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The Uses of Theory, Concepts and Comparison in Historical Sociology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Victoria E. Bonnell
Victoria E. Bonnell
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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The sociological study of history has only recently achieved recognition in American sociology. Although historical research occupied an important place in the nineteenth-century European sociological tradition, American scholars long accepted a disciplinary division relegating the study of the past to historians, while reserving contemporary subjects for sociological investigation. The field of historical sociology first witnessed a revival in the 1950s with the publication of Reinhard Bendix's Work and Authority in Industry (1956) and Neil Smelser's Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959). During these years, a small chorus of voices called for a more historical approach to sociological problems and closer cooperation between the two disciplines.

Type
Approaches to Historical Comparison
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , April 1980 , pp. 156 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1980

References

This paper was originally presented, in somewhat different form, at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in December 1978. The author wishes to thank the many friends and colleagues who provided comments on this and earlier drafts of the essay.

1 For a discussion of the nineteenth-century origins of the historical-comparative method, see Bock, Kenneth E., The Acceptance of Histories. Toward a Perspective for Social Science (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956).Google Scholar

2 Bendix, Reinhard, Work and Authority in Industry. Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956)Google Scholar; Smelser, Neil J., Social Change in the Industrial Revolution. An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959)Google Scholar. These two studies do not exhaust the list of sociological works with an historical orientation published in the 1950s. Other significant contributions include Seymour Lipset, Martin, Agrarian Socialism. The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1950)Google Scholar; Eberhard, Wolfram, Conquerors and Rulers. Social Forces in Medieval China (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1952)Google Scholar; Moore, Barrington Jr, Terror and Progress (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Bellah, Robert N., Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957).Google Scholar

3 See, for example, Lipset, Seymour Martin, ‘A Sociologist Looks at History,’ Pacific Sociological Review, 1:1 (Spring 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among historians, Sylvia Thrupp was the foremost advocate during this decade of a rapprochement between history and sociology. She went on to found Comparative Studies in Society and History in 1958.Google Scholar Thrupp's essays from this period have recently been reissued in Grew, Raymond and Steneck, Nicholas H., eds., Society and History. Essays by Sylvia L. Thrupp (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977).Google Scholar

4 Bendix, Reinhard, Nation-Building and Citizenship: Studies in our Changing Social Order (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964)Google Scholar; Tilly, Charles, The Vendee (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Moore, Barrington Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)Google Scholar. A number of other important historical-sociological studies appeared in the 1960s, including Roth, Guenther, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany. A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totawa: Bedminster Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Eisenstadt, S.N., The Political Systems of Empires (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963)Google Scholar; Swanson, Guy E., Religion and Regime. A Sociological Account of the Reformation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967).Google Scholar

5 In 1976, Paige, Jeffrey and Bellah, Robert were co-recipients of the Sorokin Prize; Immanuel Wallerstein was awarded the prize in 1977.Google Scholar

6 The literature on methodological aspects of historical/comparative sociology is sparse indeed. Some interesting thoughts on the subject can be found in Daniel Chirot, ‘Introduction: Thematic Controversies and New Developments in the Use of Historical Materials by Sociologists, , ’Social Forces 55: 2 (December 1976)Google Scholar; Johnson, Bruce C., ‘Missionaries, Tourists and Traders: Sociologists in the Domain of History,’ unpublished paper, 1979Google Scholar; McDaniel, Timothy, ‘Meaning and Comparative Concepts,’ Theory and Society, 6 (July-November 1976)Google Scholar; Stinchcombe, Arthur L., Theoretical Models in Social History (New York: Academic Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Vallier, Ivan, ‘Empirical Comparisons of Social Structure: Leads and Lags,’ in Vallier, Ivan, ed., Comparative Methods in Sociology. Essays on Trends and Applications (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1971). For additional bibliographical references on the subject of methodology, see note 7.Google Scholar

