Abstract

Large-scale, long-term, historical accounts of social and cultural change survive as legacies of those treatises by Smith, Comte, Marx, and others grappling with the complexities of an emerging Modern Age. Postmodern and postcolonial writers have built a formidable body of work in opposition to this legacy and to its contemporary disciples. The core criticism is that these accounts rely on explanations that privilege forms of structural determinism over expressions of human agency. This book takes on this charge, presenting a novel mode of inquiry for the historical social sciences that neither reduces human agency to epiphenomena nor de-links human agency from historical contingency.