Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences.

Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Edited by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xix plus 444 pp.).

An appraisal of the accomplishments of "comparative historical analysis" since the publication of Barrington Moore, Jr.'s classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), this volume deserves the attention of historians. The contributors are sociologists or political scientists, and they distinguish their work from that of historians by denoting it theory-grounded. But they distinguish it as well from other social scientists, particularly from rational choice/game theorists and those who rely upon aggregate statistical methods. They emphasize the value of a limited number of case-studies in comparative work, what they call the small-N approach. They reject large-N statistical analysis, but their principal target is the universalizing ambition of the rational choice/game theorists who take little or no account of time and place.

The questions they take on are bracing. They implicitly challenge historians who sometimes argue around the edges of the big questions, as in the too long debate over republicanism and liberalism in the American Revolution. Comparative historical analysis as undertaken by these social scientists addresses historical transformations that change the human condition--revolutions, democracy and authoritarianism, the invention of social policy or social welfare. To the extent that historians are satisfied with particular explanations, we are outside of their understanding of comparative history. The contributors to this volume seek general explanations, or theory, which they distinguish from the universalist claims of game theory and rational choice analysis.

These essays are centrally concerned with causal explanation, and this, I think, is their value to historians. Under the influence of Geertzian anthropology and the strong historicism informing recent work in the humanities, historians have largely let go of causal explanation in favor of interpretive understanding of subjective meanings of past actors. This impulse need not have elevated synchronic over diachronic analysis, nor should the quest for subjective meaning have marginalized the issue of causal explanation. But it has done so. This volume is a cue to redirect our attention to causal explanation of historical change.

The book is divided into three sections. The first asks whether work since Moore has developed new knowledge that enriches our understanding of revolution, the conditions of and for democracy, and social policy formation. The second section addresses new analytics: more complex understanding of time and periodization, institutionalism, and network theory. The final section gets into rather technical questions of method, and there is a sort of conclusion by Theda Skocpol, whose presence in these pages is exceeded only by the long shadow of Barrington Moore.

Some essays are better than others, but the best speak in important ways to historians, particularly those by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Jack A. Goldstone, Paul Pierson, and Ira Katznelson. The introductory essay by Mahoney and Rueschemeyer is a comprehensive survey of the field and its relations to more "scientific" approaches and more historical approaches, including a brief (and distancing) discussion of the "cultural turn" in historical study. At its core is a powerful argument for the quest for generalized, if not universalistic, explanations based on multiple cases. These cases may be widely separated in time and place, though in each instance time and place are seriously considered. What is missed is the impact of earlier revolutions, whether political or industrial, on later developments, sometimes over very long periods of time. For that one needs a greater awareness of real time connections implied by transnational and global approaches. As Zhou Enlai told Henry Kissinger when asked about the French Revolution, "It's too early to tell." For him it was not yet concluded; hence one could not be sure of its outcome.

Jack A. Goldstone's learned and theoretically rich essay argues that recent research, much of it stimulated by Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions (1979), has produced such a proliferation of factors in the study of revolutions that the project of a generalized theory is much in doubt. However, in a neat turn, he suggests reversing the strategy: stability is a historical result, and scholars might focus on conditions making for stability, which may be less ungainly, as a way into the study of revolutions. This notion borders on a kind of trick, but it quite likely will open new and potentially important lines of inquiry and explanation.

Paul Pierson and Ira Katznelson examine the question of time and structure in historical explanation. Pierson is concerned with different temporalities and the relation of different time-frames to historical explanation--without reference, surprisingly, to Fernand Braudel's important essay, "History and the Social Sciences: The Long Term" (1958). Katznelson's concern is with a more subtle problem: the relation of periodization to what he calls "preferences." Pierson fears that too much historical work uses too tight a time-frame, both causes and consequences may have multiple time-frames, with different explanations embedded in them. Think of the 1951 National League Pennant race: was the time frame Bobby Thompson's home run (one inning), that last game, the last few weeks of the season, or one of the games the Dodgers lost in April?

Katznelson is less interested in the time-span of temporal framings than the implications of the link between structural analysis and periodization. He argues that in macro historical scholarship the structural framing of periodization effectively predicts causation, as in phases of class struggle in Marxist theory. How might one integrate preferences or self-conscious agency into such causal explanations? What is the relation of micro-analysis, with its attention to agency and choices, to macro-analysis, which tends toward structural explanation? He argues that in the process of structural change there are moments of "unsettled" social circumstances that open up multiple possibilities within structured macro change. This represents a weakening of constraint that gives play to preferences. Whatever the structural determinants of the American Revolution, for example, space opened up for quite particular and relatively unconstrained choices concerning specific provisions in the state constitutions and, then, the U.S. Constitution.

Here several themes inherent in explaining social change come together: contestation, contingency, preferences. The notion of preferences suggests a role for beliefs and ideas, which are notably absent in the explanatory schemes offered in this book. Edwin Amenta's essay on the development of social policy is the weakest of the lot, but it has the advantage of highlighting this deficiency of the volume as well as the tendency to completely ignore the comparative work done by historians. Amenta, whose field is American welfare provisions, makes no mention of the transnational and comparative work on industrialism and welfare by Alan Dawley and Sonya Michel or that on the international circulations of ideas about social policy by James Kloppenberg and Daniel Rodgers.

Thomas Bender

New York University