© Immanuel Wallerstein 1997. (Iwaller@binghamton.edu)
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(Conférence de prestige sur le thème, "Temps et Durée," Université Libre de Bruxelles, Sept. 25, 1996
published in Thesis Eleven, No. 54, Aug. 1998)
While epistemological debates are no doubt eternal, there are moments when they seem to reach higher intensity than usual. We are living such a moment in the last decade of the twentieth century. Science appears to be, is said to be, under fierce attack, and with it rationality, modernity, and technology. Some see this as a crisis of civilization, of Western civilization even the end of the very concept of a civilized world. Whenever the defenders of prevailing intellectual concepts seem to be screeching in pain rather than ignoring their critics or answering them calmly and (dare I suggest) rationally, it may be time to take a step backwards in order to make a cooler appraisal of the underlying debate.
For at least two centuries now, science has been enthroned as the most legitimate path, even the only legitimate path, to truth. Within the structures of knowledge this has been sanctified by the belief that there exist "two cultures" that of science and that of philosophy (or letters) which have not only been thought to be incompatible with each other but have also been de facto ranked in a hierarchy. As a result, the universities of the world have almost everywhere separated these two cultures into distinct faculties. If the universities have asserted formally the view that the two faculties were equally important, governments and economic enterprises have not hesitated to manifest a clear preference. They have invested heavily in science and for the most part barely tolerated the humanities.
The belief that science is something different from and even antagonistic to philosophy, the so-called divorce between the two, is in fact relatively new. It evolved as the endpoint of the process of the secularization of knowledge that we associate with the modern world-system. Just as philosophy came to displace theology as the basis of statements of truth by the end of the Middle Ages, so science came to displace philosophy by the end of the eighteenth century. I say "science" did this, but it was a very particular version of science, that associated with Newton, with Francis Bacon, and with Descartes. Newtonian mechanics posited a series of premises and propositions which achieved canonic status in our modern world: Systems are linear; they are determined; they tend to return to equilibria. Knowledge is universal and can ultimately be expressed in simple covering laws. And physical processes are reversible. This last statement is the one that seems most counterintuitive, because it suggests that fundamental relations never change, and that time is therefore irrelevant. Yet this last proposition is essential if one to maintain the validity of the other parts of the Newtonian model.
Thus, in terms of this model, "time and duration" cannot be a meaningful or significant topic, or at least not one about which scientists can make statements. Yet here is Ilya Prigogine, a physical scientist, talking on this topic, and here am I, a social scientist, talking on it. How can this be? To understand this, we have to take into account the history of the epistemological debates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Let me start with social science. Social science is a concept that was invented quite recently, only in the nineteenth century. It refers to a body of systematic knowledge about human social relations that was put forward and institutionalized in these two centuries. In the divisioning of knowledge into two cultures, social science inserted itself as somewhere and somehow in-between. It is crucial to note that most social scientists did not do this boldly, asserting the legitimacy (not to speak of the superiority) of some third culture. Social scientists intruded in-between uneasily, uncomfortably, and with divided ranks. Social scientists continually debated whether social science was closer to the natural sciences or closer to the humanities.
Those who considered that social science was nomothetic, that is, in search of universal laws, generally argued that there was no intrinsic methodological difference between the scientific study of human phenomena and the scientific study of physical phenomena. All seeming differences were extrinsic, and were therefore transitory, if difficult to overcome. In this view, sociologists were simply backward Newtonian physicists, destined in principle one day to catch up. The road to catching up involved the replication of the theoretical premises and the practical techniques of the elder brother disciplines. From this point of view, time (that is, history) was as little relevant to nomothetic social scientists as it was to solid state physicists or microbiologists. What was far more relevant was the replicability of the data and the axiomatic quality of the theorizing.
At the other end of the spectrum of the social sciences stood idiographic historians, who insisted that human social action was non-repetitive, and therefore not susceptible to large-scale generalizations that held true across time and space. They emphasized the centrality of diachronic sequences history as stories, as narratives as well as the aesthetics of literary style. I suppose it could not be said that they rejected time altogether since they emphasized, indeed embraced, diachrony, but their time was exclusively chronological time. What they ignored was duration, because duration could only be defined by abstraction, by generalization, and indeed by a chronosophy. Usually, these scholars preferred to call themselves humanists, and insisted on being located in the Faculty of Letters, to indicate their disdain for nomothetic social science.
