Micro-História, macro-história: O que as variações de escala ajudam a pensar em um mundo globalizado

Abstract

Nowadays, social scientists oppose micro and macro analysis in terms of topics, challenges and research strategies. In past decades, historians also debated and compared the advantages of micro history, with different versions of the history of the macro, transnational or global. This essay suggests, as an alternative, paying attention to the importance of the variation principle in the scales of observation, in critical and heuristic terms. It sketches an analytic model that leads one to think that it is on every level, from the most local to the most global, that socio-historical processes are preserved. Therefore, they can only be understood as the result of a multiplicity of individual and collective determinations, projects, obligations, strategies and tactics.