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The mid-nineteenth-century renaissance of interest in historical and comparative social and cultural studies issued in a rich variety of work ranging through religion, law, myth, language, kinship, art, politics—indeed, the whole sweep of human institutions. We see it as an intellectual movement given unity by a common resolve to bring time and space dimensions to humanistic inquiry, to replace analysis of abstract categories with explication of specified conditions of human affairs as outcomes of processes operating through time. Revolutionary zeal that encouraged an immediate reconstruction of society based on deduction from reasoned, timeless principle was countered with a view that the setting of human group life is always a going concern, shaped variously by temporal forces, and understandable only in its concrete forms. From this perspective the Austinian search for legal forms and the dry calculations of Benthamite utilitarianism had painted a false picture that did not get at the real stuff of social life.

The basic operation in the comparative method is an arrangement of social or cultural conditions observed among existing peoples into a series that is then taken to represent a process of evolution. This procedure has been used to depict the whole sweep of human history, a limited period of development, or the growth of a particular social or cultural element or group of elements. The method has been applied most commonly, perhaps, in a search for origins of specific cultural items.

While the expose of racist theories has done much good in the field of ethnic relations, soc sci'ts should not forget that the mere denial of race as a factor in accounting for the cultural heterogeneity of mankind still leaves that heterogeneity unexplained. 3 other hypo's to account for such diff's have been advanced. The views of representative advocates are presented for (1) environmentalism, (2) evolutionism, & (3) the historical approach. With respect to (1), the hard fact is that quite diff cultures exist within the same physical milieu & similar cultures arise in contrasting environments. Theory (2) actually leaves the central question of cultural diff's untouched, (3) attributes diff cultures to diff's in the experiences of their carriers. The failure to explain cultural diff's in cultural terms has meant that racism could be combatted only negatively, & only on its own biological ground, since no positive alternative was offered that provided a better explanation of cultural diff's. The best early organized expression of the historical point of view is to be found in certain of Hume's essays. What particularly distinguishes this analysis of the problem is its insistence on regarding cultural diff's as having come to be in the course of certain classifiable historical experiences of contact & communication. J. A. Fishman.