7 It is noteworthy that each of these scholars has written about methodology per se. See, for example, Smelser, Neil J., Comparative Methods in the Social Science and Essays in Sociological ExplanationGoogle Scholar; Moore, Barrington Jr, ‘Strategy in Social Science,’ in Barrington Moore, Jr., Political Power and Social Theory,Google Scholar; Bendix, Reinhard, ‘Concepts and Generalizations in Comparative Sociological Studies,’ American Sociological Review, 28:4 (August 1963), pp. 532–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bendix, Reinhard and Berger, Bennett, ‘Images of Society and Problems of Concept Formation in Sociology,’ in Reinhard Bendix, Embattled Reason. Essays on Social KnowledgeGoogle Scholar; Hopkins, Terence K. and Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘The Comparative Study of National Societies,’ Social Science Information, VI–5 (October 1976), pp. 25–28.Google Scholar Charles Tilly has written extensively about methodology in his recent works. See, for example, Ch. 8 and Appendices 1–4 in From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: 1978)Google Scholar. Additional work by Tilly on this subject is cited in Tilly, Charles, Tilly, Louise, and Tilly, Richard, The Rebellious Century 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 The terms ‘deductive’ and ‘inductive’ will be used in the essay to refer to a process of reasoning that proceeds from a priori propositions to empirical evidence (deductive) or conversely, from empirical evidence to the formulation of propositions (inductive). Social science research is seldom based purely on either deductive or inductive reasoning, but a proclivity toward one or the other can nevertheless be discerned in specific works. Smelser's methodology in Social Change in the Industrial Revolution represents an unambiguous case of formal deductive reasoning, with inferences drawn from general sociological theory. Some of the other works discussed below, such as the Tillys' Rebellious Century, formulate analytical propositions mainly, though not exclusively, on the basis of accumulated empirical data.

9 I am using the term ‘primary’ to refer to any source that came into existence contemporaneously with the event or phenomenon under investigation, for example, a police report of a demonstration, newspaper accounts, a documentary record of any kind, census data or other statistical material collected at the time. The term ‘secondary’ is used here to refer to accounts compiled on the basis of primary sources.

10 See Val Lorwin, R. and Price, Jacob M., eds., The Dimensions of the Past. Materials, Problems, and Opportunities for Quantitative Work in History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972).Google Scholar

11 Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, for example, that ‘to reify the motives of scholars in doing particular research into two disciplines—the first history, the second social science—is to give misleading substance to the accidental and passing, and to miss the intellectual unity of the two enterprises.’ Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. x.Google Scholar See also Jones, Gareth Stedman, ‘From Historical Sociology to Theoretical History,’ The British Journal of Sociology, 27:3 (September 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Smelser, Neil J., Essays in Sociological Explanation (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 35Google Scholar. Marxist historians constitute one major exception to this generalization. For an outstanding discussion of the Marxist approach, see Johnson, Richard, ‘Thompson, Genovese, and Socialist-Humanist History,’ History Workshop, 6 (Autumn 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘An Interview with E.P. Thompson’ by Merrill, Michael, Radical History Review 3: 4 (Fall 1976).Google Scholar

13 Merton has labelled the second level of theory ‘middle range’: ‘ … [theories of the middle range] lie between the minor but necessary working hypotheses that evolve in abundance during day-to-day research and the all-inclusive systematic efforts to develop a unified theory that will explain all the observed uniformities of social behavior, social organization and social change. … It is intermediate to general theories of social systems which are too remote from particular classes of social behavior, organization and change to account for what is observed and to those detailed orderly descriptions of particulars that are not generalized at all. Middle-range theory involves abstractions, of course, but they are close enough to observed data to be incorporated in propositions that permit empirical testing.’ Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: The Free Press, 1968), p. 38.Google Scholar

14 For further discussion of this point, see below pp. 164–67.

15 Smelser, , Essays in Sociological Explanation, p. 35.Google Scholar

16 Ibid. Thrupp has observed that: [ideally, they [historians] aim at becoming familiar with all aspects of the culture of a period before singling out particular matters for investigation. This gives one hunches as to the points at which events, ideas, structures of relationship, are taking a genuinely new turn, modifying or breaking with regularities and directions set in the past. Hunches are tested by wide general reading and some check of the primary sources of the preceding period. But these are counsels of perfection that in practice are often bypassed as too laborious.’ Although seldom implemented in its ideal form, this conception nonetheless influences the way historians proceed in selecting an empirical problem. Sylvia L. Thrupp, ‘History and Sociology: New Opportunities for Cooperation,’ reprinted in Grew, and Steneck, , eds., Society and History, p. 299.Google Scholar

17 Merton, , Social Theory and Social Structure, p. 36.Google Scholar

18 The testing of established theories forms a central preoccupation in Tilly's work. He has written: ‘When I began my long inquiry into conflict, protest and collective action, I hoped to accumulate the evidence for a decisive refutation of the Durkheimian line.’ Tilly, Charles, ‘The Uselessness of Durkheim in the Historical Study of Social Change,’ Center for Research on Social Organization, University of Michigan, Working Paper No. 155, March 1977, p. 19.Google ScholarMoore, , Social Origins, ch. vii, viii, ix.Google Scholar

