Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change

This dazzlingly original collaboration between two international authors focuses on 20 macrohistorians--that is to say, historians who have helped shape our entire way of conceiving ourselves--from Ssu-Ma Ch'ien and Ibn Khaldun to Oswald Spengler and Marx and Piritim Sorokin and Arnold Toynbee. The authors move toward a general theory of grand social change based on the writings of these macrohistorians and provide a comparative view of macrohistory and sociology. The book brings a cross-cultural and transhistorical perspective to the study of social change, analyzing macrohistorians and macrohistory comparatively and synthetically, from the traditional linear-cyclical divide as well as including broader transcendental and feminist approaches. Like a road map par excellence for the study of civilizational change, the book captures the panoramic sweep of history and helps readers learn to appreciate, and henceforth include in the circle of greats, those non-Western thinkers whose work they may until now have neglected. Johan Galtung, Sohail Inayatullah, and the other contributors to Macrohistory and Macrohistorians demonstrate that each generation may give new perspectives to ideas that we thought we understood. The book covers the vital perspective out of which the 21st century emerges, and in the cases of Sorokin, Toynbee, and Eisler, deals with theories directly bearing on the potential shape of the next thousand years. It brings a cross-cultural and transhistorical perspective to the study of social change and will be of considerable interest to historians and sociologists as well as students of philosophy, historiography, and political science.