ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the major theoretical movements in Europe that have influenced social scientists both there and in the English-speaking world. In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy of history, the meaning of action to the individual is supplanted by the deeper meaning of events for the whole culture and the character of a nation. Interpretationalists who follow Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud have to provide both an alternative interpretation of the theories as well as a diagnosis of their originators' errors in mistaking their theories for proto-natural scientific ones. Marx's notion of an ideological superstructure of social and cultural institutions, practices, norms, values, even styles and fashions and discourses has had an influence in the social sciences that lasted long after the influence of his economic theory waned. Critical theory labels an approach to social science, its aims and methods developed largely by the German contemporary of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas.
