Roger Smith's thesis is that the essence of ‘being human’ lies in the historical nature of human existence. Attempts at pinning us down in the empirical, ‘value-free’, physical terms of the natural sciences are thus misguided. The categories we deploy to construe and give meaning to ourselves and our world all have histories. Generated by historical conditions, including evaluative traditions, these categories serve to effect further historical change, which in turn rebound on the categories to alter their meanings and functions. Understanding ‘being human’ is therefore a historical task through and through. Our humanity is our history, and knowledge of that humanity must have a narrative structure. A consequence of this thesis is the dialogic nature of knowledge creation about human existence; for, if understanding ‘being human’ is a historical task, then the history of efforts at acquiring this understanding itself takes centre stage.

Familiar though aspects of this argument are, it is no simple restatement of current ‘critical theory’ wisdom. Smith scrupulously ploughs his own furrow and, if clearly located within current debates, this is very much his own mature ‘position statement’, verging on a manifesto. It has been long awaited, since he is one of the most eminent historians of the human sciences, and surely its least anglocentric British representative – partly a result, one suspects, of his lengthening Moscow sojourn. Vico, Kant, Hegel, Dilthey, Weber, Collingwood, Cassirer, Gadamer, Foucault and Habermas provide the major reference points, although Whitehead, Sherrington, Geertz and Charles Taylor (among many others) are also significant.

What differentiates Smith's approach? First, his long-standing wrestling with the concept of the ‘human sciences’, notably in his Fontana History of the Human Sciences (London, 1997). This compels him to address the concept of ‘science’, including the incommensurabilities of its German and English meanings. He denies that the human sciences possess a uniquely reflexive character, and ably demonstrates how reflexivity operates in the physical sciences too. Nor for Smith is the difference methodological, the human sciences having frequently emulated the methods of the physical ones. In his view, the real difference is that the issues being addressed are of different kinds. Crucially, the subject matter of the human sciences – ‘being human’ – is a phenomenon of a logically different type.

Second, for all that his thesis is enmeshed in philosophical issues, Smith's historical approach means that he can avoid engaging them head-on. His take on philosophical accounts of ‘human nature’ reveals how these, too, have, in assuming some ahistorical ‘essence’ or ‘spirit’, failed ‘to establish definitive and authoritative grounds for the theory of knowledge’ (p. 55), and thereby failed to produce enduring answers. With empirical science and philosophy thus eliminated as contenders to knowledge about ‘being human’, only history remains standing. It bears emphasis, however, that, for Smith, being historical in no way requires one to be unscientific. His point is that, epistemologically, history is the most appropriate way to acquire knowledge of ‘being human’. (The anglophone equation of ‘science’ with ‘physical science’ is a troublesome hurdle here.)

A closely argued chapter on ‘Values and knowledge’ (including six deadly pages on Dawkins's ‘selfish gene’ concept) denies that the historical approach provides a mandate for moral relativism. Historical knowledge is a necessary condition for any sustainable morality at all, Smith argues. In making his case he effectively rehearses the ‘fact’-versus-‘value’ fallacy, showing that without some guiding values physical science becomes impossible or meaningless. His conclusion is unequivocal: ‘We have reached a decisive rational argument for historical knowledge: it is a condition of knowing what we mean by statements’ (p. 224). Here, historical, ‘narrativist’ and linguistic perspectives fuse. Different forms of knowledge serve different purposes; historical knowledge rightly serves vital, moral, purposes. Hence Smith's reservations about the ‘evolutionary story’:

Even the sympathetic reader might nevertheless wonder whether an evolutionary story is in order if we ask not ‘what is human nature?’ but ‘how did historically self-creating humans originate?’ It would misunderstand Smith to see him ruling out such questioning. His aim here is to engineer a powerful integration of diverse insights which recent decades of critical enquiry have yielded alongside many of his own. Necessarily, only its barest outlines have been sketched.

Having long shared Smith's general orientation, I am, in an odd way, relieved to discover one, fairly substantial, point on which we differ. While accepting that reflexivity alone cannot differentiate the human from the physical sciences, I believe that there is an important sense in which psychology at least is more tightly reflexive than other disciplines; for in psychology, there is no third term in the equation, no topic of inquiry other than the inquiring subject itself. Of course psychology has deployed countless conceptual and methodological manoeuvres to render aspects of this subject ‘other’, and thus amenable to ‘natural-scientific’ research methods. But these all eventually transpire to be detours, not escape routes, notwithstanding some interesting discoveries along the way. The concept of ‘reflexivity’ badly needs critical attention, current usages failing adequately to differentiate its numerous forms. The human sciences may then still manifest their own unique modes of reflexivity.

This is not an obviously sensational book. Those unfamiliar with its author's work and standing might easily underestimate it. It is serious and important, achieving its aims by scholarly diligence and close reasoning. Although one cannot predict the book's own historical importance, it could well emerge in time as the classic text in which the various strands of late twentieth-century Western critical thought were finally, coherently, woven together – a very major achievement indeed.