The Knowledge Inheritance And Reverse Movement In Historical Sociology

The knowledge movement focuses on the relationship between ideological change and academic field,theoretical competition,and social background,and intends to highlight the competitive and conflicting side of the academic development process.As an important research field of sociology,the knowledge movement of historical sociology is quite complicated.After World War II,historical sociology gradually revived.While flourishing,cognitive differences and research differentiation also appeared.In this regard,previous researchers tried to sort out the development process of historical sociology from the aspects of subject nature,research methods,important scholars,research topics,and division stages,but they all ignored the internal mechanism and development logic of the knowledge movement in historical sociology,concealing power struggles and conflicts of interest in the process of knowledge movements.So,what is the internal mechanism of knowledge movement in historical sociology? In order to answer this main research question,this paper adopts the analytical perspective of knowledge movement,takes the academic context of historical sociology after World War II as the research object,and constructs two analytical mechanisms of knowledge inheritance and reverse movement to analyze the process.The study found that the revival of historical sociology began with the reverse movement against structural functionalism and abstracted empiricism.This process established the status of the classic text of Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy,developed the theoretical tradition and research path of structural analysis,attracting followers to continue to practice,elucidate,improve and revise.In the 1980 s,there was a“cultural turn” in social sciences.Some historical sociology researchers who emphasized the constitutive role of culture realized the reverse movement of structural analysis through the way of “theory-bashing”,and Remaking Modernity pushed cultural analysis to a climax.These scholars with diverse research orientations formed a new academic group,developed the theoretical tradition and research path of cultural analysis,and thus led a new round of knowledge inheritance.However,the overemphasis on cultural interpretation and meaning interpretation leads to epistemological dilemma,which causes historical sociologists to re-examine structural analysis,thus promoting the dialectical return of structural dimensions.