Citizens in Search of Meaning

Abstract

If a social scientist, indeed worse, one whose profession used to be sociology, receives a prize in the name of a great historian, one must be allowed to wonder. Has the social scientist abandoned his ways? Has he given up (in Windelband’s clumsy but useful terms) the ‘nomothetic’ for the ‘idiographic’, the general for the particular, theory for fact? A mild version of such a change has certainly come over me. To be parochial for a moment: no one will ever know what would have happened if by some fluke I had ended up in Oxford’s nomothetic college, Nuffield, rather than in the idiographic St Antony’s. However, I feel at home here, not just for reasons of style but for reasons of intellectual substance as well. The peculiar strength of St Antony’s lies in the way in which its members bring historical depth and theoretical insights to bear on contemporary events. I like theory. Indeed I am not immune to the extravagant luxuries of non-Euclidean worlds of the human imagination. But as I grow older — and it has to be said that theory thrives on youth, so that ageing may be the real change which I am describing — I feel more and more strongly about what I like to call social analysis. Bringing processes and constellations not just to life, but to meaning, making sense of them, is a supreme challenge which requires the empathy of the historian as well as the tidy mind of the theorist. History has no meaning, said Karl Popper, but we can give it meaning, and we can do so in two ways: by social analysis, and by moral action.

Address given at the Award Ceremony of the Toynbee Prize at St Antony’s College, Oxford, on 20 October 1990