.T. Parker. Westport, 1979; Wehler H.= U. Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung. Studien zu Aufgabe und Traditionen der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft. Göttingen, 1980; The New History: The 1980's and Beyond. Studies in Interdisciplinary history. Ed. by Th.K. Rabb, R. Rothberg. Princeton, 1982; Novick P. That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge, 1988; New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Ed. by P. Burke. Cambridge, 1991; Iggers G.G. Historiography in the Twentieth Century. From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Hanover, 1993; Passés recomposés: Champs et chantiers de l'histoire. Eds. J. Boutier, J. Dominique. Paris, 1995; L'Histoire et le métier d'historien en France 1945-1995. Ed. F. Bédarida. Paris, 1995; Windschuttle K. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past. San Francisco, 1996; Hobsbawm E. On History. London, 1997; Pomian K. Sur l "histoire. Paris, 1999; Tosh J. Striving for truth. How to master the skill of a historian. M., 2000; Clark E. History, Theory, Text. Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Cambridge, 2004.
2 Repina L.P."New Historical Science" and Social History. M., 1998; Problems of source study and historiography. Materials of the II scientific readings in memory of academician I. D. Kovalchenko. M., 2000; XX century: Methodological problems historical knowledge, parts 1 - 2. M., 2001; etc. This topic is regularly discussed on the pages periodicals- “Odysseus. A person in history ”,“ Dialogue with time. Almanac of Intellectual History "and others.
3 In this article, in order to avoid terminological confusion, we use the term "history" only to denote history = knowledge. In those cases when it comes to the history-text (historical narrative) and history = reality (the existence of humanity in time), this will be discussed separately.
4 Cf. Savelyeva I.M., Poletaev A.V. History and Time: In Search of the Lost. M., 1997, ch. 1.
5 Speaking about the fact that modern social sciences (including the humanities) do not deal specifically with the past, but transferred it to the jurisdiction of historical science, it is necessary to say about one important exception, namely, philology. History has always been closely associated with philology, which manifested itself, among other things, in the structure of education: from the inclusion of history in the course of grammar in the trivium to those that emerged in the 19th century. historical = philological faculties of universities. This “link” was determined by the fact that history, like philology, is linked to texts - historians use texts to study the past and write “history-texts”. Moreover, philology, at least since the Renaissance, also deals with the past. Moreover, it was Lorenzo Valla who was almost the first to conceptualize the concept of the past as another at the level of text analysis, putting forward and proving the idea that in the past other texts.
6 Stone L. The Past and the Present Revisited. London, 1987.
7 With regard to economics, this idea was developed by representatives of the German historical = economic school XIX- the beginning of the XX century. (for example, K. Bücher and A. Spithof), who considered it necessary to develop special economic theories for each "economic stage" or "economic style". Such theoretical concepts, tied to a particular historical period, they called "visual theories" as opposed to "timeless" or "formal" theory of economics, which should explain phenomena that are not subject to historical changes.
8 The idea that history deals only with the past and not the present is not generally accepted. V modern historiography the tendency of positioning the historian as a researcher of the "present" (histoire des temps présents - fr.) is represented primarily by the French historian P. Nora. As he wrote at the end of the XX century. "Modern history" is undergoing a metamorphosis, turning into a "historicized present" ( Nora P. Preface to the Russian edition. - P. Nora and others. France = memory. SPb., 1999, p. 5 - 14). In this case it comes on the possibility of applying the methods of historical analysis to current events, i.e. about the abandonment of specialization in the past, which has become a distinctive feature of historical science since its differentiation from other social sciences. It is essential that new approach rather, it provides a theoretical basis for noticeable new directions in historiographic practice, which primarily include " historical memory”And histoire des temps présents, developed most of all in French-speaking historiography. See for example: Chauveau A., Té tart Ph. Questions à histoire des temps présents. Bruxelles 1992; Écrire l "histoire du temps présent. En hommage à François Bédarida. Institut d" Histoire du Temps Présent. Paris, 1993; Hartog F. Régimes d'historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris, 2003.
9 Châtelet F. La naissance de l'histoire: La formation de la pensée historienne en Grèce. Paris, 1962, p. eleven.
10 Duby J. The development of historical research in France after 1950. - Odysseus. Man in history, 1991. M., 1992, p. 58.
11 Cf. Collingwood R.J. The idea of the story. Autobiography. M., 1980, p. 238.
12 Wed "Naturally = scientific experiment corresponds in the historical = humanitarian sciences to criticism of sources", - wrote M. Heidegger in the 1940s. - Heidegger M. Time and being. M., 1993, p. 45.
13 The most famous work in Russia is still the work of I. Kovalchenko, which also contains a bibliography of previous studies on this topic. Cm. I. D. Kovalchenko Historical research methods. M., 1987, p. 106-127.
14 Mayminas E.Z. Planning processes in the economy: information aspect. 2nd ed. M., 1971, p. 244 - 245.
15 Malakhov V.S. Interpretation. - Modern Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. M., 1998, p. 169 - 170.
16 Block M. The Apology of History, or The Craft of the Historian. M., 1986, p. eleven.
17 Halbwachs M. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris, 1925; idem... La topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre Sainte. Etude de mémoire collective. Paris, 1941; idem... La mémoire collective. Paris, 1950.
