‘Universalism’

This essay falls into two parts. In the first the author tries to sketch some reasons for adopting an essayistic, rather than a monographic, approach to social phenomena. If one believes that society strongly privileges a certain relatively uniform set of terms, concepts, and theories, tacitly claiming universal status for them, then a sharply focused study of individual, seemingly marginal, phenomena will escape this imposed homogeneity than more general theoretic accounts will. The second part begins by distinguishing three senses of ‘universalism’. In the first sense, and approach is universal if it claims to be applicable to everything. An example would be the ‘economic’ approach to human behaviour. In a second sense, one can claim that a theory has universal application and is also uniquely correct –it is not simply one way to approach everything, but it is the only right way. The third sense is one associated with Kantian transcendentalism, which is a claim not just about the correctness of a given view, but its necessity, a necessity that is rooted in some invariant feature which structures all our knowledge. This essay claims that a confusion of the first and third of the three senses of ‘universalism’ has had very deleterious consequences for human thought and action.