p.93 if at any given point a society conceives itself to have a number of alternative courses of
action before it, each of these will have to be understood and evaluated in terms of the possible responses it might call
forth on the part of another society. The situation produced by a society's choice of a certain alternative course
of action will in other words be itself modified in some more or less significant way by the choice made by another society
in the new situation produced for it by the action of the first society. The latter will thus find itself in a situation involving
a new set of alternatives - a situation which is the result of the sequence of its own action and the response which that
action met on the part of another society; and in this way the two (or more) societies move one another forward through an
option-tree that belongs wholly to neither of them and place themselves at choice positions which they would not have chosen
for themselves and which they could not have predicted with any very great degree of accuracy. Relationships of this
kind have been intensively studied from a formal point of view within the theory of games; and the goal of these studies has
been to construct a normative theory of rational choice under conditions of conflict and cooperation as well
as under conditions of certainty and uncertainty. My suggestion is that the concept of dialectic can be most
profitably interpreted as a sequence of situations conceptualized in this way - situations which follow upon one another
in time and which produce one another in such a way that neither party is in full control of the outcome at any given stage.
I would argue that the business of the historian involves in a quite central way the reconstruction of actual and particular
sequences of this kind.
p.94 When we speak of actions and counter-actions and of the complex network of assumptions about
the attendant circumstances of these actions and the possible responses with which they will meet, it must be remembered
that the ultimate mode of contestation of our actions is that of force, which thus becomes a kind
of implicit coefficient of every action that a society undertakes.
p.98 The point of this discussion was... that all actional events, whether they are accompanied
by any form of public discourse or not, must involve an element of implicit discourse in which the significance of
relevant events and states of affairs is determined from the standpoint of certain predominant interests and concerns
on the part of the agent, and various possible courses of action are evaluated in terms of their consequences
as they bear on those interests. This process might be described as an encoding of the elements in an action situation in
terms of their practical significance through the assignment to them of positive and negative values reflecting their
eligibility in the light of the norms, interests, and knowledge which the agent brings to the situation. The claim
that is made by my second thesis is that when a sequence of events is actional in the sense described and thus involves this
kind of practical construal of events and circumstances on the part of the agent as a necessary preliminary to action, a historical
narrative of those events must reconstruct the agent's descriptions wherever it is possible to do so
p.99 But as things are, we are thrust into one another's company; and since we
compete for so many of the same things, what one of us does has fateful consequences for the undertakings of others.
The character and consequences of an action, considered from this standpoint, may
be called "practical;"
