沃勒斯坦：从社会学到历史社会科学
原文：Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2000. “From Sociology to Historical Social Science: Prospects and Obstacles.” The British Journal of Sociology 51 (1): 25–35.
一、现代性与社会学的发展
在这篇文章中，沃勒斯坦指出，社会学发展的黄金时代大约在1945-1965年，当时社会学的科学任务似乎很明确，大家对于社会学研究也很有信心：
The golden era of sociology as a discipline was probably 1945–1965, when its scientific tasks seemed clear, its future guaranteed, and its intellectual leaders sure of themselves.
他认为，实际上，社会学从诞生以来，一直充满历史乐观主义，相信科学技术发展与历史进步是有益的并且是必然的（受乐观的社会进化论思想影响：先富能带动后富，天下终将大同，美美与共，人人自由）：
The era in which sociology was born and has lived until recently was suffused with historical optimism, based on widespread confidence in the unlimited virtue and endless future development of technology. It was anera in which intellectuals believed in human progress not only as something that was good in itself but as something that was historically inevitable.
沃勒斯坦认为，这种历史乐观主义产生了自由主义“宏大叙事”的世界观，社会学家们在这一自由主义远景之上创造了“现代性”概念，这一概念对世界进行了二元的新旧划分（近现代这种二元对立理念也深刻影响了社会学理论的发展）：
Sociologists built on this vision to create the concept of modernity, which term was designed to denote the more recent of two alternatives in a binary conceptualization of the world’s social possibilities: contract rather than status, Gesellschaft rather than Gemeinschaft, organic rather than mechanical solidarity, and so forth. These binary concepts permitted us to create elaborate descriptions of the modern world and the ways in which it was said to differ from 'traditional society.’
在他看来，近现代以来中庸自由主义与其他思潮斗争，成为主流思潮，之后无论是左翼激进派，还是右翼保守派，虽然是对自由主义的“反动”，但其实都在自由主义范畴内，只是自由主义的“变种”（个人自由主义-国家/民族自由主义-社会自由主义，这是沃勒斯坦在《现代世界体系》一书中表达的核心观点）：
There existed two main dissenting variations on the liberal grand narrative. One was conservative; one was radical. The conservative dissent expressed doubts about the inevitability of the liberalvision, and even more about its desirability. There were conservative sociologists, to be sure. But sociology as a field was not very receptive totheir message, and never gave their theoretical ideas much space. In order tosurvive in intellectual milieus, conservatives had to renounce their more reactionary instincts and remold their arguments into a version that incorporated an evolutionary process, although to be sure it was one that nonetheless maintained the desirability and inevitability of hierarchy in the finaloutcome. Hegelian thought offered a logic on which such theses could be built, and its emphasis on the State was compatible with the ever-spreading sense of national identities.
The main radical alternative was Marxism, which offered a variant of the liberal vision that was more coherent than that provided by conservatism, but it was also one that was less different from liberalism. Essentially, Marxism laid emphasis on the fact that the present era was not the ultimate but only the penultimate moment in historical progress. This revision of the scenario had important consequences for the analysis ofthe present ( 'class conflict’ ) and for political action ( 'revolution’ ), but Marxism shared with liberalism the belief in the centrality of abinary conceptualization of the present, and of the inevitability of progress.
二、介乎科学与人文之间的社会学
另一方面，“现代性”高歌猛进中，所谓的“进步”也给一些个人和群体带来了损害，社会学在这个过程中开始研究城市、研究种种社会问题，并介入社会工作，这个时候，社会学进一步得到发展：
The self-image of sociologists as social workers, or as the theorists of social workers, provides a key to the real definition of the activity of sociologists. Indeed, the world of the financial sponsors ( states, foundations and so on ) was particularly attracted to this concern of sociologists, without which sociologists would have received even less financial support than they in fact did.
然而，此后，新自由主义的兴起、在全球范围内的扩张引起了沃勒斯坦的思考：进入二十一世纪，科学技术与现代性将会继续高歌猛进，带来社会的繁荣？还是有另一种可能，即现存世界体系终将崩溃？
So one major question before us is whether the twenty-first century promises a linear thrust forward of technology and modernity ( whether called globalization or post-modernity or whatever ) or whether it portends a collapse of the existing world-system.
