Ricerc@Sapienza

This work tries to make evident how and why we must go beyond the epistemological disputes that have dominated the world social thought for the past two centuries. Demonstrating the relevance of time and space and how they affect the content of any analysis, Braudel and Wallerstein provide an epistemological alternative to the antinomy between idiographic and nomothetic disciplines. This alternative is constituted by multiple, socially constructed geo-historical categories. They are interpretative keys to understand the complexity of the geohistorical social systems and have considerable implications for scientific and moral choices.