Review Essay As Big as it Gets: ‘Big Theory’ and the Collapse of Darwinism

In recent years, the study of long-run processes that play them-selves out of the course of centuries, even millennia, rather than years or decades, has become popular in the humanities as well as the social and natural sciences. In part, the emergence of this field of research reflects a growing appreciation among scholars that the structures of modern life cannot be fully understood or even placed in their proper contexts without first having adequate knowledge of how we arrived at the current state of affairs. In part, the recent expansion of this area of study is also driven by the desire (of some) to find an intellectual basis upon which a better future may be built, or at least the more obvious pitfalls of myopia avoided. In recognition of this growing interest in ‘big history’, a recent issue of this journal, edited by Graeme Donald Snooks (2005a), specifi-cally devoted its attentions to this literature1. One of the things to emerge from that publication was the realization that to make sense of such lengthy time periods, a solid theoretic framework is abso-lutely essential; in other words, to be meaningful, ‘big history’ needs to be accompanied and informed by ‘big theory’. Of course, given the large number of variables involved and the complexity of issues at hand, the construction of such ‘big theories ’ is a daunting task. Yet, if one believes that the profound economic, political and ecological challenges that the twenty-first century poses for hu-manity can only be disentangled and confronted by taking a long view, it is a vitally important task. At the forefront of this recen