The last two hundred years have witnessed a sharp-
ened interest in what causes men to do, believe, create,
or
destroy, and under what circumstances and influ-
ences; what has helped to sustain or threaten the pres-
ervation of their ideas, norms, values,
symbols, manners
and customs, institutions and artifacts; what degree
of balance or tension has attended contemporaneous
social configurations,
or their chronological trans-
formation
through time (the “synchronic” and “dia-
chronic” mode of culture in
anthropological termi-
nology). This growing
preoccupation has been the
cause and the symptom of what is meant by the
histor-
ical and cultural
self-consciousness of modern times.
The chief practitioners in this search
have been a
hybrid species of historians cum
philosophers, though
some, M. J. de Condorcet, Auguste Comte, or Karl
Marx, for example, might have preferred being thought
of as social
scientists. Frequently these thinkers were
also social critics, no less
eager to bring about change
in the future than they were to trace it in the
past.
But notwithstanding divergences in orientation or
method, they
all derived inspiration from, or reacted
to the challenge of the advances
made in the physical
sciences. The idea that the emergence,
perpetuation,
and development of human events were phenomena
susceptible to discoverable principles was never far
from their minds, even
when they emphatically insisted
that these principles were sui generis and attainable
by methods radically
different from those of the physi-
cal
sciences.
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), was one who indeed
boldly declared that the
cultural world of man, since
it was created by man, was more likely to
yield its
secrets to human inquiry than the world of nature
which only
God, the sole creator of that world, can
know with certainty. Explicitly or
implicitly, this basic
premiss of Vico's New Science
(Scienza nuova, 1725)
became the bedrock
of subsequent speculations about
the genesis, content, and development of
culture.
