It is in facing such questions about the relation between the particular and the general that the analogy with the physical sciences, so frequently employed in discussions of microhistory and total history, finally breaks down. In studying the physical world, scientists can count on a uniformity of physical laws across all their scales of observation, whether they are looking at quarks or quasars. But nothing of the sort can be assumed about social interactions. In discussing individual decisions, historians and other social scientists look to a host of situation-specific psychological, cultural, social, and political factors which can be related only with great approximation and difficulty to the impersonal social, political, and economic factors which govern the behavior of humans in the aggregate. Drawing connections between these two disparate scales has of course been one of the great challenges of the social sciences since their birth in the eighteenth century. Microhistory has clarified the problem by drawing renewed atttention to the problem of scale itself, but it cannot be said to have yet offered many new and persuasive answers.