Richard,
I wrote a longer post to you, but my server crashed. In short, it said you
are not explaining the world. (And it suggested you read Gill, Cox, and
Robinson.)
But I did have a couple of questions. (1) Why do you consider Weberian
thought experiments (imaginary lines of history) to be a superior mode of
analysis to historical materialist theorizing from concrete reality and
actual history? (2) Why do you find real-world theorizing to be
"deterministic"?
Andy
One can summarize the logic of the thought experiment in this way: If the
past had not been what it was, everything in the present would not be what
it is.