This book concludes a two-part work that began with Theories of Civil Violence (1988). The two works, written over a period of more than ten years, seek judgments on the progressive character of social science. Can our overall understanding of social life reasonably be said to increase over time? Do the analytical successes of earlier thinkers form necessary stepping-stones for the work of those who follow? Do present-day social scientists in any meaningful sense know more than our predecessors knew decades or centuries ago?

My concern with such questions has grown out of deeper perplexities about the conduct of social inquiry and its role in the larger social context. On the one hand, working social scientists normally defend their chosen approaches as superior to the alternatives – that is, as providing more accurate, more profound, more veridical insight into the subject matter. Yet even casual acquaintance with our literatures reveals the predictable obsolescence of such perceptions. The appeals of any particular way of studying the social world over others are enormously context-sensitive. In retrospect, prevailing theoretical mind-sets often seem to tell us more about the tensions or obsessions affecting particular ages or intellectual constituencies than about the social world. To the extent that our understandings have this context-bound character, it would appear that every theoretical school begins the work of social analysis anew.