8/9/2019 History and Social Science

1/2

History and Social ScienceRichard Ostrofsky

(May, 2006)

In his treatise on Poetics (Part IX), Aristotle declares: Poetry, therefore, is

a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, for poetry tends to

express the universal, history the particular. Agree or not, such valorizing

of the abstract and general over the concrete and particular was crucial to

the development of science and to our present-day, scientific world-view. To

a classical philosopher, particulars are valued for the universal truths that

they embody. Incidental features are irrelevant if not corrupt or deviant.

As any actual circle that could be drawn is inferior to the mathematically

ideal circle, so actual people and the things they did are inferior to godly

ideals of heroism and wisdom. The actual historical record is always less

edifying, less inspiring, than the myth. Why labor to chronicle the hurly-

burly of a real war, when you could read Homer? Even today, by the same

token, why study history (which, at its best, can only tell you what

happened in some particular situation), when you could turn to sociologyfor a theory of how people behave and how societies work in every similar

situation?

A central result of the Darwinian concept of a self-organizing universe is

to overturn this philosophical preference for ideal types and grand

generalities. Fitness the quality of fecundity, and ecological

compatibility with everything else is a quality of individual cases and

specimens. Life is a probing of the edge of the possible (in Stuart

Kauffmans words), not a living up to general principles. The patterns and

principles that we find in nature always come after the fact. Any generalprinciples that we discover are abstractions of our representations of the

real, rather than laws to be obeyed or plans to be followed. In particular,

sociology is only possible when the complexities and sheer messiness of

lived events are ignored or stripped away. Historians too must do this to

some extent, if they are to tell a coherent story. But they, at least, are

committed to recognize and capture (what they judge to be) the essential

facts of a concrete situation. And they are aware and apologetic for their

necessary acts of reductive judgment as sociologists, too often, are not.

8/9/2019 History and Social Science

2/2

Ignorance of history and preference for sociology in the United States

may be one cause of that countrys self-defeating approach to foreign policy

and its disastrous neo-conservatism which is not conservative at all.

Sociology, after all, suggests the possibility of social engineering a

technologizing effort to change society according to ones own preferences.

By contrast, history mostly exposes the futility of such efforts and the

human suffering they have caused. Authentic conservatives know this.

Consequently, they prefer an evolutionary and Fabian approach to social

change, and are suspicious of drastic measures. Whether we think them

right or wrong on a particular issue, they deserve better than to be confused

with the present lot of radical opportunists who call themselvesconservative and are anything but.

The Darwinian view of society as a self-organizing system explains why

the study of history is vitally important, and why sociology is at best the

historians useful servant, not the other way round. Sociology can be a

useful adjunct to common sense in the construction of historical

explanations, but it is unlikely that we will ever know enough about the

dynamics of social organization to predict future history, any more than we

can know enough about atmospheric physics to predict the weather more

than a few days ahead. On the other hand, the theory of self-organizing

systems requires that a society remain consistent with itself, and that each

day, week and year, must build on the outcomes of the last in re-entrant

fashion. Come what may, a society remains tightly bound to its own past in

ways not necessarily predictable, but very real.

Perhaps we learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from

history. Even so, reading history at least gives a feeling for the ecological

character of a society, and its resistance to change against its character. It

helps us see society as an organic whole, more easily deranged thanmended. Serious history also exposes the shallowness and mendacity of

historical myth. This alone should be sufficient reason to study it.