Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- I Accumulation of Research
- II Analytic Tools
- 5 BIG, SLOW-MOVING, AND … INVISIBLE
- 6 HOW INSTITUTIONS EVOLVE
- 7 USES OF NETWORK TOOLS IN COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL RESEARCH
- 8 PERIODIZATION AND PREFERENCES
- III Issues of Method
- Conclusion
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics
- References
8 - PERIODIZATION AND PREFERENCES
REFLECTIONS ON PURPOSIVE ACTION IN COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- I Accumulation of Research
- II Analytic Tools
- 5 BIG, SLOW-MOVING, AND … INVISIBLE
- 6 HOW INSTITUTIONS EVOLVE
- 7 USES OF NETWORK TOOLS IN COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL RESEARCH
- 8 PERIODIZATION AND PREFERENCES
- III Issues of Method
- Conclusion
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics
- References
Summary
The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, a remarkable painting jointly executed circa 1615 by two painters with very different styles, hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. A standing Eve, offering the apple, and a seated Adam, receiving it, both in the left foreground, were portrayed figuratively by Peter Paul Rubens. The lush garden in which they are placed, an overwhelming background filled with dense flora and the prolific animal kingdom against which the protagonists and their act of exchange stand out, was painted by Jan Breughel the Elder, Pieter Breughel the Elder's second son and friend to Rubens. This collaboration, the best example I know in the visual arts of an oscillation and combination of perspectives and methodologies in a single work, is a performance of analytical history. Marking the critical moment when a single exchange disenchanted the world and transformed the status of humankind inside nature, it is, like the best historical social science, a work about a particular time, setting, and choice, a perceptible narrative constituted by a story of periodization and an account of preferences.
What I wish to say about the vitality and possibility of comparative historical scholarship is contained in this canvass, or at least suggested by it. Macrohistorical scholarship tilts in the direction of periodization. This rich vein of learning, with a lineage in Marx's story of epochal transformations and class-based agency and in Weber's combination of “objective probability” with sequences and patterns of purposeful action composing what he called sources of “adequate causation,” primarily offers large structure analyses of long-term processes marked by titanic transformations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences , pp. 270 - 302Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
References
Abrams, Philip. 1982. Historical Sociology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Anderson, Perry. 1974. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: New Left Books
Archer, Margaret S. 1995. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Barth, Frederik. 1969. “Introduction.” Pp. 9–38 in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget
Bendix, Reinhard. 1964. Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies of Our Changing Social Order. New York: Wiley
Blockmans, Wim. 1998. “Representation (Since the Thirteenth Century).” Pp. 29–64 in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 7: c.1415–c.1500, edited by Christopher Allmand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Brewer, John. 1988. The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783. New York: Knopf
Brubaker, Rogers. 1984. The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber. London: George Allen and Unwin
. 1990. “In Defense of Rational Choice: A Reply to Ellen Meiksins Wood.” New Left Review 184: 97–109Google Scholar
1982. “Reply to Elster on Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory,” Theory and Society 11: 483–95Google Scholar
Collier, Ruth Berins. 1999. Paths Toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America. New York: Cambridge University Press
Collier, Ruth Berins and David Collier. 1991. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
de Swaan, Abram. 1998. In Care of the State: Health Care, Education, and Welfare in Europe and the USA in the Modern Era. New York: Oxford University Press
Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse Press
Douglas, Mary and Steven Ney. 1998. Missing Persons: A Critique of Personhood in the Social Sciences. Berkeley and New York: University of California Press and the Russell Sage Foundation
Downing, Brian M. 1992. The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Elias, Norbert. [1939] 1994. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization. Oxford: Blackwell
Ertman, Thomas. 1997. Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press
Finer, S. E. 1997. The History of Government, III: Empires, Monarchies, and the Modern State. Oxford: Oxford University Press
and . 1993. “Endogenous Preferences and the Study of Institutions.” American Political Science Review 87: 639–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartz, Louis. 1955. The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World
. 1998. “Making Use of the Past: Time Periods as Cases to Compare and as Sequences of Problem-Solving.” American Journal of Sociology 104: 339–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hernes, Gudmund. 1998. “Real Virtuality.” Pp. 74–101 in Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory, edited by Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg. New York: Cambridge University Press
James, Susan. 1984. The Content of Social Explanation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
. 1972. “The Irrelevance of Equilibrium Economics.” Economic Journal 82: 1237–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katznelson, Ira. 1981. City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States. New York: Pantheon Books