18 In the most explicit form, the conceptual, conceptual and theoretical apparatus of the social sciences is used in the works of J. Levy devoted to economic and social history, as well as in the discussion of theoretical problems of microanalysis. In this sense, the work of this Italian historian is extremely representative. Here are just some examples of the productive use of social theories of microanalysis in the work of Levy. From microeconomics, he used the concept of "bounded rationality" of the behavior of economic agents, developed by G. Simon, who later received the Nobel Prize in Economics, and the neoinstitutional theory of the functioning of markets, which dates back to the works of R. Coase, and from the 1960s was developed by A. Alchyan , D. North et al. From the apparatus of microsociology, Levy borrows the theory of symbolic interactionism (J. G. Mead, G. Bloomer); “The scale of social interaction” by F. Barth; the symbolic power of P. Bourdieu, the network interactions of J. Homans, etc.
19 Berger P. In Praise of Particularity: The Concept of Mediating Structures. - Review of Politics, July 1976, v. 38, no. 3, p. 399-400.
20 Back in 1923, K. Breisig became the first German historian to head the department of sociology at the University of Berlin, created especially for him.
21 Aries F. Child and family life under the Old Order. Yekaterinburg, 1999, p. 12.
22 Smelser N. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry. Chicago, 1959; Tilly Ch. The Vendée: A Sociological Analysis of the Counterrevolution of 1793. Cambridge, 1964; Eisenstadt NS. Revolution and Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Study of Civilizations. M., 1999; Moore W.E... Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston, 1966; Mann M. The Sources of Social Power, v. 1 - 2. V. 1. A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1780, v. 2. The rise of Classes and Nation States. Cambridge, 1986 - 1993.
23 See, for example: Braudel F. History and social sciences. Historical duration. - Philosophy and methodology of history. Collection of translations. M., 1977, p. 116.
I. M. SAVELIEVA, A. V. POLETAEV *
History in the space of the social sciences
In recent decades, the relationship of history with the social sciences has been discussed in a large number of works devoted to "historiographic turns". Therefore, taking into account the elaboration of the topic of "turns in historiography", including in the Russian one, we want to offer some more general considerations about the mode of existence of the historical discipline among other social and humanities, about models of interdisciplinary interaction.
Understanding the specifics modern history(historical knowledge), in our opinion, requires consideration of three interrelated topics:
1) Character differences between history and other social sciences;
2) The degree of scientific character of history, that is, its likeness with other social sciences;
3) Models interactions stories with other social sciences.
The scientific novelty of this approach consists in using the capabilities of the sociology of knowledge to analyze historical epistemology and consistently study the relationship between history and various forms of knowledge about the past.
History as knowledge of the past
Modern historians overwhelmingly understand history as a science of past social reality, but usually they do not think this thought out to the end, taking it for granted. In fact, accepting this thesis requires answering several questions.
First, why did knowledge about the past stand out as an independent area only in social = scientific knowledge?
Secondly, if history is knowledge about the past, then how to define the rest of the social sciences by the parameter of time? Are they only the sciences of the present and, if so, where is the border between the past and the present in social = scientific knowledge and how is it determined?
The division of social sciences according to the parameter of time did not appear immediately. For example, at the initial stage of specialization of social = scientific knowledge, major works on historical sociology were no exception, which they later became. The reason was not only that sociology was going through a certain stage of self-determination and had not yet made a final choice, but also in some of them characteristic of the 19th century. seductions about the possibility of discovering universal or "natural" laws suitable for "all times" (positivist paradigm in social science, coming from O. Comte, and an evolutionary approach focused on the analysis of social dynamics).
The subsequent rejection of the natural = scientific approach in sociology, economics and other social disciplines was accompanied by a general cooling towards the problems of the past. The development by the social sciences of an independent categorical and theoretical apparatus, the rejection of the once fashionable "historical" approach and the appeal to the methods of structural = functional analysis, in a sense, cut them off from the past. As the American historian L. Stone rightly noted a quarter of a century ago, "not a single group of representatives of the social sciences is seriously interested in either the facts or the interpretation of changes if they occurred in the past."
At the same time, it is obvious that such a statement applies only to the study of the distant past. After all, if you think about it, the overwhelming part of the information about social reality, which the social sciences operate on, in one way or another also refers to the past. Any today's newspaper tells about yesterday's events, that is, about the past, although readers perceive the latest newspaper information as a story about the present.
Let's take an example from the field of economics. Stockbroker with the most recent change information exchange rates , interest rates, stock prices, etc., will be extremely surprised if he is told that he is studying the past, although in fact it is so. In this sense, he is no different from an economic historian who analyzes the fall in stock prices during the Great Depression. In both cases, these events have already occurred, they are already in the past, and the only question is how far this past is from the present. In other words, information about stock prices of 70 = years old and one minute ago is qualitatively the same, in the sense that it is information about the past, not about the present. A historian differs from a broker not in what information he analyzes, but in what he does it for, what actions he performs based on the analysis of information about the past (one writes an article, and the other buys some securities).
An example from the field of politics is just as clear - any politician takes into account the latest events and actions of other actors. political activities, but good politicians take into account both the events of a much more distant past, and the experience of the great figures of past eras: W. Churchill, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Caesar. Suffice it to recall Machiavelli's "Sovereign", a book that was written for the present and the future, but at the same time permeated with the past.
