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A STRIKING NEW ATTEMPT TO GO BEHIND THE LIBERAL AND RATIONAL-CHOICE STARTING POINT IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND POLITICAL PREFERENCES IS FOUND IN AARON WILDAVSKY'S CULTURAL THEORY. EVEN WHILE REJECTING METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM, CULTURAL THEORY'S MONOCAUSALLY SOCIAL THEORY OF PREFERENCE FORMATION RETAINS IN A NEW GUISE THE LIBERAL PRESERVATION OF PREFERENCES FROM CRITICISM BY REESTABLISHING A DETERMINISTIC VIEW OF THE FORMATION OF VALUES, LEADING IT TO SHARE WITH LIBERALISM AN AHISTORICAL VIEW OF THIER ORIGINS.

Aaron Wildavsky's cultural theory (eg, see "Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation," American Political Science Review, 1987, 81, 1, Mar, 3-21 [also see abstract of "Can Norms Rescue Self-Interest or Macro Explanation Be Joined to Micro Explanation?" in SA 41:1]), which is designed to overcome shortcomings in rational choice theory & to account for people's political preferences, is critically assessed. It is argued that Wildavsky's cultural theory does not facilitate the criticism of political preferences because its understanding of them is based on the libertarian premises that structure our politics. By restricting the influences on an individual's political preferences, cultural theory parallels the naturalistic tendencies of endogenous determinism by reducing society to the status of a physical object, & reproduces the deracinated & conservative view of economistic & libertarian theory. It is concluded that cultural theory -- both in its passive, socially reductive mode & in its active atomistic rationalism -- fails to allow for the criticism of preferences, & shares with liberalism an ahistorical view of the origins of political values. Adapted from the source document.

In the course of their disciplinary consolidation during the 19th and 20th centuries, the social sciences came increasingly to be less historically orientated. Analogously, global history became increasingly a marginal concern for professional historical scholarship. At the present juncture, however, there is a coincidence of a rethinking of the formation of modernity in cultural terms and the need to locate European modernity in a global context. Social theory must be able to provide an account of global historical developments that is less constrained and biased than modernization theory, even in the new garb of globalization studies, but significantly more elaborate in conceptual terms than current contributions to global history. A rethinking of the formation of modernity has already contributed to a greater appreciation of processes of cultural and ideational transformations. It has also suggested new ways of studying institutional change. It must, however, also be able to locate the specific European trajectory in a global context. The core element in such a research programme is the analysis of three major periods of global cultural crystallization, namely the Axial Age, the ecumenical renaissance, and the formation of modernity. The rationale and the contours of this research programme are outlined.

Reviews 3 books on political theory by Hayden White: Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, Baltimore, 1973; Topics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticsm, Baltimore, 1978; and The Contest of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore, 1987. (Abstract amended)

Presence -- Contents -- Prologue -- 1. Presence in Absentia -- 2. Be Here Now: Mimesis and the History of Repre sentation -- 3. Meaning, Truth, and Phenomenology -- 4. Of Photographs, Puns, and Presence -- 5. The Public Rendition of Images Médusées: Exhibiting Souvenir Photographs Taken at Lynchings in America -- 6. The Presence of Immigrants, or Why Mexicans and Arabs Look Alike -- 7. Transcultural Presence -- 8. "It Disturbs Me with a Presence": Hindu History and What Meaning Cannot Convey -- 9. The Presence and Conceptualization of Contemporary Protesting Crowds -- Epilogue: Presence Continuous -- Notes -- Contributors.

This occasional but substantial joumal, devoted by its title to the philosophy of history, will publish, we are told in an editorial note, material "principally in four areas: theories of history, cause, law, explanation, generalisation, determinism; historiography, studies of historians, historical figures and events which illuminate general historiographical problems; method of history, interpretation, selection of facts, objectivity, social and cultural implications of the historian's method; related disciplines, relationship of problems in historical theory and method to those of economic, psychological and other social sciences." The distinctions here drawn seem, on the whole, to be indicative rather than analytical: "determinism" is grouped a little oddly with its neighbours, and it is not quite clear how the third area ("method of history") is related either to the first or to the second; but all in all, there is little doubt what the province of a journal of philosophy of history is here taken to he be.To borrow words from the opening lines of the first contribution, an article entitled "History and Theory" by Sir Isaiah Berlin (a member of the editorial committee), "history is what historians do"; and philosophy of history is a mode of enquiry into what it is and how they do it. This philosophy is concerned with the explanation rather than the explicandum; its tools are analytical and its statements second-order statements. Some exceptions to this view can be found in the issues so far published and there may be more to come.