Temporal heterogeneity

The historians’ “eventful” conception of temporality certainly posits that different historical times have, effectively, different rates of change—that history may be “accelerated” by events. But it also posits that events transform or reconfigure social relations. The consequence is that they see distinct historical eras as having varying forms of life and different social dynamics. Historians, to put it differently, assume that time is heterogeneous. We assume that what entities exist in the social world, how they operate, and what they mean change fundamentally over time. This is not to say that the world is in constant flux and chaos; the social temporality posited by historians is always a mix of continuity and change. But our working assumption is that every important form of social relations is potentially subject to change: not only ideas, institutions, and identities, but tools, forms of shelter, sex, gods, climate, diseases, cultivated plants, and languages. Another way of putting this is to say that historians implicitly assume that social life is fundamentally constituted by culture, but by culture in the widest possible sense—that is, by humanly constructed practices, conventions, and beliefs that shape all aspects of social life, from agriculture and procreation to poetry and religion. We assume that because these practices are humanly constructed, humans are also capable of destroying, altering, neglecting, forgetting, or radically reconstructing them, either purposely or unintentionally.

Temporal heterogeneity implies causal heterogeneity. It implies that the consequences of a given act are not intrinsic in the act but rather will depend on the nature of the social world within which it takes place. This assumption is quite contrary to the practices of mainstream social scientists, whose entire mode of operation is to discover and apply general causal laws, laws implicitly or explicitly assumed to be independent of time and place. The model case would be economists, who assume that all social actors everywhere are utility maximizers and that the laws of supply and demand are universal. Historians of course admit the existence of causal regularities of considerable duration. But rather than assuming that the world of the past must have been governed by the same logics as the world of the present, historians assume that the social logics governing past social worlds varied fundamentally, and therefore that their logics must be discovered and puzzled out by the researcher.

Temporal heterogeneity also implies that understanding or explaining social practices requires historical contextualization. We cannot know what an act or an utterance means and what its consequences might be without knowing the semantics, the technologies, the conventions—in brief, the logics— that characterize the world in which the action takes place. Historians tend to explain things not by subsuming them under a general or “covering” law, but by relating them to their context.

Finally, if the world in which actions take place is temporally heterogeneous, it makes sense for historians to insist on the importance of chronology, Indeed, chronology—the precise placement of a happening or a fact in time— is important for two reasons. First, as I have already pointed out, historians insist that we cannot know why something happens or what its significance might be without knowing where it fits in a sequence of happenings. Meticulous attention to chronology is the only way to be sure that we have the sequence straight. But chronology is also important because the meaning of an action or an event depends on the temporal context in which it occurs. In order to understand the relation of one social fact to another, one needs to know whether the temporal boundaries of the social facts placed them within the same “historical era”—that is to say, within a period during which some particular historical logic obtained. Chronology is crucial because it tells us within what historical context we must place the actions, texts, or material artifacts we are attempting to interpret or explain.

The historian’s implicit theorization of social temporality— as fateful, contingent, complex, eventful, and heterogeneous—is, I hope to have indicated, reasonably coherent.

—William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 9-11.