EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
There is an understanding that all historical knowledge is relative, dependent on the point of view and destined to change over time. One of the main reasons for thinking about history in this way is that the names we use for different periods and complexes of events, such as the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Elizabethan era, the Roman Republic, are allowed to be perceived as if they were given to us and defined once and for all, in the manner of various natural phenomena (celestial bodies, for example). These names of historical phenomena determine more than simply designating a given time and space. There is no limit to the questions that can be asked about events that happened at a particular place and time. And it is precisely these questions that will determine the object of a search. Of course, there are many and different reasons why people at different times ask themselves different questions about the same periods, but this does not mean at all that history at different times and on the basis of the same information will give different answers to the same questions.
It is a misconception that the totality of an event and process can constitute a single object of human thought. Inevitably, every thought, to a greater or lesser extent, is abstract, and every cognitive discipline can only consider the world that surrounds us through certain selected aspects that can be subsumed under a logically connected structure of rules. This, however, is not the only method of selection. While the question posed designates the phenomenon that is to be studied, it is only through the rules (laws) of theoretical sciences that the remaining phenomena relevant for the explanation can be selected. The entirety of observable phenomena in a given time and place can never be the object of study, and depending on the questions that are asked, the same time-space coordinates can contain any number of different objects of study.
Social phenomena are never given as a distinct set with which a historian can work. They are created by him, often spontaneously and without the use of particularly sophisticated instruments. But when he is confronted with more complex phenomena, such as language, legal and economic systems, it is necessary for him to use theories created by the social sciences. These theories are not social sets in the sense that they claim to discover certain regularities through empirical observations. Their function is quite different - to constitute these sets by providing schemes of structural relationships that a historian can use in his attempt to fit into a whole all the separate elements he discovers.
If, for his part, a historian ignores these theories (how market prices are formed, for example), he will eventually have to come to terms with his failure when a theorist from one discipline or another shows him how he contradicts himself when his presumptions and assumptions are brought out and made explicit.
A few important clarifications should be made in view of what has been said so far. All that the theory attempts to provide is a technique of reasoning to help connect individual facts, but as with mathematics and logic, it cannot be refuted or confirmed by the facts. What can and should be done is to check whether the assumptions and presumptions used are present in the case under consideration. In other words, the theory is logically prior to history, which in no way means that historical research often forces theorists to revise their constructions. The extremely low level of awareness on the part of historians of the theories they use is the subject of a separate discussion.
The topic, entitled " How We Discover Rules and Create Order ", is about the endogenous formation of rules in a given order as a result of spontaneous processes, but also about the spontaneous evolution of the framework of this order, and I hope that the questions I ask myself will be considered in light of what has been said so far.
(More on the subject and the questions raised by these introductory remarks can be found in “The Counter-Revolution of Science” ch.7 & “The Facts of the Social Sciences” by F.A. Hayek)
Great read.
Opening the PDF is mandatory.