Zitat der Woche zur Ausrichtung von Geschichtswissenschaft von Bill Sewell:

Nevertheless, I am convinced that cultural historians’ lack of interest in economic and socialstructural explanation has been a very serious loss. It has been particularly serious because it has taken place during a period—since the mid-1970s—that has been marked by a profound transformation of the world economy from state-guided forms of capitalism to an aggressive financialized neoliberal capitalism. Especially in the United States, but not only there, economic inequality has risen precipitously, economic security of the middle and working class has been undermined, and democracy has increasingly mutated into plutocracy. Meanwhile the world’s political institutions have utterly failed to respond to the steady advance of global climate change, which threatens to make our earthly home uninhabitable within a century or two— unquestionably a consequence of the world’s current economic system. That the great bulk of the history profession turned its back on economic and social-structural causation during a period when the dynamics of capitalism weighed ever more forcefully on the course of the human endeavor is, in retrospect, an astounding fact and not something we should be proud of.

Aus: AHR Conversation. Explaining Historical Change; or, The Lost History of Causes. In: The American Historical Review (2015) 120 (4): 1369-1423, hier 1382.

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