SUMMARY:

Ilya Gerasimov suggests that the type of social imagination and analysis that prevail today was formed in the seventeenth century in dialogue with the classical physics of Newton and Galilei and rationalized in the early 1800s by Auguste Comte. The development of physics from the seventeenth century to Einstein’s general theory of relativity and to quantum mechanics in the first half of the twentieth century was not only about the accumulation of knowledge but also represented a true epistemological revolution that changed the perception of reality and the role of its observer. Nothing of the kind happened in the social sciences and humanities, however. Since Thomas Hobbes, society has been viewed as an isolated system in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, and social processes are conceptualized as “bodies in motion” – homogeneous objects moving along clear trajectories. Hence the reduction of empirically observable social complexity to simple entities endowed with collective subjectivity and temporal longevity, such as the nation or the state. Gerasimov elaborates the concept of an “imperial situation” as an element of the new episteme, congruent with the language of complexity and relativity in modern natural sciences. This concept is not about empires but about the fundamental condition of unsystematic diversity that is observable in any society. Unsystematic diversity is a constant from the vantage point of social reality as an open system of multivalent actors in a state far from equilibrium and thus in asymmetrical relationships. Different perspectives on the same segment of historical reality may produce very different reconstructions of it that can never be accurately accommodated by any single narrative. Gerasimov offers his analytical model of truly modern history writing as a way to avoid the extremes of reductionism and relativism.