Abstract
Like many initiatives in theory, The Dialectics of Inquiry Across the Historical Social Sciences comprises a brilliantly suggestive accomplishment even if it fails to convince some of its truth. David Baronov diagnoses the antimony between agentic freedom and structural necessity as the unmastered binary undergirding historical sociology (p. 4). He scarcely addresses sociologists’ own reflections on this issue, which has occupied them at least since the heyday of Barrington Moore. Baronov’s omission may have an unspoken rationale. Historical causes are often likened to variables, an abstracting that permits structures, choices, or repertoires to be weighed as generically similar factors contributing to variation in outcomes. Once this homogenizing into variables occurs, the most analytic of sociologists (including Erik Olin Wright) have illustrated how claims for qualitative “causal asymmetries” between variables become logically untenable. To recall an example processed by this convention, assassinating the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, a contingent and quaint act, becomes just as much an “important” cause of the First World War as the rigidifying system of alliances between empires. For just as that Europe-wide structure lent the minor act its consequences, so the act summoned the ominous alliance system finally to life.
Baronov overcomes this standard view in which the logical equality of causal factors seems almost intrinsic to conjunctural explanation. He does so by unpacking the mode of existence of acts versus that of long-term structural eras or ages. His presentation unfolds through chapters on each of four types of case events encountered initially as phenomenal givens. Then, moving from what is obvious to “what necessarily follows from our experiences” of each (p. 270), Baronov unpacks the constellations of technological, cultural, and political eras that each event happened to crystallize. For example, during the 1863 riots in New York against the Civil War draft, attacks on telegraph nodes across the urban grid rested upon the build-up of a novel communication infrastructure; assaults on government buildings manifested resistance to the solidifying central state; and lynchings of African Americans expressed an evolving culture of racial subordination.
This ensemble of long-term background conditions did not make the riots “possible”—at least not in the usual sense by which we attach that concept to a piece of fruit that is ripening on a tree and that correlatively bears some chance of falling. Instead, an event like the 1863 riot (and each of the others that Baronov considers) is “a self-positing ontological whole . . . free of external determination because otherwise it could not be” (p. 54). Strange as it sounds at first, Baronov’s adjective “self-positing” captures the insight that an event is very unlike a pre-given game card that probabilistically might or might not appear in the course of play. Baronov’s descriptions seem to grapple with the way historical actuality confronts us with a naked being-so-and-not-otherwise that is scarcely specifiable in advance or genuinely derivable. His argument helps reflect the way a rich event does not have to issue entirely from reasons. This is merely to concede that our reckoning of possibility, necessity, or logical sufficiency grows out of secondary reflections.
Baronov’s conclusion therefore is that for sociologists isolable events determine which historical structures endure in the long haul and with which consequence. By contrast, the intersecting technological, cultural, or socio-political structures do not determine events. Another phrasing of this conclusion might be that structures are the construed predicates of events, not the other way around. Baranov lends us approximately the view that only contingent events can sustain an apparently fixed boulder in place, because it is when no stone strikes the boulder at the right spot that it becomes stabile. At a minimum, Baronov establishes a universal asymmetry between acts and structures while insisting that structures, even as our own “abstract contrivances” (p. 29), remain necessary for appraising an act. In fact, reviewing each of his four exemplary events, Baronov concludes that “all that we comprehend about a chair, a riot, a flood, or an ailment—including those Ages and Eras making it possible for each to come to be—necessarily follows from our experiences with that concrete and finite object or phenomenon” (p. 270). Another inference, initially illustrated through Baronov’s case analysis of the manufacture of a 1950s plastic chair, is that putative structural trends—such as industrial mass-production, application of chemical science, and modernist design—condition or shape each other only via the contingent event of producing, say, this particular chair or that (p. 47).
It is a major contribution that Baronov (in my view) dispels the imagery of people exercising agency by making choices limited by circumstances not of their choosing, an idiom circulated by infelicitous translation of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. (Marx in that work certified historical ingredients, Stücke, not circumstantial structures as the givens.) Although Baronov initially cites Marx, his parsing of the substantive autonomy of events leads him to conclude more radically that people adapt the elements of their time to “construct the very stage upon which they act” (p. 272, my emphasis). Even if we accept that inherited structures offer preconditions for action, the richness of events confirms that people creatively transform the very stage furniture for acting into scenery of their liking. So Lenin proved to some at the Finland Station, and so I think the sans-culottes’ tactics proved at the battle of Valmy in 1792. It is extremely useful for Baronov to have moved the discussion of agency away from linguistic reflection on options of an invisible human will toward analysis of “autonomous determination” of events (p.270), a more rigorous designation that may include non-human agents lacking conscious self-determination.
Baronov’s stepwise method of proceeding from phenomena to theoretical resolutions lays bare each of his inferences along the way. Allegedly we first encounter a chair with “immediate apprehension of its material content” (p. 18) and a riot as “a fluid rush of human activity” (p. 58). This stripped-down narrating seems uncomfortably similar to the just-so stories about raw perception that empiricist philosophers are wont to spin. If eras and ages are “abstract contrivances,” how are competing periodizations of history derivable from “our experiences” of the same events? Although his argument seems ready-made for reframing fateful shifts, such as moments of the French Revolution, Baronov refrains from exploiting legendary turning points that would noticeably multiply historical interpretations. He engages neither sociologists’ literature on possible events (think of Geoffrey Hawthorn) nor philosphers’ literature on the preeminent being of events (Claude Romano). Despite the Spartan style of his main exposition, Baronov offers a bracing antidote to the professional commonplaces that reign over much of historical sociology.