Abstract

Psychohistory is affected by problems similar to those affecting the broader discipline of history, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences generally: the heterogeneous composition of social movements, the phenomenon of discontinuity, and the capacity of people actively to construct versions of the world from their own idiosyncratic conflicts and in the context of the many different social locations they occupy. In particular, answers to the key question, how the social world is related to mind or events to cognitive and affective responses, seem as remote as ever. At the same time, ironically, a number of prominent social theorists, compelled to acknowledge the failure of rational choice and resource mobilization theories, have expressed a renewed interest in issues of collective identities, norms, values, moral obligations and transgressions, that is, in issues that have been central to psychohistory from the beginning. Historians no doubt will try to follow the paths taken by theorists, as they have in the past, but it is uncertain what paths they, in turn, will take