THE FUTURE
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longer talk of "inevitable" historical happenings, as though it were
a matter of tracing a natural process, it may
be
useful to recall what
the term "law" signified when applied to long-run developments of
the kind that concern the sociologist. Neither Comte, nor Marx, nor
J.
S. Mill, nor any other major thinker of the nineteenth century, ever
supposed that the political process as such lent itself to scientific
description or analysis. It would be truer to say that they regarded
politics as a madhouse, or at most as a stage on which the actors
declaimed lines not of their own composition. The regularities dis–
cernible amidst this surface confusion were of a different order. They
were long-term and related to impersonal processes, such as the impact
of technology upon the fabric of inherited social institutions. To
grasp the logic of history it was necessary to go behind the scenes
and take a look at the machinery. We have grown skeptical of this
approach, chiefly because we are no longer quite so certain that
political strife is an epiphenomenon. We have come to suspect that
the political sphere is once more acquiring an autonomy it lost at
the peak of the liberal era. But this modification of the traditional
approach does not, in my opinion, invalidate the general principle
that to understand history one has to look for regularities. On the
opposing view, history tends to become a "tale told by an idiot."
I am not suggesting that this reflects upon the distinguished scholars
who in recent decades have imposed the new empiricist orthodoxy
on sociologists and historians alike. I am merely pointing out that
empiricism is an intellectual school among others. For practical
purposes the prevalent approach is tied up with a particular political
creed: liberalism; and with a particular national culture: the Anglo–
American one. There are excellent reasons why this school of thought
should be influential, but it has no monopoly of wisdom, and in the
present case its contribution to the debate has tended to be largely
negative. It has demonstrated to its own satisfaction that its ways of
thought are superior to those of the lesser breeds in Europe and
elsewhere. The demonstration, I am happy to say, has left the rest
of us quite unconcerned. Indeed there is evidence that the tide may
have turned and that the British- if not as yet the Americans-have
begun to waver in their attachment to radical empiricism.
What such an attachment involves is above all a refusal to
