Prof. Dr. Margrit Grabas
Economic and Social History
(including Technical and Environmental History)
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Economic History - as a discipline of both history and economics - possesses an integrating function within the humanities, the social sciences and the technical sciences, because it links systematic and historical subjects, questions and methods on the one hand, and because of its closeness to the history of population, the history of technology and the humanities. Accordingly, it can counterbalance the dehistoricization especially of economics that took place in the course of the 20th century and can falsify unrealistic economic models through the historical analysis of socio-economic structures, processes and results.Thus, Economic History can help to enforce the change of paradigms in economics that could be observed in the Anglo-Saxon area at the latest since the 1980ies, in order to develop after 1989 in the direction of an again value-bound, historical contextualization of economics. Further, Economic History is indispensable for the advance of history in general, in order to counter the danger of de-economizing history that exists since the opening of history towards cultural studies in the middle of the 1980ies. | |||
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Economic History possesses an orientating function for students of the economic and historical sciences that should not be underestimated. This function is explained by the situation of Economic History within the more and more complex developing processes of social practice that undergo complicated and painful historical changes. It is the analysis of interrelations between economic predicaments and subjective scope of action that change in the course of time and produce structural imbalances and instabilities, which relativize current socio-economic discontinuities and changes in the sense of a deliberate shaping of developments. As much as economic process variables - presupposing certain conditions - constitute quantifiable objective correlations, as little are they historically determined on the basis of the socio-culturally determined intentionality of human action. | |||
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Economic History is highly relevant for politics on the background of an accelerating regionalization of world economy. Not only does it produce large series of data that are required for intertemporal and international comparative analyses. Its focussing on interrelations between objective and subjective development parameters renders it capable of making transparent the institutional requirements, political base conditions and socio-cultural norms and values for individual and collective learning processes of societies that cope with basic structural changes of history. Thus, Economic History provides an essential contribution for the more and more urgent humanization of the economic processes of production and exchange. | |||
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The relevancy of Economic History for practice and politics is recognizable especially in its close interrelation with aspects of the history of technology and environment in the development of industrial market economies. Technology - as a mediator between man and nature and accordingly a cultural factor of first rank - has fully developed its inherent dichotomy of "creation" and "destruction" only under market economy conditions. If technological innovations constitute an essential requirement for the dynamization of economic circulations, they represent on the other hand - in the face of the global market and dependent on an accelerating technological knowledge - a danger potential that can almost not be controlled any more. Restriction of technological effects - under ethical, ecological and socio-economic aspects - can only be realized in cooperation with Economic History and its sub-disciplines technological history and environmental history. Only the clarification of the historical dimensions of the problem of technological effects will produce the necessary self-assurance for the ecological/political regulation of social changes.Technology is not - as has long been taken for granted - the result of inadvertible economic forces, along a fateful predetermined line of progress, but the result of "variable social processes of engendering orientations for action and selective decisions" of individual and collective agents. |
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| for further information see | Grabas, M., Kultur in der Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Einführungsvortrag zum gleichnamigen Panel auf der Tagung des wirtschaftshistorischen Ausschusses des Vereins für Socialpolitik vom 7. März bis 9. März in München, in: Vierteljahrsschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 94 (2007)/2, S. 173-177 Grabas, M., Die Bedeutung der Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichtsschreibung im Kontext neuer wissenschaftlicher Herausforderungen im großgewordenen Europa, in: Internationale Wissenschaftliche Vereinigung Weltwirtschaft und Weltpolitik (IWVWW) – Berichte 133 (2003), S. 1-5 |
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