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Accounting for Change*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Kenneth Keniston
Affiliation:
Yale University

Extract

Accounting for change is the most vexed problem in the social sciences. In none of these disciplines do we yet have adequate explanations of why and how individuals, social systems, cultures, economies, or polities change — prospering, developing, transforming themselves, stagnating and sometimes succumbing. Yet to account for “historical” change requires just such prior accounts from psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics and political science. Furthermore, it involves the even more difficult question of how and why changes in each of these “units” of history affect and are affected by each other. Of all of these complex relationships between individual and social order, between economy and family, between culture and government, and so on, we now have only the most rudimentary models and maps. The problem of accounting for historical change, to which Dr. Wyatt addresses himself in his comments on Dr. Lifton's paper, will therefore not be solved in the near future. Nor will it, I suspect, be solved at all without profound transformations in each of the different fields involved. For truly to account for history will require within each discipline an as-yet-unachieved vision of men as simultaneously psychological individuals, social animals, cultural creatures, historical figures and economic and political men.

Type
Debate: Accounting for Change
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1965

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References

* A comment on Robert Jay Lifton, “Individual Patterns in Historical Change: Imagery of Japanese Youth”, CSSH, VI, no. 4, pp. 369–83, and Frederick Wyatt, “In Quest of Change: Comments on Robert Jay Lifton's ‘Individual Patterns…’”, ibid., pp. 384–92.