Charles Tilly,German Historicism,and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science |
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Authors: | Steinmetz George |
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Institution: | (1) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA |
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Abstract: | This paper examines Charles Tilly’s relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly
was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a “historicist.”
The “search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,” he argued, was a “waste of time”
and had “utterly failed.” Tilly’s approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th
century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus
on “historical individuals” rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave
of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible
reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly’s program of “relational realism” resembled critical
realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism’s argument that social mechanisms are
always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing
Tilly’s ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology
in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical. |
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