But even these humanistic, idiographic historians were caught up in the idolatry of Newtonian science. What they feared far more than generalizations (and therefore science) was speculation (and therefore philosophy). They were Newtonians malgré soi. They conceived of social phenomena as atomic in nature. Their atoms were historical "facts." These facts had been recorded in written documents, largely located in archives. They were empiricists with a vengeance. They held to a very up- close vision of the data, and the faithful reproduction of the data in historical writing. Up-close tended to mean very small- scale in both time and space. So these humanist historians were also positivist historians, and most of them saw little contradiction between the two emphases.
This definition of the tasks of the historian became ascendant throughout the academic world between 1850 and 1950. It was not, to be sure, without its harsh critics. One major such current was in France, and the journal Annales, founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. In a letter written in 1933 to Henri Pirenne, who shared their discomfort with positivist history, and whose influence on the Annales school was profound (see Bryce & Bryce, 1991), Lucien Febvre said of a book by Charles Seignobos:
Un vieil atomisme poussiéreux, un respect naïf du "fait", du petit fait, de la collections des petits faits considérés comme existant "en soi" (Bryce & Bryce, 1991, 154).
But the clearest, and fullest, statement of the critique of the dominant mode of historical writing was that made in 1958 by Fernand Braudel, who continued the Annales tradition after 1945 (Braudel, 1969). I shall examine that text.
Let us start with the title, "Histoire et science sociale. La longue durée." If there is one term that is thought to summarize Braudel's emphasis and contribution, it is the longue durée. This is of course the duration of which we are speaking, although in fact Braudel's term tends not to be translated when used in English-language social science. The term is polemical. Braudel wishes to attack the predominant practice of historians to concentrate their energy on recording short-term happenings or events, which he calls (following Paul Lacombe and Fran‡ois Simiand) l'histoire événementielle. (This latter is a term difficult to translate into English; I believe the closest equivalent is "episodic history.")
For Braudel, the mass of "small details" (some dazzling, some obscure) that comprise the bulk of traditional history, which is almost always political history, is only a part of reality, indeed only a small part. Braudel notes that nomothetic social science "a presque horreur de l'événement. Non sans raison: le temps court est la plus capricieuse, la plus trompeuse des durées" (1969, 46). This assessment is the clue to Braudel's famous boutade in La Méditerranée: "Les événements sont poussière" (1949, ).
Thus, against the chronological time of events, Braudel counterposes duration, la longue durée, with which he associates
the term of "structure," giving the latter a very precise definition:
Against a time that is just there, a mere external physical parameter, Braudel insists on the plurality of social times, times that are created and, once created, both aid us in organizing social reality and exist as constraints to social action. But having asserted the limits and misdeed of l'histoire événementielle, he is quick to add that it is not only the historians who are at fault:
Soyons juste : s'il y a péché événementialiste, l'histoire, accusée de choix, n'est pas le seul coupable. Toutes les sciences sociales participent à l'erreur. (1969, 57)
It seems, says Braudel, that nomothetic social science is no more virtuous than idiographic history in this regard. He focuses his discussion on Lévi-Strauss's search for underlying social relations that exist in all social interaction, a set of elementary cells that are both simple and mysterious (once more, our atoms), which the scientist is supposed to seek to "saisir sous tous les langages, pour les traduire en alphabet Morse..." (Braudel, 1969, 71). To this, he says no, this is not what I mean by longue durée. Quite the contrary:
Réintroduisons en effet la durée. J'ai dit que les modèles étaient de durée variable : ils valent le temps que vaut la réalité qu'ils enregistrent. ... J'ai comparé parfois les modèles à des navires. ... Le naufrage est toujours le moment le plus significatif.... Ai-je tort de penser que les modèles des mathématiques qualitatives ... se prê:teraient mal à de tels voyages, avant tout parce qu'ils circulent sur une seule des innombrables routes du temps, celle de la longue, très longue, durée, à l'abri des accidents, des conjonctures, des ruptures? (1969, 71-72)
Thus, says Braudel, the search for the infinitely small (by the idiographic historian) and the search for not long but very long duration (by the nomothetic social scientist) he says of the very long, "s'il existe, [il] ne peut être que le temps des sages" (1969, 76) share the same defect. Braudel ends by making two claims in effect. First, there are multiple social times which interweave and owe their importance to a sort of dialectic of durations. Hence, secondly, neither the ephemeral and microscopic event nor the dubious concept of infinite eternal reality can be a useful focus for intelligent analysis. We must rather stand on the ground of what I shall the unexcluded middle both time and duration, a particular and a universal that are simultaneously both and neither if we are to arrive at a meaningful understanding of reality.