Note, however, that there is no historical past in the works of Machiavelli. This word is perhaps the key to understanding exactly which "past" and "present" figure in the separation of history and social sciences. This distinction is associated with the understanding of the historical past as another... Thus, the border between the present and the past is determined: the present, that is, the subject of specialized social sciences, includes that part of the past when society was not others in relation to the present, and therefore the schemes, models, theories and concepts created for the analysis of modernity are applicable to it. It is clear that this border is conditional and blurred; in individual disciplines, and even within each of them, the line between the past and the present can vary greatly. But the general principle of division "by time" remains unchanged.
Thus, we have come to the answer to the question why only in one type of knowledge - scientific knowledge about social reality - is knowledge related to the past specially emphasized. From the point of view of the "subject", it is clear that of the three types of realities - divine, natural and social - only the latter is thought of as subject to significant (rapid, qualitative) changes. Divine reality is often generally assumed to be unchanged, but if some changes are allowed in it, then periods of the past that are qualitatively different from the present (for example, in Christianity the era before the Incarnation of Christ) usually attract much less attention than the present and the future. In the world of inanimate nature, either a low rate of change or the absence of qualitative transformations is postulated, and the analysis of the past states of the object of study of a particular science no longer requires special disciplines and is solved directly within the framework astronomy, geology, etc. For wildlife, where the rate of change is higher, this problem is already expressed more clearly, which is the reason for the emergence of such branches of biology as paleozoology and paleobotany.
From the point of view of the method, it is also understandable why specialization "in time" arises in the framework of scientific knowledge about social reality. Other types of knowledge - philosophy, morality, art, ideology, etc. - although they construct not only the present, but also the past and future social reality, they mainly do this with the help of timeless, atemporal categories ( being, goodness, beauty, benefit, power, etc.). In social = scientific knowledge, there is no “theory in general” that is not tied to time and social space. Even the most formal economic models proceed from a certain reality characteristic of a certain time and certain countries.
Therefore, in particular, we cannot agree with the widespread opinion that the historian only transports into the past the problems that representatives of other social sciences are dealing with in relation to modern society. The point is that theories public life are applicable only to a certain historical period and are adequate only to it.
The scope and applicability of most modern economic, sociological, and political concepts does not exceed 100 - 150 years (and in many cases much less). Everything outside this period requires a different theoretical and categorical apparatus. Starting at some point, for a theoretical analysis of the vanished reality, it is necessary to develop other schemes, models and concepts. Thus, historical knowledge turns out to be not a single science, but a system of sciences, more precisely, even a multitude of systems, each of which corresponds to some type of society that existed in the past. Relatively speaking, ideally, for example, the analysis of the Enlightenment requires own sociology, economics, political science, etc. Or, in other words: there must be a sociology of the Enlightenment, Renaissance, late Middle Ages, early Middle Ages, etc. irrelevant problems. The human resources involved in this venture are very, very limited, which explains the insufficient "theoreticalness" of the research carried out by historians, and the small number of studies of past social reality produced by scientists = social scientists.
Of course, the concept we propose is applicable only to the modern scientific episteme, in which there are a number of established social disciplines that meet the standards of scientific knowledge. And the methods that historical science uses, develops (or should have found and applied) to cognize its object, reflect (or should reflect) the state social knowledge presently. But, as it seems to us, the introduction of a third "classification axis" - time - makes it possible to more accurately determine the place of history in modern system knowledge.
The fact that history is concerned with the study of the past does not mean that it is not connected with the present. Historical knowledge at every moment of time is tied to the present, dictated by it and is largely determined by the present. In this sense, the construction of the past reality, embodied in today's historical knowledge, is inextricably linked with the construction of the present, presented in the social sciences.
History as scientific knowledge
The difference in the criterion of time between history and the social sciences, in our opinion, does not imply differences in the method of research. Our next thesis is that both empirical and theoretical foundations of history, from the point of view of modern science of science, do not have fundamental differences from other social sciences.
The cardinal question of historical theory is the question of how to study a disappeared object, that is, an object that existed in the past. Since the object of cognition in history, as a rule, cannot be observed or reproduced experimentally, in discussions about the scientific nature of history, the problem of "the reality of the past" often arises. However, it looks somewhat contrived: all social sciences work with observations related to the past, and they are little worried about its reality. And, say, in astrophysics, this problem should have been even more acute: the picture of the starry sky, observed at the present time, reflects only the past state, and very distant in time. Moreover, this picture has a complex temporal structure, since its different elements (observed stars) refer to different time moments, depending on the distance from the Earth (more precisely, from the observer). Astrophysicists are essentially concerned with such a distant past, about which historians and archaeologists they cannot even think, but they do not care about the problem of the reality of this past. They work with information (with signals) about objects, and the reality of these signals is not questioned.
The modern sociology of knowledge equates the status of the reality of the past and the present. “The Historical Spirit believes in reality the past and proceeds from the fact that the past as a form of being and, to some extent, as a content, by its nature does not differ from the present. Perceiving what no longer exists as former, he admits that what happened (in the past) existed in a certain time and place, just as what we see now exists ... This means, in particular, that it is absolutely unacceptable to interpret what happened (in the past) as fictional, unreal and that the absence of the past (and the future) should not in the least be considered unreality, "wrote F. Chatelet.
A feature of social reality that radically distinguishes it from natural reality is that a significant part of the objects of study are of a limited intersubjective nature. At the heart of social reality as a product of human activity are acts of thinking, but they are inaccessible for direct observation. Therefore, human actions (social and cultural) are distinguished as the primary object in the study of social reality. However, they are localized in time and space and are limitedly intersubjective. These actions are intersubjective only at the moment they are performed, and due to the locality, only a limited number of people can observe them. Any given specific action has a one-time, single character and is not reproducible as an object for repeated observations. In this regard, in the social sciences, when it comes to the study of human actions, completely intersubjective are data observations, not yourself objects observations. In general, in order to analyze any society, one does not need to see it.
