Conceptual categories of time and space in the social sciences: moving beyond methodological disputes

The aim of this essay is to analyze the construction of the conceptual categories of time and space in the social sciences. The methodological dispute of the late nineteenth century, the Methodenstreit, debated the merits of the so-called idiographic and nomothetic epistemologies. Later the Annales movement, in general, and Fernand Braudel in particular, departed from both the idiographic epistemology of traditional history expressed as the narration of events and the nomothetic epistemology of social sciences articulated in the search for universal laws valid across time and space. While in the positions taken in Methodenstreit, time and space were analytically irrelevant, Braudel, expressing the Annales version of history, conceived time as a social construct and conceptualized multiple social times. World-systems scholars and Immanuel Wallerstein in particular, have shared Braudel's analysis of the varieties of social times and have gone a step further. That is, they have argued that each of the four times--episodic, cyclical, structural, and eternal--has a corresponding space and that furthermore time and space are not two separate dimensions but together form a single category, "TimeSpace."