Braudel saw traditional history as privileging time (a certain time) over duration, and he sought to reinstate la longue durée as a key epistemological tool for social science. Prigogine sees traditional physics as privileging duration (a certain duration) over time, and he seeks to reinstate la flèche du temps as a key epistemological tool for the natural sciences.
Here too a history of the controversy seems necessary to understand the debate. The history of the natural sciences in the last two centuries is somewhat different from that of the social sciences. Newtonian science has followed a steady trajectory since at least the seventeenth century, both as an intellectual construct and as an ideology for the organization of scientific activity. By the early nineteenth century, it was given canonic (and if you will textbook) status by Laplace. Many of its practitioners felt that major scientific theorizing was at an end, and that all that was left for working scientists was to clean up some of the minor loose ends, as well as to continue to utilize the theoretical knowledge for practical purposes.
But as we know, or as we should know, theorizing (just like history) is never at an end because all our knowledge, however valid it seems in the present, is in a cosmic sense transitory because it is tied to the social conditions out of which it was learned and constructed. In any case, Newtonian science came up against physical realities it found difficult to explain, and by the end of the nineteenth century, when Poincaré demonstrated the impossibility of solving the three-body problem, it was in trouble, even though most scientists were not yet ready to acknowledge this.
It is only in the 1970's that the discomfort with Newtonian mechanics as the paradigm for all scientific activity was sufficiently widespread that we can speak of a significant intellectual movement within the natural sciences challenging the predominant and formerly substantially unchallenged views. This movement goes by many names. For shorthand purposes, it may be called "complexity studies." One of the central figures of this challenge has been Ilya Prigogine, who received the Nobel Prize for his work on dissipative structures. I shall use as my text his recent summation of his views, La Fin des certitudes, which has as its subtitle Temps, chaos, et les lois de la nature (Prigogine, 1996). Just as we may take la longue durée to signal Braudel's central emphasis, so we may take la flèche du temps (a term Prigogine took from Arthur Eddington but which is now associated with him) to signal Prigogine's central emphasis.
As his point of departure in this book, he reproduces the conclusions he (and Isabelle Stengers) drew in their earlier La nouvelle alliance:
1. Les processus irréversibles (associés à la flèche du temps) sont aussi réels que les processus réversibles décrits par les lois traditionelles de la physique ; ils ne peuvent que s'interpréter comme des approximations des lois fondamentales.
2. Les processus irréversibles jouent un rôle constructif dans la nature.
3. L'irréversibilité exige une extension de la dynamique (1996, 32).
Newtonian mechanics, says Prigogine, describes stable dynamic systems. But just as, for Braudel, l'histoire événementielle described a part, but only a small part, of historical reality, so for Prigogine, stable dynamic systems are a part, but only a small part, of physical reality. In unstable systems, slightly varying initial conditions, which are always and necessarily particular, produce vastly different results. The impact of initial conditions are essentially unexamined within Newtonian mechanics.
And just as, for Braudel, the effects of the longue durée are most clear in macroscopic as opposed to microscopic structures, so for Prigogine, "c'est en effet en physique macroscopique que l'irréversibilité et les probabilités s'imposent avec le plus d'évidence" (1996, 52). Finally, just as for Braudel, "les événements sont poussière," so for Prigogine, "lorsqu'il s'agit d'interactions transitoires ..., les termes diffusifs sont négligeables" (1996, 51). The situation, however, becomes quite the opposite for Prigogine in Braudel's longue durée: "En bref, c'est dans les interactions persistantes que les termes diffusifs deviennent dominants" (1996, 62).
For Braudel, there are multiple social times. It is only of the very long duration (a duration of which, I remind you, he said: "s'il existe, il doit être le temps des sages") that truly universal laws may be asserted. Such nomothetic social science presumes the ubiquity of equilibria, as does Newtonian mechanics. Here too, Prigogine takes aim:
Alors que, à l'équilibre et près de l'équilibre, les lois de la nature sont universelles, loin de l'équilibre elles deviennent spécifiques, elles dépendent du type de processus irréversibles .... Loin de l'équilibre, ... la matière devient plus active (1996, 75).