Moreover, in the social sciences, only the results or products of cultural actions fully meet the requirement of intersubjectivity. At the same time, the intersubjective character is inherent in both the object form itself and the symbolic content of these objects. Strictly speaking, only material objects and messages contained in them, presented in symbolic form, have a stable (persisting in time) intersubjective character.
The thesis that historical knowledge differs from other social sciences in that historians are unable to observe the object under study is essentially correct. However, the overwhelming majority of social scientists also do not engage in direct observation, unlike scientists = natural scientists, who devote a lot of time to observations. Social scientists, on the other hand, deal with data (messages) about an object, and in this sense they are not much different from historians. There are, of course, exceptions. Such disciplines as, for example, cultural anthropology, to a large extent psychology and partly linguistics (in the framework of the study of living natural languages) really actively rely on direct observation. But in most public and humanities- economics, sociology, political science, international relations, right - scientists are dealing with messages (data, texts, etc.).
This can partly explain what was observed in the second half of the 20th century. increased interest in text analysis. In a sense, it reflects the desire to increase the "scientific character" of social = humanitarian research, and not a departure from it. The requirement for the intersubjectivity of empirical material, which is an indispensable condition for the objectification of scientific knowledge (i.e., its recognition as knowledge or a true statement about reality) naturally brings texts to the fore. As J. Duby noted, “Historians have developed a desire to see in a document, in evidence, that is, in a text, an independent scientific value ... They are aware that the only reality available to them is in the document”.
As another argument in favor of the difference between the empirical basis of history from other social sciences, the thesis is put forward that there is no feedback between theory and empirical evidence. Meaning the theoretical component of scientific knowledge, in the very broad sense, posing questions and looking for answers to them, we can say that in order to answer new questions, the researcher needs new information. It can arise both due to new data (information), and due to the new use of existing ones.
Basically, in the XX century. historical science has demonstrated colossal possibilities for the development of both (that is, involvement into the circulation of new data (messages), or "sources" in the language of historians, and the extraction of radically new information from those already used). Of course, there are certain limitations here: a historian cannot organize a sociological survey, examine a specific enterprise or conduct psychological testing of a certain person. However, it should be noted (and, we think, every social scientist will agree with this) that the presence of specialists in the "current reality" of the potential for obtaining radically new data often does not coincide with the real possibilities.
A sociologist who does not work for a public opinion research center has very little chance of getting the issue of interest included in questionnaires(by the way, it is not so easy for the employees of these centers either). Specialist in international relations in the overwhelming majority of cases, he cannot be present at the negotiations. The economist cannot get access to the documents of a particular firm, and it is almost impossible to get the statistical office to start collecting new data (at best, this takes years). The psychologist can hardly count on the fact that he will be able to get in his laboratory any famous person and persuade her to get tested. Well, lawyers and literary scholars, in principle, are deprived of the opportunity to initiate new data in accordance with their research interests.
As R. Collingwood noted back in the 1940s, “historians do not equip expeditions to countries where wars and revolutions take place. And they do not do this, not because they are less energetic and courageous than natural scientists, or less able to raise the money that such an expedition would require. They do not do this because the facts that could be obtained with the help of the expedition, as well as the facts that could be obtained by deliberately fomenting revolutions at home, would not teach historians anything that they want to know. "
This fully applies to all social scientists.
Finally, the idea of science as empirical = theoretical knowledge includes the thesis that not only theory should be based (with all possible reservations) on empirical data, but theoretical constructions should somehow be verified using empirical data (in practice) ... This serves as another reason for doubts about the "scientific character" of historical knowledge, since it is believed that historians, unlike other social scientists, do not have the opportunity to test their concepts in practice.
However, as shown in a variety of modern studies in the field of sociology and philosophy of science, theories are not refuted or confirmed only with the help of empirical data. Checks of this kind are only one, far from the most essential, mechanism for the formation of the social stock of scientific knowledge. The idea that history differs from "normal" science by the impossibility of conducting an experiment is based on the natural = scientific concept of scientific "norms" and is essentially archaic. The other extreme is an attempt to adjust historical science to the standards of natural = scientific knowledge.
In fact, no social scientist (the only exception is psychology) can conduct scientific experiment in reality, and historians in this sense are by no means an exception. If we talk about thought experiments, then here historians have exactly the same, if not great, opportunities for experimentation as an economist or political scientist.
In the XX century. the toolkit of historians who traditionally studied written sources with the help of textual criticism, paleography, epigraphy and other applied historical disciplines has been significantly enriched by the methods of adjacent social sciences. Thanks to the emergence of quantitative history, procedures for criticizing statistical sources came into use, and sociology, anthropology and demography contributed to the rooting of content analysis, oral questioning and other non-historical methods in historical studies, up to the technical procedures of climatology applied by E. Le Roy Ladurie.
And yet, the main change in the empirical base of historical research did not occur in the material itself and the methods of processing it, although progress is obvious here, but in a new understanding of the role of empirical material, which can be conditionally designated as a transition from source to information. Since the end of the 19th century, that is, at the stage of transformation of history into a science, the concepts of information and source essentially begin to separate. If earlier it was believed that each source carries specific and fixed information, now it has become clear that the same document or object can be a source of different information.
