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.