Nor is Prigogine embarrassed by the concept of an active nature. Again, quite the contrary: "C'est parce que ... nous sommes à la fois 'acteurs' et 'spectateurs' que nous pouvons apprendre quelque chose de la nature" (1996, 173-174).
There is however one important difference between Braudel and Prigogine, their starting-point. Braudel had to fight against a dominant view in history that ignored structure, that is, duration. Prigogine had to fight against a dominant view in physics that ignored non-equilibria situations, and the consequences of the uniqueness of initial conditions, that is, time. Hence Braudel talked of the importance of the longue durée and Prigogine of the importance of the flèche du temps. But just as Braudel did not want to leap out of the frying pan of l'histoire événementielle into the fire of the très longue durée, but insisted on staying in the unexcluded middle, so Prigogine does not seek to renounce reversible time to jump into the fire of the impossibility of order and explanation.
Prigogine's unexcluded middle is called chaos déterministe:
En effet, les équations sont déterministes comme le sont les lois de Newton. Et pourtant elles engendrent des comportements d'allure aléatoire! (1996, 35).Well, perhaps more than just allure, because he also says that probabilities are "intrinsèquement aléatoires" (1996, 40). This is why I speak of this position as being situated in the unexcluded middle. It is clearly middle:
Le hasard pur est tout autant une négation de la réalité et de notre exigence de comprendre le monde que le déterminisme. Ce que nous avons cherché à construire est une voie étroite entre les deux conceptions qui mènent aussi bien à l'aliénation, celle d'un monde régi par des lois qui ne laissent aucune place à la nouveauté, et celle d'un monde absurde, acausal, où rien ne peut être ni prévu ni décrit en termes généraux (1969, 222).
Prigogine himself calls this "une déscription médiane" (1996, 224), but I wish to insist that it is not merely the assertion of the merits of a golden mean, but those of the unexcluded middle a determinist chaos and a chaotic determinism; one in which both time and duration are central, and constantly constructed and reconstructed. This may not be a simpler universe than the one classical science thought it was describing, but the claim is that it is closer to being a real universe, harder to know than the one we used to perceive, but more worth knowing, more relevant to our social and physical realities, ultimately more morally hopeful.
Let me conclude, on this American Day, celebrated in Belgium, with two quotations. The first is from that great Belgian scholar, Henri Pirenne:
Toute construction historique ... repose sur un postulat: celui de l'identité de la nature humaine au cour des âges. ...
[Pourtant...] Il ne faut qu'un moment de réflexion pour comprendre que deux historiens, disposant des mèmes matériaux, ne les traiteront pas d'une manière identique. ... Ainsi, les synthèses historiques dépendent à un degré très élevé, non seulement de la personnalité des leurs auteurs, mais aussi de leur entourage social, religieux ou national (1931: 16, 19- 20).
The second is from the American philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead:
Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure. The very benefit of wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skill to avert evils. We must expect, therefore, that the future will disclose dangers. It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties (1948, 125).
I opened by saying that science is said to be under severe attack today. It is not true. What is under severe attack is Newtonian science. What is under severe attack is the concept of the two cultures, of the incompatibility of science and the humanities. What is being constructed is a renewed vision of scientia, which is a renewed vision of philosophia, whose centerpiece, epistemoologically, is not merely the possibility but the requirement of standing in the unexcluded middle.
Braudel, Fernand (1949). La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II. Paris: Lib. Armand Colin.
Braudel Fernand (1969), "Histoire et sciences sociales : La longue durée," in Ecrits sur l'histoire, Paris: Flammarion, 41-83 [original in Annales E.S.C., XIII, 4, oct.-déc. 1958, 725-753].
Lyon, Bryce and Mary (1991). The Birth of Annales History: The Letters of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Henri Pirenne (1921- 1935). Bruxelles: Académie Royale de Belgique, Commission - Royale.
Pirenne, Henri (1931), "La tâche de l'historien," Le Flambeau, XIV, 1931, 5-22.
Prigogine, Ilya (1996). La Fin des certitudes : Temps, chaos et les lois de la nature. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Whitehead, Alfred North (1948). Science and the Modern World. New York: Mentor [ninth printing, 1959] [original publication 1925].
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