Formally, the informational approach has not received any noticeable distribution in historical research. The word "information" is used in historical works, but not as a clear scientific concept, but only as a synonym for "information", "data", etc. Even during the period of surge in interest in information theory, the number of works on application information analysis in history it was relatively small. There are at least two reasons for this.
The first, and rather obvious, is a high level of formalization of general systems theory, information theory and, accordingly, their combination - theory information systems... The traditional lack of mathematical training for historians naturally hindered attempts to master these theories and their application to historical research.
The second, no less important circumstance is the incompleteness of the theory itself. information systems and its insufficient elaboration, which is clearly manifested when trying to apply it to complex social objects. If the first reason does not require comment, then the second should be discussed in more detail. But first, let us recall that within the framework of the system = information approach, the distinction between information and data (information, messages) is very important, which can be considered a synonym for the traditional term "source" (although the source is also used in the sense of a carrier of information).
A domestic economist noted: “Information is not a thing, but some relation between the environment and a given system, an object and an observer, a sender and a receiver, which together, in turn, form the information system under consideration ... By itself, any information, data about any neither were the objects identical to the information about these objects. Data and corresponding messages can be characterized from different sides in terms of content, the number of characters, their recording, etc. But messages carry information only insofar as they remove uncertainty, increase the recipient's, consumer's knowledge of the object of interest. Consequently, information depends on the ratio of the recipient's a priori and a posteriori knowledge of the object (before and after receiving the message), on the recipient's ability to understand the message and compare it with the previous information, data (if he had them). A necessary prerequisite is also the inclusion of the object about which the message arrives in the system considered by the observer. Otherwise, the data about this object are not, as it were, recorded by the observer and do not carry any information for him. "
The use of a systemic = informational approach makes it possible to visually structure the main problems associated with the analysis of empirical material in historical research. In particular, we can say that there is a kind of "systemic uncertainty" here, which can be illustrated with a specific example.
Suppose that we have a certain source of the type of "historical legends" (according to E. Bernheim), for example, written in the XI century. text about the crusade. When working with this text, the following systematic = informational approaches are possible.
1. We consider society (social reality) of the 11th century to be a system = object; we regard the author of a text as a channel for transmitting a message about an object, the text itself as a message, and ourselves as a system = a message receiver. This message carries information for us to the extent that it reduces the uncertainty of our knowledge about the object (society of the XI century).
2. We still consider ourselves the system = receiver, and the system = object - the society of the 11th century, but we consider the author of the text as an element of this system (or generally take his personality as independent system). In this case, the text is a message about the personality of the author (his thinking, knowledge, etc.), and only through him - a message about the society of which he was a component.
3. Finally, the text itself can be regarded as a system = object (in this case, stationary, not dynamic, but this essentially does not change the matter). When reading this text, we carry out its mental interpretation. If we fix this internal interpretation in the form of a text, which is designed for someone to read it, then a transition to one of the two previous options takes place, with the difference that the reader of our text acts as a system = message receiver:
a) our interpretation is viewed as a message about the text as a system = object, and we ourselves are regarded as a message transmission channel;
b) our interpretation is viewed as a message about us as a system = object or as an element (subsystem) of our social reality as a whole. In this case, our text can be interpreted as a message about our social reality or about us as a system of personality.
This really existing variety of approaches to the analysis of texts from the point of view of the theory of information systems (moreover, in practice, these approaches are mixed within the framework of one study), corresponds to the variety of approaches to the interpretation of texts within the framework of hermeneutics and semiotics.
A domestic philosopher wrote about this: “During the 60s, a confrontation between two main approaches to interpretation<текстов>: existential = hermeneutic and structural = semiotic. The hermeneutic interpretation is based on the idea of the text as the objectification of the spirit. The meaning-forming components here are “individuality”, “life”, “inner experience”, “objective spirit”, etc. The methodological basis of structural = semiotic interpretation is the interpretation of the text as a set of interrelated elements (signs) in a certain way; the semantic components here are "orders" independent of the subject, according to which these signs are organized. In hermeneutics, interpretation is aimed at comprehending the meaning of the text as a message addressed to a potential reader, in structuralism - at decoding the code that determines the interaction of signs ”.
It is easy to see that practically the same problems are discussed here that arise when analyzing texts within the framework of the informational approach. Within the framework of the hermeneutic approach, the system-object is the author of the text and through him the reality surrounding him (see above case 2), within the framework of the structural = semiotic approach, the system = object is the text itself (see above case 3).
Interaction of history with other social sciences
A characteristic feature of the historiography of the second half of the XX century. the use of theories of various levels created in other social and humanitarian sciences for the analysis of the past social reality became. Therefore, in the analysis of modern historiography, the focus of attention is the problem of interdisciplinarity, which in relation to history is distinguished by its clearly expressed specificity and manifests itself in two main configurations. They can be described as “appropriation strategies” on the part of historians and “turning to the past” on the part of representatives of other social sciences. (We will try not to touch upon the topic of "historiographic turns" along and across the studied topic).
Although interdisciplinarity as a theoretical problem of history came to the fore only in the second half of the 20th century, the interdisciplinary approach itself became a distinctive feature of historiography, in fact, from the moment of its formation. Suffice it to look at this direction of historical knowledge back in the 19th century. - whether it be the asserting Marxist school, geohistory or social = cultural history, - to understand that scientific historical knowledge, already in the period of self-determination, was based on the methodological tools of various social and humanitarian sciences, which, of course, turned out to be fruitful only if history retained its own methods of construction past social reality.
