This essay considers some theoretical perspectives which provide interpretations of two significant issues which cut across all the discipline lines in the social sciences and the humanities. The first issue concerns the nature of historical movement. While the world views of modern science and mechanistic Marxism claim that both knowledge and history develop in a continuous progressive manner, this notion has been challenged by historians, philosophers and social scientists who argue that historical movement in knowledge and institutional domains proceeds in a sharply discontinuous manner characterized by abrupt transformations and disjunctions. The second issue considers the compelling question of whether any researcher can proceed on the basis of a value-free research design, or whether all methodological and theoretical claims must be inevitably influenced and conditioned by the values and ideations of the theorist's culture. In terms of this controversy, the lines are clearly drawn between the notions of historical and cultural relativism predominant in Anglo-American historical and social science inquiry, and the claims of certain formalist-structuralist theorists who assert the existence of transhistorical and transcultural structural universals.