Comment on Foucault (2002) and Savage (2009)

Foucault (2002) contrasts the idea of a ‘total history’ (it means, the idea of discovering
certain internal coherency in the historical narrative) with the practice of discovering
discontinuities (shifts, limits, dispersion, and the like) in history. He highlights that
discontinuities have moved from being something that need to be eliminated or avoided, to
being “one of the basic elements of historical analysis” (p. 8-10).

By analyzing the discontinuities in the historical discourse of sociology, Savage (2009)

shows how epochalism has become an integrant part of contemporary British sociology
since the middle of last century. Highlighting the emergence of a ‘new’ social order,
Savage argues, was part of a discursive device within the social sciences which helped to
justify the very existence of sociology as a new field, that is, autonomous in relation to
other social sciences.

I found very interesting and productive, among others, the idea delineated by Savage in his
paper that epochalism is not the result of deficient theoretical conceptions about time (one
might think about Braudel’s conceptions of longue durée or about Schütz’s notions on the
duration of individuals’ experience in everyday life). The ‘solution’ of the problem of
epochalism (even if this might be considered in part a theoretical problem) cannot be the
result of a logical-deductive task; it has to do with the way sociology embodies certain set
of practices (such as interviewing or conducting surveys).

This makes me reflect upon 1) the way how the construction of theories operates, since
sociology is constituted as a certain set of practices, with certain logic autonomous from
logical reasoning. From this approach, the very development of concepts depends on doing
sociology (and not only on thinking sociologically); and I particularly think of how this
could help highlight the limitations of theories such as that of Parsons or that of more
recent post-positivist developments in sociology.

I also reflect upon 2) the fact that social sciences, as sets of activities embedded in given
social orders, constitute themselves fields of power. If the construction and development of
scientific knowledge is a social activity and theoretical approaches cannot be understood as
separated from the context where they were produced (Lamont & Wuthnow, 1990), it

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would be very pertinent to analyze how those power relations operate in the field of social
sciences at the global level (for example, the division of labor between those academics in
privileged positions and those who are not).

Finally, I want to remark that it would have been very fruitful if Savage had provided us
with some ideas or insights about how the epochalism present in social research practices
might be deconstructed.

References

Foucault, M. (2002). Introduction. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (pp.3 – 17). New

York: Pantheon Books.

Lamont, M., and R. Wuthnow. (1990). Betwixt and between: Recent cultural sociology in
Europe and the United States. In Frontiers of Social Theory: The New Syntheses,
pp. 287–315.

Savage, M. (2009). Against Epochalism: an analysis of conceptions of change in British

sociology. Cultural Sociology, 3 (2), pp. 221–238.