Until recently a bias was widespread in the historical profession against the introduction of theory into historical research and writing. The historian was to reproduce the past wie es eigentlich gewesen and this, it was felt, required an immersion into the evidence free of any theoretical presuppositions. The past itself would speak through the historian. In fact, this traditional historiography did have basic theoretical assumptions about the nature of historical knowledge, but its practitioners were often blandly unaware of them. This faith in the objectivity of historical investigation became increasingly problematic in the course of the twentieth century. If the older tradition of historical scholarship had held that theory and generalization necessarily distorted historical reality, increasingly historians and theorists of history believed that the past could be reconstructed only with the aid of questions derived from theories about the interrelations of historical phenomena. Particularly as the interests of the historians shifted from a recounting of political events to the analysis of social processes and changing social structures did social history in its concerns move increasingly closer to the generalizing social sciences.

The question remained what sort of theories were applicable to history and particularly to social history. The warnings of the historians of traditional orientation that the historian must take into account the unique, nonrecurrent character of the past and the fact that history deals with living human beings whose volitions and intentions must be understood were taken seriously by the newer generation of social historians. They recognized that history could never be entirely equated with systematic social science. While the systematic social sciences sought knowledge in the form of generalizations, history was a particular form of social science which took into account the unique character of human experiences. Yet the unique could be understood only in a social context, and the understanding of this context required theoretical constructs and called for comparative methods. On the other hand the higher the level of generality and abstraction, the more the historical account is apt to be removed from the concrete history lived and experienced by human beings. The task was to find a mode of theoretical abstraction which helped to bring out clearly the unique character of a historical situation or structure.

The articles in this issue constitute attempts at such a search. In selecting authors we have tried to solicit work relatively unknown in the United States but representative of current endeavors to give social history a theoretical orientation. The issue opens with two essays, one by Alberto Caracciolo, editor of Quaderni storici, the other by Jurgen Kocka, cofounder and coeditor of Geschichte und Gesellschaft, which give a broad survey of the role of theories in social history in Italy and West Germany. Both essays focus on the 1970s. Together they supply valuable contextual background for the more specialized articles that follow.

In the next five articles three major contemporary approaches to social history are presented and critically assessed. Jerzy Topolski, of the University of Poznan, outlines the methodological problems that arise in applying the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism to historical research, and indicates how they may be flexibly resolved within the legacy of Karl Marx's thought. A concrete instance of several of these problems was the intra-Marxist debate between Perry Anderson and Edward P. Thompson in the 1960s. Keith Nield, coeditor of Social History, tells why that debate should be regarded as significant both for its revelation of important methodological issues and for its failure to affect later research. A rival approach to the Marxist has been that of the great Annales historians. Explicitly disavowing megatheory, they tried to discern long-term trends, short-term cycles, and collective mentalities, and to interrelate them over time. In an article on Fernand Braudel, John Day, of the University of Paris, shows how this strategy has been managed fruitfully by a master. Two succeeding articles appraise the value of specific social sciences to the operating social historian. In an essay that is somewhat broader than its title, "Psychoanalysis and History," Hans-Ulrich Wehler, of Bielefeld University, adjudges the merits--to a degree, the rival merits--of psychology, social psychology, and sociology as auxiliaries to the study of social history. The essay by Ronald G. Walters, of the Johns Hopkins University, assesses the theories of a leading American anthropologist, Clifford P. Geertz, whose influence upon historians has been pervasive.

A final article, by Dieter Groh and Rolf-Peter Sieferle, of the University of Konstanz, offers an exemplar of two social historians who with interdisciplinary aid have devised their own explicatory hypothesis, in this case to explain the changing attitudes of the Western world toward nature from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.