In conceptualizing social institutions and the action they envelop, recent trends in contemporary social theory have tended to reinforce the historian's more intuitive proclivity to take nothing for granted. The relationship between human activity and its context, we are warned, is problematic and indeterminate. Society and its cognates – economic processes, cultural traditions, values, and mores – are ultimately contingent upon the epistemological speculations in which all human beings must engage in order to establish sufficient common ground to enable each other's actions to be observed, described, categorized, debated, and, ultimately, understood. Contemporary social theory does not deny that the relationship between human action and social context is amenable to explanation, but it does seek to restore the contingency attendant upon an appreciation of human agency to that task of explanation. Society must be understood as the expression neither of an all-pervading underlying natural order nor of irresistible material forces. Rather, society “is made and imagined … a human artifact.”