PERIODIZATION AND PREFERENCES

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511803963.009

8 - PERIODIZATION AND PREFERENCES

REFLECTIONS ON PURPOSIVE ACTION IN COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Ira Katznelson

Edited by

James Mahoney and

Dietrich Rueschemeyer

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Ira Katznelson: Affiliation:
Columbia University; Cambridge University
James Mahoney: Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
Dietrich Rueschemeyer: Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island

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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 - 302

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803963.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2003

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