150 struggling with the worldsociety or culture. Th e principles enunciated in the name of this con-
ception are intended to have consequences for the design of institutions
as well as for the solution of the problems that we face in dealing with
one another. However, there is no reverse movement from our moral
and po liti cal experience to the revision of the principles.
Th e historicist wave is the fourth and most recent of these manifes-
tations of the idea of the two regimes. Its core idea is that the human
world is collectively shaped by society and culture. Th e self- grounding
of humanity is thus both practical and collective: it passes through the
historical development of forms of life and of consciousness. Our rela-
tion to these or ga nized and distinct forms of life is internal. We can
understand them, as Vico earlier argued, because we made them. A
decisive contrast exists between the inward relation that we can have
to such collective constructions of ours and the relation from without
that we can have to the non- human world, of which we are not the
authors.
Th e historicist wave thus has two aspects. One aspect is social: we
can fi nd direction only in the collective work of society and culture.
What we mistake for an experience or power of the individual is in fact
a collective construction in historical time. Th e other aspect is herme-
neutic: of these collective worlds of ours we can hope to attain knowledge
unlike the knowledge from the outside that we have of nature. Scientifi c
explanation diff ers from the interpretation of our practices and institu-
tions. Meaning is parasitic on history.
Our self- understanding and our self- construction in history are
badly misdirected when we begin to see and treat the orders of soci-
ety and of culture as if they were parts of the furniture of the uni-
verse: a fate imposed on us by natural necessity rather than by hu-
man, albeit collective, agency. Th e power that the dead exercise over
the living, through the medium of such collective forms, is not to be
confused with the constraints that non- human nature imposes on
human experience.
For the historicist, the frontier between the two regimes tracks the
division between the social and the extra- social. Everything that we
did not make through society and culture, including the natural con-
stitution of the human body, belongs to the fi rst regime: the one that we
can see and explain only from the outside, as observers or manipula-