Great events happen; people live through them; and both ordinary citizens and historians attempt to make sense of them. Examples of the kinds of events I have in mind include the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR; the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s; the violent suppression of the Democracy Movement in Tiananmen Square; the turn to right-wing populism in Europe and the United States; and the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
My purpose here is to identify some of the important intellectual and conceptual challenges that present themselves in the task of understanding events on this scale. My fundamental points are these: large-scale historical developments are deeply contingent; the scale at which we attempt to understand the event matters; and there is important variation across time, space, region, culture, and setting when it comes to the large historical questions we want to investigate. This means that it is crucial for historians to pay attention to the particulars of institutions, knowledge systems, and social actors that combined to create a range of historical outcomes through a highly contingent and path-dependent process. The question for historiography is this: how can historians do the best job possible of discovering, documenting, and organizing their accounts of these kinds of complex historical happenings?
Is an historical period or episode an objective thing? It is not. Rather, it is an assemblage of different currents, forces, individual actors, institutional realities, international pressures, and popular claims, and there are many different “stories” that we can tell about the period. This is not a claim for relativism or subjectivism; it is rather the simple and well-understood point for social scientists and historians, that a social and historical realm is a dense soup of often conflicting tendencies, forces, and agencies.
Weber understood this point in his classic essay “’Objectivity’ in Social Science” when he said that history must be constantly re-invented by successive generations of historians: “There is no absolutely “objective” scientific analysis of culture—or put perhaps more narrowly but certainly not essentially differently for our purposes—of “social phenomena” independent of special and “one-sided” viewpoints according to which—expressly or tacitly, consciously or unconsciously—they are selected, analyzed and organized for expository purposes” (Weber 1949: 72). Think of the radically different accounts offered of the French Revolution by Albert Soboul, Simon Schama, and Alexis de Tocqueville; and yet each offers insightful, honest, and “objective” interpretations of part of the history of this complex event.
We need to recall always that socially situated actors make history. History is social action in time, performed by a specific population of actors, within a specific set of social arrangements and institutions. Individuals act, contribute to social institutions, and contribute to change. People had beliefs and modes of behavior in the past.
They did various things. Their activities were embedded within, and in turn constituted, social institutions at a variety of levels. Social institutions, structures, and ideologies supervene upon the historical individuals of a time. Institutions have great depth, breadth, and complexity. Institutions, structures, and ideologies display dynamics of change that derive ultimately from the mentalities and actions of the individuals who inhabit them during a period of time. And both behavior and institutions change over time.
This picture needs of course to reflect the social setting within which individuals develop and act. Our account of the "flow" of human action eventuating in historical change needs to take into account the institutional and structural environment in which these actions take place. Part of the "topography" of a period of historical change is the ensemble of institutions that exist more or less stably in the period: cultural arrangements, property relations, political institutions, family structures, educational practices. But institutions are heterogeneous and plastic, and they are themselves the product of social action. So historical explanations need to be sophisticated in their treatment of institutions and structures.
In Marx's famous contribution to the philosophy of history, he writes that "men make their own history; but not in circumstances of their own choosing." And circumstances can be both inhibiting and enabling; they constitute the environment within which individuals plan and act. It is an important circumstance that a given time possesses a fund of scientific and technical knowledge, a set of social relationships of power, and a level of material productivity. It is also an important circumstance that knowledge is limited; that coercion exists; and that resources for action are limited. Within these opportunities and limitations, individuals, from leaders to ordinary people