Abstract
This chapter reconsiders the opposition between explanation and understanding, and uses a creative reinterpretation of Aristotle’s four causes to provide an anatomy of “interpretive explanation” and to provide a philosophical grounding for a distinction between forming and forcing causes. The possibility that this rendering of explanation can serve as the basis for a hermeneutic understanding of the human sciences is then explored via a reading of sociohistorical research on the French Revolution. Inflected by insights from cultural sociology and science studies, the chapter expands upon Donald Levine’s reading of Aristotle for modern social science and extends the insights of the hermeneutic work of Wilhelm Dilthey into a framework for hermeneutic sociohistorical research.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The initial model of “intellectual origins” of the revolution was, as both Chartier and Darnton agree, “diffusionist” and top down. In his classic The Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution, Daniel Mornet traced the spread of philosophical ideas, and ultimately what he liked to call “intelligence,” through various institutions, examining, for example, what was taught in schools, increases in readership, and the growth of the Freemasons. Lacking a concept of “field” or “discourse,” however, Mornet dichotomized “ideas and principles” and “pragmatic action” in an unfortunate way; the inheritors of his project in the 1990s set themselves the task of reconsidering these “origins” from an updated theoretical perspective.
- 2.
For printing and the theory of ideological infrastructures and its applicability in pre-revolutionary France, see Mann (1993: 175–76, 36–37). For printing and distribution structures in the provinces for “under the cloak” literature, see Darnton (1995a: 22–82). For the growing importance of a literary market and its consequences, see Turnovsky (2010). For quantitative figures on the orders of clandestine literature in the run-up to the revolution, see Darnton (1995b).
- 3.
Anticipating the kinds of arguments we make here based on the cultural historiography of the revolution, Sewell continues on to write that “once the crisis had begun, ideological contradictions contributed mightily to the deepening of the crisis into revolution.” Forming causes are a useful category, in part, because they help specify how something could “contribute mightily” to a revolution without forcing it to happen.
- 4.
This forcing cause is itself the product, in these accounts, of the conjuncture of two earlier forcing causes (and thus the utility of conjunctural causality to historical sociology becomes quite concrete): (1) the imperial war-making of the French state in competition with other European states (a cause which became more powerful as England developed economically (see Skocpol 1976: 179–180)), and (2) a series of money-raising procedures, such as venality, that worked in the short term but which, over the longer term, were disastrous: “each time the state raised money in one of these ways, furthermore, it created another walled-off pool of privilege that would be harder to drain for new money in the future” (Tilly 1996: 162).
- 5.
Specifically, Darnton takes a more Geertzian position vis-à-vis “culture,” Baker prefers arguing for the tautonomy of “discourse” (thus implicitly engaging Althusser and Marxism), Chartier uses a theory of “representation” and is influenced by Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, Sewell identifies a dialectic between action and structure taken from the social theory of Anthony Giddens, and Hunt focuses on the Durkheimian notion of “collective representations.”
- 6.
In the twentieth century, public opinion became a classic instance of a “looping kind.” See Igo (2007).
- 7.
References
Abbott, Andrew. 2001. Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Aristotle. 1941. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon. New York: Random House.
Baker, Keith. 1990. Inventing the French Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Biernacki, Richard. 2012. Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bossenga, Gail. 2011. Financial Origins of the French Revolution. In From Deficit to Deluge: The Origins of the French Revolution, ed. Thomas E. Kaiser and Dale K. Van Kley, 37–66. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Chartier, Roger. 1991. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Darnton, Robert. 1995a. The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
———. 1995b. The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769–1789. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Davidson, Donald. 2005. Problems in the Explanation of Action. In Problems of Rationality, 101–116. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York: Bloomsbury.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1976. The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Studies. In Dilthey: Selected Writings, ed. H.P. Rickman, 170–245. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1996. Selected Works, Volume 4: Hermeneutics and the Study of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dray, William H. 1997. ‘Explaining What’ in History. In Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. May Broadbeck, 343–348. New York: Macmillan.
Engelskirchen, Howard. 2007. The Aristotelian Marx and Scientific Realism: A Perspective on Social Kinds in Social Theory.” Ph.D. dissertation. State University of New York at Binghamton.
Flyvberg, Bent. 2001. Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Furet, Francois. 1981. Interpreting the French Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. 2nd ed. New York: Continuum Publishing Company.
Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. In The Interpretation of Cultures, 2000. New York: Basic Books.
Glaeser, Andreas. 2011. Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2014. Hermeneutic Institutionalism: Towards a New Synthesis. Qualitative Sociology 37 (2): 207–241.
Goertz, Gary, and James Mahoney. 2012. A Tale of Two Cultures: Contrasting Qualitative and Quantitative Paradigms. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1971. Knowledge and Human Interests. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hacking, Ian. 1995. The Looping Effects of Human Kinds. In Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. Dan Sperber, David Prernack, and Ann James Premack, 351–383. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 1996. Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Harrington, Austin. 2000a. Objectivism in Hermeneutics? Gadamer, Habermas, Dilthey. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 30 (4): 491–507.
———. 2000b. In Defence of Verstehen and Erklären: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology. Theory and Psychology. 10 (4): 435–451.
———. 2001. Dilthey, Empathy and Verstehen: A Contemporary Reappraisal. European Journal of Social Theory 4 (3): 311–329.
Igo, Sarah E. 2007. The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Johnson, Jim [Bruno Latour]. 1988. Mixing Humans with Non-Humans: Sociology of a Door-Closer. Social Problems 35: 298–310.
Jones, Colin. 1996. The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution. American Historical Review 101 (1): 13–40.
Krause, Monika, and Michael Guggenheim. 2012. How Facts Travel: The Model Systems of Sociology. Poetics 40 (2): 101–117.
Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Law, John. 2007. Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics. Version of 25th April 2007. http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2007ANTandMaterialSemiotics.pdf
Levine, Donald N. 1995. Visions of the Sociological Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Luker, Kristin. 2008. Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Info-glut. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1986. The Intelligibility of Action. In Rationality, Relativism, and the Human Sciences, ed. J. Margolis, M. Krausz, and R.M. Burian. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Mahajan, Gurpeet. 1992. Explanation and Understanding in the Human Sciences. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Mahoney, James. 2012. The Logic of Process Tracing Tests in the Social Sciences. Sociological Methods & Research 41(4): 570–597.
Mann, Michael. 1993. Sources of Social Power, Volume 2. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2011. Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding. In Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1991. Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation. In The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, and Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Schusterman, 59–80. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Roth, Paul. 1991. Interpretation as Explanation. In The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Schusterman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Sewell, William, Jr. 2005. Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille. In Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation, 225–270. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1985. Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case. Journal of Modern History 57 (1): 57–85.
Skocpol, Theda. “France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 18(2): 175-210 (1976), 188.
———. 1985. Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell. Journal of Modern History 57 (1): 86–96.
Steinmetz, George, ed. 2005. The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Tackett, Timothy. 1996. Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Thomas, W.I., and D.S. Thomas. 1928. The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs. New York: Knopf.
Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 990–1992, 186. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
———. 1996. European Revolutions: 1492–1992.. Wiley-Blackwell.
———. 2006. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Turnovsky, Geoffrey. 2010. The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ariail Reed, I. (2023). What Is Interpretive Explanation in Sociohistorical Analysis?. In: Sociology as a Human Science . Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18357-7_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-18356-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-18357-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)