"Long Data" and Social Science
For my class on social theory and international relations, I read an excerpt of Braudel's work laying out the concept of the "longue duree." This is nearly 2AM, so this will not be a particularly long riff.
Braudel's method involves charting the influence of a social structure that persists over long periods of time. They become "stable elements for an indefinite period of time," providing both constraint and support for human action. Of course, Braudel's conception of structure is not purely material. For him the "longue duree" is a combination of geographical, biological, economic, and even spiritual constraints and ingrained mental frameworks.
Though the idea of structure is a conscious construction of the historian for analytical purpose, Braudel also sees it broadly as an enduring regularity in human affairs. It is not a recurring aspect of nature, as it is a social-organizational form that can erode over the ages.
A recent Wired post on the concept of "Long Data" suggests a few ways that an social scientist might extend Braudel's time scale:
By “long” data, I mean datasets that have massive historical sweep — taking you from the dawn of civilization to the present day. The kinds of datasets you see in Michael Kremer’s “Population growth and technological change: one million BC to 1990,” which provides an economic model tied to the world’s population data for a million years; or in Tertius Chandler’s Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, which contains an exhaustive dataset of city populations over millennia. These datasets can humble us and inspire wonder, but they also hold tremendous potential for learning about ourselves.
The concept of "long data" has some advantages beyond merely observing the persistence of certain structures. The slow accumulation of beliefs, trade, institutions and political entities over time can also give us a sense of when disruptive change occurs and/or path dependency sets in. We can get a sense of larger context that is often missing.
I have read some fairly interesting works that argue that social change is an inherently autocatalytic process. Peter Turchin, Manuel De Landa, and David Christian all have looked at the ways in which different social, natural, biological, and ideational processes combine to generate new outcomes. Perhaps Turchin also gets around some of the problems with old cyclical theories of history in noting his interest in a dynamic view of cycles:
[W]hen students of dynamical systems (or, more colourfully, ‘chaoticians’ such as Jeff Goldblum’s character in the film Jurassic Park) talk about ‘cycles’, we do not mean rigid, mechanical, clock-like movements. Cycles in the real world are chaotic, because complex systems such as human societies have many parts that are constantly moving and influencing each other.
Of course, questions of agency often also creep in. Are human beings making choices or are we the prisoners of impersonal forces operating on millennial time scales?
I would submit that it is really difficult to answer this question on a general basis. I remember a writer noting that on a large enough temporal and spatial scale, human agency fades, although his exact name escapes me. Perhaps Braudel's notion of constraint or "hindering" factors is more useful. That, and the specter of determinism does not really do justice to the idea of a dynamic--and historical--set of interacting processes.
It might also be noted that the idea of systemic interactions between humans and the natural environment which create path dependencies is well-accepted in debate over climate change. Scientists use elaborate computer simulations to ponder critical points after which feedback loops doom any effort to reverse global warming. If we are able to accept that a given systemic interaction may come to defy human agency in this context, why should we blanch at the idea of even more long-term processes?
I read David Christian's introduction to big history in a hurry last year, so I would likely be interested to see his take on the scale question when I have more time. Perhaps the impact of individual and group agency has to do with what kind of scale the investigator wants to look at and the kind of question being asked.
How this all applies to IR and political science is something I will be pondering over the coming months.
