The present monograph considers some macrohistorical trends along with the aspects of globalization. Macrohistory is history on the large scale that tells the story of the entire world or of some major dimensions of historical process. For the present study three aspects of macrohistory have been chosen. These are technological and political aspects, as well as the one of historical personality. Taken together they give a definite picture of unfolding historical process which is described from the beginning of (...) human society formation to the present day and near future. The combination in the monograph title of the two terms – macrohistory and globalization – is in no way artificial. On the contrary, the connection of these terms is organic at least as the real goal of macrohistory is to find mean-ing in the past so as to create new possibilities of meaning for the future. The analysis of globalization also includes three aspects: political, economic and futurological as today the world may well be regarded as being at the start of a new global reconfiguration. The author presents his ideas of the world prospective political and in some respects social-economic development basing on the analysis of macrohistory and contemporary globalization processes. The monograph also considers some global scenarios of the World System's near future. (shrink)

An eclectic and civilizationally rich theory of grand social change is the objective of this collection of essays focusing on historians--from Ibn Khaldun to Oswald Spengler and from Piritim Sorokin to Arnold Toynbee--who have helped shape our way of conceiving of ourselves.

ABSTRACT Historians of science, inasmuch as they are concerned with knowledges and practices rather than institutions, have tended of late to focus on case studies of common processes such as experiment and publication. In so doing, they tend to treat science as a single category, with various local instantiations. Or, alternatively, they relate cases to their specific local contexts. In neither approach do the cases or their contexts build easily into broader histories, reconstructing changing knowledge practices across time and space. (...) This essay argues that by systematically deconstructing the practices of science and technology and medicine (STM) into common, recurrent elements, we can gain usefully “configurational” views, not just of particular cases and contexts but of synchronic variety and diachronic changes, both short term and long. To this end, we can begin with the customary actors’ disciplines of early modern knowledge (natural philosophy, natural history, mixed mathematics, and experimental philosophy), which can be understood as elemental “ways of knowing and working,” variously combined and disputed. I argue that these same working knowledges, together with a later mode—synthetic experimentation and systematic invention—may also serve for the analysis of STM from the late eighteenth century to the present. The old divisions continued explicitly and importantly after circa 1800, but they were also “built into” an array of new sciences. This historiographic analysis can help clarify a number of common problems: about the multiplicity of the sciences, the importance of various styles in science, and the relations between science and technology and medicine. It suggests new readings of major changes in STM, including the first and second scientific revolutions and the transformations of biomedicine from the later twentieth century. It offers ways of recasting both microhistories and macrohistories, so reducing the apparent distance between them. And it may thus facilitate both more constructive uses of case studies and more innovative and acceptable longer histories. (shrink)

A striking feature of our world is that we only seem to have records of the past. To explain this ‘record asymmetry’, Albert and Loewer claim that the Past Hypothesis induces a narrow probability density over the world’s possible past macrohistories, but not its future macrohistories. Because we’re indirectly acquainted with this low-entropy initial macrostate, our observations of records allow us to exploit the associated narrow density to infer the past. I will argue that Albert and Loewer cannot make sense (...) of why this probabilistic structure exists without falling back on the very records they wish to explain. To avoid this circularity, I offer an alternative account: the ‘fork asymmetry’ explains the record asymmetry, and this in turn explains the narrow density—not vice versa. (shrink)

The basic argument of this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia is that colonial attitudes toward South Asian religion and Hindus' attitudes toward Western intellectual discourse reveal an ambiguous mix of xenophilia and xenophobia. This articles focuses on yoga, whose macrohistory comprises a global case of xenophilia, beginning with Vivekananda's address at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago and still ongoing today. Before that watershed speech in 1893, however, indigenous scholars were translating Sanskrit texts into Bengali (...) as part of an effort to articulate a unified vision of Hindu traditions that could be used to engage with the science, medicine, and other attractive aspects of British and Western culture. Comparing Bengali renderings of Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra, this essay concludes that one of them, the translation of paṇḍit Kālīvar Vedāntavāglīś, exposed elements of ambiguity in the original work that expanded the possibilities for the engagement of yoga with Western discourses, while at the same time legitimating the Sanskritic past as a resource for addressing new realities. In the process, Kālīvar's translation helped enable the globalization of yoga as we know it today. This article concludes by suggesting that microhistorical work on the activities of translators may aid in understanding the part that local knowledge can play in our global future. (shrink)