The theme of the place of history in the system of social and humanitarian sciences as a methodological problem was articulated already in the first third of the last century, in particular, by the founders of the “school of the Annals” M. Blok and L. Fevre. However, in the 1930s, most social disciplines were in their infancy, and the founders of the "school of the Annals" felt reverence not for social ones (according to Blok, these disciplines, like history, still survived childhood), but for the natural sciences. First of all, they were struck by the discoveries in the field of physics. A fundamentally important consequence of this situation was the relatively equal relations between representatives of the social sciences, including history (the “historical synthesis” proposed by A. Burr was also based on this principle). Perhaps the not so prestigious position of the social sciences at that stage, some ignorance of their achievements or underestimation of their successes gave a very important result. In the first half of the last century, the claims of historians to produce their own theories were clearly higher. For example, the "old" social history that was being created then (A. Pirenne, M. Blok, L. Fevre, F. Braudel) in the sense of theoretical independence, in our opinion, is not inferior to the "new" social history of the 1970s, and, perhaps , and surpasses it.
But in the last half century, historians have practically not produced their own "historical" theories. Examples of several important exceptions that have appeared, however, quite a long time ago, are E. Kantorovich's Two Bodies of the King (1957), a book that laid the foundation for the "ceremonialist" trend in historiography; F. Braudel's theory of three levels of social change (1958); the theory of childhood in the early modern era by F. Aries (1960); The Long Middle Ages by J. Le Goff (1985). Basically, creating large conceptual works, historians began to solve the problem of theoretical renewal, referring to the theories of various social and humanitarian sciences. This process was later called the “appropriation strategy”.
The strategy of appropriation is implicitly based on the idea that history, which can be viewed as a social science analyzing past, no longer existing societies, can naturally rely on the theoretical apparatus of the social sciences dealing with the present. Since the 1960s, the updating of historiography has been taking place at a high rate and the following model of interaction has developed throughout it: this or that social science - the corresponding historical subdiscipline - the choice of macro = (later and micro =) theory - its application to historical material.
This model turned the relationship between history and the social sciences that existed in the positivist paradigm. If in the XIX century. it was assumed that historians should collect empirical material for the social sciences in order to develop theories on its basis, but now, on the contrary, social sciences are becoming suppliers of theoretical concepts for history.
The rise in the popularity of theoretical knowledge and the degree to which historians are familiar with modern social concepts (no matter how superficial it may be) is explained by a whole complex of obvious prerequisites. The social sciences and the humanities themselves had to not only establish themselves, but also develop sufficiently so that from them it was possible with greater partiality and analysis to choose theories that promise new perspectives in the study of the past. In addition, the theories developed in social science and their authors should have become sufficiently well-known or even popular. And, finally, the dissatisfaction necessary for the creation of new scientific knowledge, the feeling of another epistemological "crisis" - disappointment in old approaches, a feeling of exhaustion of possibilities, must be constantly reproduced.
The “appropriation strategy” that has emerged in historiography over the past half century is faced with several dangers, each of which is associated with the loss of the “sense of time”.
First of all, in the works of historians there is often a kind of “theoretical lag,” that is, the use of rather old and no longer quite adequate theories from the point of view of modern science. It happens that the focus of historians is on the "classics" who have lost their relevance in the context of their discipline. Not to mention the enduring popularity of K. Marx, conceptual historical works are full of references to the works of S. Freud, E. Durkheim, M. Weber, L. Levy = Bruhl, the early works of N. Elias, etc. the mainstream of "historical memory", a new direction in historiography, whose representatives generally ignored modern social psychology, choosing the concept of " collective memory "M. Halbwachs, developed in the first half of the last century.
The reasons for such a time lag are different: information gap; difficulties associated with orientation in a "foreign" discipline and the ability to assess the potential of new theories; professional unpreparedness for mastering complex concepts, etc. But, as far as we can judge, this is not the specificity of history. For the same reasons, a "bad mix" arises in many interdisciplinary fields.
At the same time, there are a sufficient number of examples of “quick reaction” of historians to innovations in the social and humanitarian sciences. So, in due time the theory of modernization, world-system analysis, the concept of symbolic power penetrated into historical research almost without delay. Some theories of contemporary social and cultural anthropology were just as quickly assimilated by historians. The same can be said about the "linguistic turn" in historiography. Today we have many interesting examples of constructing microhistory in the image and likeness of microsociology and microeconomics with the use of the corresponding concepts.
In addition to the "theoretical lag" within the framework of the "appropriation strategy" there is a potential (and often realized) threat anachronisms caused by the application of theories focused on the functioning of one type of society (of one time) to societies of another time, as we have already discussed above.
Anachronisms of this kind have been observed in various fields. As a result, many historians who have tried to combine proven methods of working with historical material and theoretical models of the social sciences have met with failure (as, indeed, a number of sociologists who have come up with the macrotheories of historical sociology). In those sections of historiography, where impressive results were initially obtained, over time, the question arose about the limits of applicability of the theories created to explain modern society to societies of the past. Overall, it appears that very few social theories can be successfully applied to the study of past societies.
It is useful to look at the problem of interdisciplinary synthesis from a different perspective - after all, other social sciences also have their own fields of study related to the study of the past (history).
