Teaching and Review Essay

California State University, Dominguez Hills
Created: May 21, 2000
Latest update: May 21, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org.

This essay is based on Immanuel Wallerstein's Chapter on "World-Systems Analysis" in Giddens' and Turner's Social Theory Today, Stanford University Press, 1987.

At p. 313, we read:

"History is the study of, the explanation of, the particular as it really happened in the past. Social science is the statement of the universal set of rules by whicih human/social behaviour is explained."

"This is the famous distinction between idiographic and nomothetic modes of analysis, which are considered to be antithetical. The 'hard' version of this antithesis is to argue that only one of the modes (which one varies according to one's views) is legitimate or interesting or even 'possible'. This 'hard' version is what the Methodenstreit was about. The 'soft' version sees these two modes as two was of cutting into social reality. . . . "The argument of the idiographic school is the ancient doctrine that 'all is flux." If everything is always changing , then any generalization purporting to apply to two or more presumably comparable phenomena is never true. . . . Conversely, the argument of the nomothetic school is that it is manifest that the real world (including the social world) is not a set of random happenings. If so, there must be rules that describe 'regularities', in which case there is domain for scientific activity. . . ."

Notes for essay up soon. jeanne May 22, 2001.