Katznelson, Ira 1992. Marxism and the City. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Katznelson, Ira 1997. “Structure and Configuration in Comparative Politics.” Pp. 81–112 in Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure, edited by Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman. New York: Cambridge University Press
1998. “The Doleful Dance of Politics and Policy: Can Historical Institutionalism Make a Difference?” American Political Science Review 92: 191–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knight, Jack. 1992. Institutions and Social Conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press
1988. “Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective.” Comparative Political Studies 21: 66–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1991a. “History and Industry Location: The Case of the Manufacturing Belt.” American Economic Review 81: 80–3Google Scholar
1991b. “Increasing Returns and Economic Geography.” Journal of Political Economy 99: 483–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar
. 1987. “Preference Falsification, Policy Continuity and Collective Conservatism.” The Economic Journal 97: 642–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and . 1992. “Structure and Irony in Social Revolutions.” Political Theory 20: 147–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levi, Giovanni. 1998. “The Origins of the Modern State and the Microhistorical Perspective.” Pp. 58–82 in Mikrogeschichte, Makrogeschichte: Komplementär oder inkommensurabel?, edited by Jürgen Schlumbohm. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag
Löwith, Karl. 1982. Max Weber and Karl Marx. London: George Allen and Unwin
Magnusson, Lars and Jan Ottosson, eds. 1997. Evolutionary Economics and Path Dependence. Cheltenham, UK: Elgar
. 2000. “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology.” Theory and Society 29: 507–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mantzavinos, C. 2001. Individuals, Institutions, and Markets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Marx, Anthony W. 1998. Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. New York: Cambridge University Press
Marx, Karl. 1956. The Holy Family. Moscow: Progress
Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press
Moore, Barrington, Jr. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press
Morgan, Edmund S. 1988. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: W. W. Norton
North, Douglass C. 1995. “Five Propositions about Institutional Change.” Pp. 15–26 in Explaining Social Institutions, edited by Jack Knight and Itai Sened. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Oakes, Guy. 1988. Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Padgett, John. 1990. “Networks and Identities in Political Party Formation: The Case of the Medici in Renaissance Italy.” Unpublished manuscript
Pettit, Philip. 1993. The Common Mind: An Essay on Psychology, Society, and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press
. 2000. “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics.” American Political Science Review 94: 251–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation. New York: Rinehart and Company
Popper, Karl. 1964. The Poverty of Historicism. New York: Harper & Row
Przeworski, Adam. 1990. “Marxism and Rational Choice.” Pp. 62–92 in Individualism: Theories and Methods, edited by Pierre Birnbaum and Jean Leca. Oxford: Clarendon Press
and . 1988. “Contrasting Rational and Psychological Analyses of Political Choice.” American Political Science Review 82: 719–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ringer, Fritz. 1997. Max Weber's Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyn H. Stephens, and John D. Stephens. 1992. Capitalist Development and Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Schattschneider, E. E. 1960. The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston
. 1977. “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6: 317–44Google Scholar
Sen, Amartya 1999. Reason before Identity: The Romanes Lecture for 1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press
1992. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation.” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silberman, Bernard S. 1993. Cages of Reason: The Rise of the Rational State in France, Japan, the United States, and Great Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Skocpol, Theda. 1992. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Steinmo, Sven and Kathleen Thelen, eds. 1992. Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press
Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1968. Constructing Social Theories. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World
Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1978. Theoretical Methods in Social History. New York: Academic Press
. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51: 273–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 2001. “Modernity and Identity.” Pp. 139–53 in Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science, edited by Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
. 1999. “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science 2: 369–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tilly, Charles. 1964. The Vendée. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Tilly, Charles 1975.“Reflections on the History of European State-Making.” Pp. 3–83 in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, edited by Charles Tilly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Tilly, Charles 1984. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press
. 1987. “Choosing Preferences by Constituting Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation.” American Political Science Review 81: 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 92
- Cited by