事件、过程与政治文化——近年来中古政治史研究的评述与思考

Event, Process and Political Culture——A Review Essay on Recent Publications on Medieval Chinese Political History

近年来中古政治史研究表现出"纵的停滞"与"横的拓展"的特征,传统以"政治集团"或"党派分野"为中心的政治史研究领域陷入瓶颈,通过社会网络这一概念的引入,认识政治活动中的"政见-庇护"复合结构,有助于完善传统的政治集团分析范式。"政治过程"与"政治文化"这两个观察维度的引入,拓展了政治史研究的范畴。受新史学的影响,作为政治史研究基本单位的"事件"曾饱受批评,反思传统历史学编纂与研究中对因果关系的构拟,发现与提取"决定性的瞬间",才能重新赋予"事件史"研究以合法性。

Two labels of particularity can wisely describe recent progresses in medieval Chinese political history, which is "stagnated horizontally" and "expanded horizontally". Since the traditional paradigms with a focus on "political group" or "clannish division" has become the bottleneck of political history studies, by introducing the concept of social network, I advanced the compound structure of " politics-patron" in political activities. This improved traditional paradigm of analysis on political groups. Also, the introduction of two new perspectives " political process" and " political culture", expand research themes of political history. Moreover, the rise of "New History" also forcefully challenged the basic research unit of "event" in political history. Therefore, we should revisit traditional historiography, thus to discover and reveal the"critical juncture" by reconstructing causal relationship as well as causal inference in historical studies. Only by these means can we re-implement legitimacy on "event history".