ABSTRACT
Our aim has been to identify and interrogate those conceptual premises necessary for a dialectical analysis of large-scale, long-term historical accounts of social and cultural change. This is a task made necessary by several decades of forceful and cogent critiques of such accounts as inexorable negations of freedom-that is, negations of human agency and self-determination. Accordingly, we begin this chapter with a summation of those necessary premises emerging from our analysis of the Jena Chair, the New York City Draft Riots, the Yí River Flood, and the Mozambican AIDS before examining the consequences of these for such critiques. Importantly, one should not surmise from this cursory recitation of premises that the content of the preceding analysis can be neatly reduced to an elementary set of paradigmatic axioms. The case for these premises ultimately lies not in any intrinsic or transcendental logic but in the arduous process of discovery itself-that is, the immanent phenomenological analysis set out in preceding chapters.