In principle, when an interdisciplinary direction arises, two disciplines are involved in it, and its creation and functioning can either take place autonomously within each of the two disciplines, or only in one of them. The "division of labor" in related sciences between specialties and specialists, in this case historians and non-historians, occurs in very different ways. Let us explain our thesis on the example of such a pair of disciplines as sociology and history, which, respectively, produce social history and historical sociology. Representatives of historical sociology either make specific historical problems a subject sociological analysis, or they offer theories of the synthesis of sociology and history, continuing in a certain sense the work of the first generation of sociologists of the 20th century. or even traditions laid down in the 19th century.
As the American sociologist P. Berger wittily noted, “It is believed that sociologists are divided into two subspecies. The larger group consists of people who have close relationships with computers and other computing devices; these people carry out costly surveys in very specific areas of social life; they report the results of their research in barbaric English language; from time to time their findings are relevant to one or another public policy issue. A smaller group consists of people who got into sociology due to a biographical error (they should have ended up in philosophy or literature); these people mostly write books about theories proposed by long-dead Germans; their theorizing has nothing to do with public policy, and it is good that this is so. "
However, despite the atypicality noted by Berger, this minority is held in high esteem in their corporation and does not seek to join the workshop of historians. It is interesting that even in some cases known to us, when a scientist with a history education came forward with a large theoretical concept (for example, I. Wollerstein, S. Eisenstadt, G. Diligensky), he smoothly (and willingly) moved into the ranks of sociologists. We can only guess what played a greater role here: the sensitivity of the theorizing historian to recognition by the sociological community, or the underestimation of his contribution by the historical workshop, or something else, but this is a fact. The very process of such initiation is described in several lines by the French historian F. Aries. He notes that after the publication of his study The Child and Family Life under the Old Order (1960), “sociologists, psychologists and even pediatricians refocused my book, dragging me along with it. In the United States, journalists called me "French sociologist", and one day I became an "American sociologist" for a famous Parisian weekly! "
The process of "crossing the border" by individual defectors is objectively facilitated by the fact that delimitation by disciplinary areas at the level of results, that is, finished research, often really looks artificial. How conventional the division into different variants of historical = sociological synthesis is, can be judged from the works of N. Smelzer "Social changes in the industrial revolution", C. Tilly "Vendee", S. Aisenstadt "Revolution and transformation of societies", B. Moore " Social preconditions of dictatorship and democracy ", M. Mann" The origin of power in society "and many others. They can be reasonably attributed to any category, although in general social history differs from historical sociology precisely in that it uses theories developed by sociologists. Social history can be more focused on the period and country, historical sociology - on the concept and problem. In part, this is a question of the scientist's orientation: whether his task is to contribute to history or to sociology, with all the normative restrictions that come with it.
In general, although the relations of history with other social sciences have evolved in different ways in different periods, the largest representatives of historiography have always believed in the "common market" of social sciences. This belief persists today, only euphoria about the unlimited possibilities of universal laws, historical synthesis, mathematical methods, a strong theory, etc. The idea of the nature of our knowledge about the past has changed, and about the past itself, which is no longer what it really was, and not even a reconstruction, but an image, representation or construction. The number of topics and plots that are interesting and accessible to the historian has increased many times over. The construction of more bizarre, previously not obvious connections between elements of different subsystems of past social reality has begun and is actively continuing. Although interdisciplinary interaction is not one-sided - the historical approach is preserved as a general scientific method, and historical reality itself is tangibly present in all social and humanitarian sciences - it is history that is the main discipline that creates scientific knowledge about the past.
* - Doctor of Historical Sciences, Director of the Institute of Humanitarian Historical = Theoretical Research of the State University - Higher School of Economics.
- Doctor of Economics, Professor, Deputy. Director of the Institute of Humanitarian Historical = Theoretical Research of the State University - Higher School of Economics.
See, for example: Faire de l'histoire. Eds. J. Le Goff, P. Nora, t. 1 - 3. Paris, 1974; La nouvelle histoire. Eds. R. Chartier, J. Le Goff, J. Revel. Paris, 1978; International Handbook of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory. G. G. Iggers, H. T. Parker. Westport, 1979; Wehler H.= U. Historische Sozialwissenschaft und Geschichtsschreibung. Studien zu Aufgabe und Traditionen der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft. Göttingen, 1980; The New History: The 1980's and Beyond. Studies in Interdisciplinary history. Th. K. Rabb, R. Rothberg. Princeton, 1982; Novick P. That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge, 1988; New Perspectives on Historical Writing. P. Burke. Cambridge, 1991; Iggers G. G. Historiography in the Twentieth Century. From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Hanover, 1993; Passés recomposés: Champs et chantiers de l'histoire. Eds. J. Boutier, J. Dominique. Paris, 1995; L'Histoire et le métier d'historien en France 1945-1995. Ed. F. Bédarida. Paris, 1995; Windschuttle K. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past. San Francisco, 1996; Hobsbawm E. On History. London, 1997; Pomian K. Sur l "histoire. Paris, 1999; Tosh J. Striving for truth. How to master the skill of a historian. M., 2000; Clark E. History, Theory, Text. Historians and the Linguistic Turn. Cambridge, 2004.
"New Historical Science" and Social History. M., 1998; Problems of source study and historiography. Materials of the II scientific readings in memory of the academician. M., 2000; XX century: Methodological problems of historical knowledge, parts 1 - 2. Moscow, 2001; and others. This topic is regularly discussed on the pages of periodicals - “Odysseus. A person in history ”,“ Dialogue with time. Almanac of Intellectual History "and others.
