Volume 22, Number 6 · April 17, 1975
Jumbo History
By Keith Thomas
Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism
by Perry Anderson
Humanities Press, 304 pp., $15.00
Lineages of the Absolutist State
by Perry Anderson
Humanities Press, 573 pp., $25.00
The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century
by Immanuel Wallerstein
Academic Press, 410 pp., $16.50
As historical scholarship has grown more professional so have its boundaries contracted. Few academic historians today feel impelled to embark on one of those monumental surveys of human civilization so beloved by their Victorian predecessors. The great tradition of comparative historical sociology running from Montesquieu to Max Weber seems now to be extinct. Skeptical of large-scale aspirations, most academics prefer to stick to their own minute specialties in the hope, sometimes justified but usually not, that out of the microscopic study of very small problems great truths will arise. The composition of large-scale works of historical interpretation is therefore left to autodidacts, unintimidated by academic demarcation lines, and visionaries, convinced that by reinterpreting the past they can shape a new future.
Review, 3462 words
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