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8 Historicism and Its Alternative A gainst historicism is the claim that certain ideas about human affairs are necessarily beyond criticism, either because they are obviously true or because knowledge of human affairs is possible only if they are not put into question.1 It is often the case that inconsistent ideas are maintained in a text, by a theoretician, or within a discipline. For example, the idea that the skin is a natural boundary, dividing subjects and thereby particularizing expressions of agency, is often taken for granted in the human sciences. It is not obviously consistent with another proposition also taken for granted—namely, that humans are essentially social in the sense that actions are only recognizably complete across bodies and according to an intentionality that is an ongoing accomplishment for which no one can be decisively responsible. Both ideas are virtually axiomatic: a theory that purports to cover the subject matter of a discipline or subdiscipline (e.g., exchange theory, system theory, or network theory in sociology) would fail unless the apparent contradiction between the two ideas is explained, neutralized, or resolved. Avoiding the issue would raise the very threat of skepticism that is otherwise forestalled by acting as if neither idea is problematic or needs to be expressed for the sake of such a theory. The threat is reduced when they are allowed to remain latent—if, in other words, they are systematically excluded from the formal statements of a theory, remaining at its margins along with other ideas “taken for granted”—such as tendencies of entities to endure and people to resist dissonance, the rational tendentiousness of action, and the idea, currently being incorporated into the neuroscience of reading, that “culture” draws its apparent continuity from the ways in which cultural facts come to be structured in the brain (Dehaene 2009). Another way of saying this is that those ideas remain beyond question to the Historicism and Its Alternative 151 extent to which they remain outside of theory, with the likely consequence that the refinement of concepts becomes even more urgent, increasingly defensive, and increasingly likely to undermine claims of representational adequacy. A further consequence of ignoring the contradiction between the skin as a natural boundary and the social as incompatible with such a boundary has been a separation of the social sciences from the critical discourses, professional and lay, from which most of their topics, issues, and pre-concepts derive. It is a small step to declare that those discourses are about matters of “value” rather than possible “truths,” and, though they may enrich our lives and give direction and significance to what we do, they do not provide knowledge (for a critique of the distinction, see Putnam 2002). This thesis is usually accompanied by a historical narrative in which social science develops as the progressive application of the methods of natural science to human affairs, disregarding those humanistic fields that rely on the essential sociality of humans and the irreducibility of the social (Gordon 1991). The attempt to graft the methodology of one sort of science onto another allows a mass of received topics unaccountable in disciplinary terms to appear to be what it cannot be—namely, a basis for a progressive accumulation of knowledge about human affairs. The overall effect is familiar—that the disciplinary aspect of social science, its claim to specialize within an ostensibly rational division of knowledge, is increasingly subordinate to its departmental divisions and status, its content subsumed by the form and rhetoric of its own socially alienated discourse. In this respect, one might say that theorizing is replaced by theory (refined concepts) and, therefore , by a tendency to subordinate the idea of human affairs to the activity of comparing and synthesizing theories of what such affairs cannot be. A second, related, consequence may be philosophically more significant. It involves a narrowing of the criteria for deciding what topics, among those received, are worthy of the attention of the social scientist when social science is abstracted from the human sciences and thereby thought of apart from their common sub-theoretical object. It then becomes possible to speak loosely of a humanist discipline—say, sociology, economics, or politics—without having to refer to the “basic fact” that all topics are implicated in what is human about human affairs. This provides a convenient way out of one difficulty posed by the contradiction between the skin as a natural boundary and activity that transpires across bodies—that is, how to rationalize what...

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