In this article, in order to avoid terminological confusion, we use the term "history" only to denote history = knowledge. In those cases when it comes to the history-text (historical narrative) and history = reality (the existence of humanity in time), this will be discussed separately.
Cm. , History and Time: In Search of the Lost. M., 1997, ch. 1.
Speaking about the fact that modern social sciences (including the humanities) do not specifically deal with the past, but have transferred it to the jurisdiction of historical science, it is necessary to say about one important exception, namely, philology. History has always been closely associated with philology, which manifested itself, among other things, in the structure of education: from the inclusion of history in the course of grammar in the trivium to those that emerged in the 19th century. historical = philological faculties universities. This “link” was determined by the fact that history, like philology, is linked to texts - historians use texts to study the past and write “history-texts”. Moreover, philology, at least since the Renaissance, also deals with the past. Moreover, it was Lorenzo Valla who was almost the first to conceptualize the concept of the past as another at the level of text analysis, putting forward and proving the idea that in the past other texts.
Stone L. The Past and the Present Revisited. London, 1987.
With regard to economics, this idea was developed by representatives of the German historical = economic school of the 19th - early 20th centuries. (for example, K. Bücher and A. Spitgof), who considered it necessary to develop special economic theories for each "housekeeping stage" or "housekeeping style". Such theoretical concepts, tied to a particular historical period, they called "visual theories" as opposed to "timeless" or "formal" theory of economics, which should explain phenomena that are not subject to historical changes.
The idea that history deals only with the past and not the present is not generally accepted. In modern historiography, the tendency of positioning the historian as a researcher of the "present" (histoire des temps présents - fr.) is represented primarily by the French historian P. Nora. As he wrote at the end of the XX century. "Modern history" is undergoing a metamorphosis, turning into a "historicized present" ( Nora P. Preface to the Russian edition. - P. Nora and others. France = memory. SPb., 1999, p. 5 - 14). In this case, we are talking about the possibility of applying the methods of historical analysis to current events, that is, about the rejection of specialization in the past, which has become a distinctive feature of historical science from the moment of its differentiation from other social sciences. It is significant that the new approach rather provides a theoretical basis for noticeable new directions in historiographic practice, which primarily include "historical memory" and histoire des temps présents, which is developed most of all in French-speaking historiography. See for example: Chauveau A., Té tart Ph. Questions à histoire des temps présents. Bruxelles 1992; Écrire l "histoire du temps présent. En hommage à François Bédarida. Institut d" Histoire du Temps Présent. Paris, 1993; Hartog F. Régimes d'historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris, 2003.
Châtelet F. La naissance de l'histoire: La formation de la pensée historienne en Grèce. Paris, 1962, p. eleven.
Duby J. The development of historical research in France after 1950. - Odysseus. Man in history, 1991. M., 1992, p. 58.
Cm. Collingwood R.J. The idea of the story. Autobiography. M., 1980, p. 238.
Wed "Naturally = scientific experiment corresponds in the historical = humanitarian sciences to criticism of sources", - wrote M. Heidegger in the 1940s. - Heidegger M. Time and being. M., 1993, p. 45.
The most famous work in Russia is still the work of I. Kovalchenko, which also contains bibliography previous research on this topic. Cm. Historical research methods. M., 1987, p. 106-127.
Planning processes in the economy: informational aspect. 2nd ed. M., 1971, p. 244 - 245.
Interpretation. - Modern Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. M., 1998, p. 169 - 170.
Block M. The Apology of History, or The Craft of the Historian. M., 1986, p. eleven.
Halbwachs M. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris, 1925; idem... La topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre Sainte. Etude de mémoire collective. Paris, 1941; idem... La mémoire collective. Paris, 1950.
In the most explicit form, the conceptual, conceptual and theoretical apparatus of the social sciences is used in the works of J. Levy, devoted to economic and social history, as well as in the discussion of theoretical problems of microanalysis. In this sense, the work of this Italian historian is extremely representative. Here are just some examples of the productive use of social theories of microanalysis in the work of Levy. From microeconomics, he used the concept of "bounded rationality" of the behavior of economic agents, developed by G. Simon, who later received Nobel prize in economics, and the neoinstitutional theory of the functioning of markets, which goes back to the works of R. Coase, and since the 1960s was developed by A. Alchian, D. North and others. From the apparatus of microsociology, Levy borrows the theory of symbolic interactionism (J.G. . Bloomer); “The scale of social interaction” by F. Barth; the symbolic power of P. Bourdieu, the network interactions of J. Homans, etc.
Berger P. In Praise of Particularity: The Concept of Mediating Structures. - Review of Politics, July 1976, v. 38, no. 3, p. 399-400.
Back in 1923, K. Breisig became the first German historian to head the Department of Sociology at the University of Berlin, created especially for him.
Aries F. Child and family life under the Old Order. Yekaterinburg, 1999, p. 12.
Smelser N. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry. Chicago, 1959; Tilly Ch. The Vendée: A Sociological Analysis of the Counterrevolution of 1793. Cambridge, 1964; Eisenstadt NS. Revolution and Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Study of Civilizations. M., 1999; Moore W. E... Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston, 1966; Mann M. The Sources of Social Power, v. 1 - 2. V. 1. A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1780, v. 2. The Rise of Classes and Nation States. Cambridge, 1986 - 1993.
See for example: Braudel F. History and social sciences. Historical duration. - Philosophy and methodology of history. Collection of translations. M., 1977, p. 116.
