Formulation of the claim
The text holds that reform in the political or educational sphere cannot succeed if it remains confined to ready-made solutions or to conceptions detached from the society’s history. A historical scientific approach is not merely an epistemological option, but a means of understanding how institutions and ideas have come into being, and then dealing with them from within rather than imposing an external model upon them.
Explanation
The text assumes that any reform requires a precise knowledge of the context in which crises arose. It therefore presents change not as a quick decision, but as a process that passes through a historical understanding capable of explaining the structures and obstacles that produced the status quo. From this perspective, the value of the historical scientific approach lies in its ability to reveal what makes reform possible and limited at the same time.
Its place in the book’s argument
This claim appears within Arkoun’s argument, which links reform more to epistemological critique than to general slogans. The book does not present reform as a direct administrative response, but as a path that requires a historical understanding showing how crises are formed and persist. In this sense, the claim helps steer the reading toward the idea that change begins with precise knowledge of structure and context.