在上述这一现实争论背后，是这样一种变化：近现代早期，随着科学技术的发展，自然主义与人本主义不断分野，逐渐形成二元对立的态势（科学主义的认识论与解释学和人本主义的认识论的对立）。社会科学则介乎期间，摇摆不定：
The natural scientists won acceptance for their claims. The Western world, which by then had become the centre of a capitalist world-economy that would come to encompass the entire globe in the nineteenth century, enthroned a scientific epistemology as the preferred mode of knowledge. In defensive retreat, a counter-view, a different epistemology, hermeneutic and humanistic, asserted itself as 'non-scientific’ and laid battle.
From circa 1850 to circa 1970, the world university system had separate faculties of the natural sciences and of humanities pulling epistemologically in opposite directions, with the social sciences located in-between and being pulled apart by these two strong forces.
但是，随着自然科学（和数学）领域复杂性科学的发展，对近现代以决定论、还原论和线性论为基础的自然科学的基本模式受到了挑战：
Basically, the sciences of complexity have challenged the fundamental model of modern science, sometimes called the Baconian/Cartesian/Newtonian model, which was determinist, reductionist, and linear. The new group argues that this older and dominant model, far from describing the totality of natural phenomena, in fact is descriptive of very special and limited cases. The scientists of complexity invert almost all thepremises of Newtonian mechanics, insisting on the 'arrow of time’ and the 'end of certainties.’
此外，这一时期，文化研究兴起，研究者将“文化”的研究历史化与相对化，身份政治研究、后现代主义思潮兴起，关于少数群体的相关研究不断深入。社会科学同时受到这两种运动的影响，并对此两种发展进行了整合：
Today, we have scientists of complexity using language more consonant with the discourse of social science ( the arrow of time ) and advocates of cultural studies doing the same ( social-rootedness of values and aesthetic judgments ). Both these groups are growing in strength. The model is becoming centripetal in the sense that the two extremes ( science and the humanities ) are moving in the direction of the in-between centre (social science), and to some degree on the centre’s terms.
三、建立历史的社会科学
鉴于以上的新发展，沃勒斯坦重新思考社会科学的未来，认为社会科学家或许能够促进一种新的综合，重建社会科学认识论基础，积极的整合社会科学各学科，以创造一个更为明智的学术分工体系：
Perhaps social scientists can help to clarify the issues and thereby promote a new synthesis which would reunify the epistemological bases of the structures of knowledge. Perhaps not, but we shall not know unless we try.
The third scenario, perhaps less likely but probably more desirable, is that social scientists themselves take the lead in reunifying and redividing social science so as to create a more intelligent division of labour, one that would permit signicant intellectual advance in the twenty-first century.
在沃勒斯坦看来，社会科学要跳脱出韦伯的形式理性与实质理性二元划分，从经验的、历史的、综合的视角出发展开具有价值关怀的社会科学研究。沃勒斯坦将之称为历史社会科学（想到黄宗智倡导的“实践历史与社会科学”研究……），强调它必须建立在这样认识论的假设之上，即对社会现实的描述都必然同时是“历史的”，不仅要考虑情境的特殊性，还要考虑结构的延续、互动与变动：
I think such a reunification could only be achieved on the basis of considering that we are all pursuing a singular task, which I call historical social science, to underline that it must be based on the epistemological assumption that all useful descriptions of social reality arenecessarily simultaneously 'historical’ ( that is, they take into account notonly the specificity of the situation but the continual and endless changes in the structures under study as well as in their environing structures ) and 'social scientific’( that is, they search for structural explanations of the longue durée, the explanations for which, however, are not and cannot be eternal ). In short, process would be at the centre of the methodology.
接着，沃勒斯坦又继续详述了一下这种历史社会科学的综合性与世界性特征，在这里，沃勒斯坦与布迪厄的倡导颇为类似，都很有左派的理想，那就是：“全世界知识分子，联合起来！”（沃勒斯坦还说，这要求所有社会科学家都要能够：read scholarly work in five to seven languages，惭愧惭愧，我连英语都还没学好……）：
In such a reunified ( and eventually redivided ) social science, it would not be possible to assume a significant divide between economic, political, and sociocultural arenas ( no ceteris paribus clauses allowed, even provisionally ). And we would have to be very careful about the 'we’ and the 'other’. Instead of drawing a line between the modern and thepre-modern, the civilized and the barbaric, the advanced and the backward ( which we continue to do in so many subtle and not so subtle ways ), historical social scientists have to incorporate the tension of universal–particular intothe centre of their work, and subject all zones, all groups, all strata to the same kind of critical analysis.