Given the educational mandate of The New Centre, at the start a new Season of publishing on &&&, we thought that Arrighi’s advice about constructing theoretical models might be useful for our students, researchers and members. Taken from his short book The Geometry of Imperialism (Verso, 1987) these short passages define the relationship between particulars and universals in building models for explaining social and historical phenomena.
Since the ideo-typical structure may assume a generic form, and since reference will continually be made to historico-empirical material, it is perhaps opportune to recall Weber’s admonition that ‘ideal- typical’ developmental constructs on history are to be sharply distinguished from each other… The maintenance of this distinction in all it’s rigour often becomes uncommonly difficult in practice due to a certain circumstance. In the interest of the concrete demonstration of an ideal type or of an ideal-typical developmental sequence, one seeks to make it clear by the use of concrete illustrative material drawn from empirical-historical reality. The danger of this procedure, which in itself is entirely legitimate, lies in the fact that historical knowledge here appears as a servant of theory instead of the opposite role. It is a great temptation for the theorist to regard this relationship either as the normal one, or, far worse, to mix theory with history and indeed to confuse them with each other. This occurs in an extreme way when an ideal construct of a developmental sequence on a conceptual classification of the ideal-types of certain cultural structures are…integrated into a genetic classification. The series of types which results from the selected conceptual criteria appears then as an historical sequence unrolling with the necessity of a law. The logical classification of analytical concepts on the one hand and the empirical arrangements of the events thus, conceptualized in space, time, and causal relationship, on the other, appear to be so bound up together that there is an almost irresistible temptation to do violence to reality in order to prove the real validity of the construct. The risks of ‘doing violence to reality’ are indeed numerous, often even unavoidable, but it is as well to understand what they involve. There is, first of all, an original and unavoidable act of ‘violence’, without we social science could not even exist. Thus, the initial choice of any pair of ‘opposites’ (the primary types) on the basis of which historico-empirical material is ordered and structured, is imposed on this material from without by the adoption of position towards it, which expresses what Weber called at once an individual ‘sentiment’ and ‘will’, and a given ‘view of the world’. There is no innate characteristic in things themselves which allows us to isolate one of their parts: ‘A chaos of “existential judgments” about countless individual events would be the only result of a serious attempt to analyze a reality “without presuppositions’… Order is brought into this chaos only on the condition that in every case only a part of concrete reality is interesting and significant to us, because only it is related to the cultural values with which we approach reality.’
Thus the initial choice by which the object of study is constituted unfailingly ‘does violence to reality’, by imposing on in it a structure which is not ‘its own’, but which derives from ‘our’ world-view and our ‘concrete’ will and sensation. […] The scientific use of historico-empirical material is never reducible, even in this initial phase, to the simple function of exemplifying ideal types imposed on reality. After all, ‘our’ world-view and our ‘concrete’ will and sensation which determine the position we take towards reality, are themselves part of reality, and the configuration is directly or indirectly influenced by those same events which constitute the historico-empirical material, or at least by some of them. A war, a peace, a massacre, a famine, a revolt, a scientific discovery will normally come to form par, albeit chaotically and often unconsciously, of the representations of our imagination, influencing the way in which we look and see things.
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In effect, the adoption of a definite position towards the chaos of empirical data must include a position towards the chaos of our imaginative representation of those data. An ideo-typical construction, in order words, must be able to order, in a univocal conceptual framework, those great events which are generally considered in a particular epoch to be relevant to the phenomenon under investigation. Reference to empirical data, then, always has a significance over and above mere illustration of idio-typical construction — namely, verification of the relevance and univocality. At the same time, it should be stressed that the object of verification is not a hypothesis, since ‘[the idio-typical concept] is no hypothesis, but it offers guidance to the construction of hypothesis. It is not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description. What calls for verification is whether and to what extent a given idio-typical structure can generate a univocal order of relevant hypotheses.
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To construct a theory is to leave in the shade its presuppositions (in order to illuminate it’s specific object) or even the definition of that object itself (in order to illuminate the connections, whether causal or less direct, which link its components to one another and to the components of other ensembles). This procedure is justified when either the definition of the object of study or its own presuppositions may be discounted; when it is enough to expound the theory for its interlocutors to know to or to intuit the subject and the purpose of the discussion. The problem of the reconstruction of the theory arises when neither of these two conditions is satisfied — when […] no one is quite sure anymore what is being discussed and why it is being discussed. It is then necessary to adopt a procedure that is the inverse of that normally followed in the construction of a theory: we have to bring to light again the presuppositions of the theory and to concentrate on defining its object.