19 Bendix, Reinhard and Roth, Guenther, Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1971), p. 218.Google Scholar Bendix defines concepts of limited applicability as ‘concepts that are usefully applied to more than one society for a period whose approximate beginning and end are themselves a n object of research.’ For an exceptionally lucid discussion of sociological concepts, see Bendix, Reinhard, ‘Comparative Sociological Studies,’ in Transactions of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology, Washington, D. C., 2–8 September 1962 (Louvain, Belgium: International Sociological Association, 1964).Google Scholar

20 The moral and political concerns of historical sociologists deserve careful consideration which cannot be undertaken here. A provocative discussion of these problems can be found in Bendix, Reinhard, Social Science and the Distrust of Reason (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1951)Google Scholar. On this subject, see also Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Introduction,’ The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974)Google Scholar and The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. x–xii.Google Scholar

21 Smelser, Neil J., ‘Sociological History: The Industrial Revolution and the British Working Class Family,’ in Smelser, , Essays in Sociological Explanation, p. 11.Google Scholar This important essay originally appeared in The Journalof Social History, 1 (1967), pp. 17–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and is also reprinted in Flinn, M.W. and Smout, T.C., Essays in Social History (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 23–38.Google Scholar

22 Smelser, , Social Change, Ch. II.Google Scholar

23 Smelser, , ‘Sociological History,’ in Flinn, and Smout, , eds., Essays in Social History, p. 28.Google Scholar

24 For a recent critical discussion of Smelser's study, see Anderson, Michael, ‘Sociological History and the Working-Class Family: Smelser Revisited,’ Social History 3 (October 1976).Google Scholar

25 Wallerstein, , The Modern World-System, p. 7.Google Scholar

26 Wallerstein, , The Capitalist World-Economy, p. 7.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., p. 5.

28 Ibid., p. 158.

29 Brenner, Robert, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,’ New Left Review, 104 (July-August 1977), discusses this aspect of Wallerstein's argument,Google Scholar

30 Wallerstein, , The Modern World-System, p. 7.Google Scholar

31 This conceptualization of approaches to comparison is drawn partly from an unpublished seminar paper by Reneau, Donald, ‘Comparative Historical Analysis: A Critique of Sociology 242A.’ Berkeley, California, Fall 1978.Google Scholar

32 Marc Bloch has noted the importance of comparing contrasting as well as similar phenomena: ‘But let us beware of a misunderstanding from which the comparative method has only too frequently suffered. Too of ten people have believed or affected to believe that its only aim is to search for similarities. … On the contrary, the comparative method, rightly conceived, should involve specially lively interest in the perception of the differences, whether original or resulting from divergent developments from the same starting point.’ Bloch, Marc, Land and Work in Medieval Europe. Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, trans, by Anderson, J.E. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), p. 58.Google Scholar

33 Wallerstein, , The Capitalist World-Economy, p. 36.Google Scholar

34 Tilly, Charles, ‘Collective Violence in European Perspective,’ in Graham, Hugh Davis and Gurr, Ted Robert, eds., A History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspective (Washington, D. C: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969)Google Scholar; Tilly, Charles, ‘Revolutions and Collective Violence,’ in Greenstein, Fred I. and Polsby, Nelson, eds., Handbook of Political Science (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1974).Google Scholar

35 Bendix, Reinhard, Kings or People. Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1978).Google Scholar

36 Tilly, Tilly and Tilly, , The Rebellious Century 1830–1930. p. 11.Google Scholar

37 Ibid., p. 244, for remarks on this point.

38 Ibid., p. 312.

39 Ibid., p. 250. For further discussion of these typologies, see Charles Tilly, ‘Collective Violence in European Perspective,’ in Graham, and Gurr, , op. cit.Google Scholar, and ‘Revolutions and Collective Violence,’ in Greenstein, and Polsby, , op. cit.Google Scholar

40 Ibid., Chs. 5–6.

41 Bendix, , Nation-Building and Citizenship, p. 249.Google Scholar

42 Bendix, Reinhard, ‘The Mandate to Rule: An Introduction,’ Social Forces 55: 2 (December 1976), p. 246.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43 Bendix, , Kings or People, p. 15.Google Scholar

44 Ibid. Elsewhere Bendix has written: ‘By means of comparative analysis I want to preserve a sense of historical-particularity as far as I can, while still comparing different countries. Rather than aim at broad generalizations and lose that sense, I ask the same or a t least similar questions of divergent materials and so leave room for divergent answers. I want to make more transparent the divergence among structures of authority and among the ways in which societies have responded to the challenges implicit in the civilizational accomplishments of other countries.’ Bendix, , ‘The Mandate to Rule,’ p. 247.Google Scholar

45 See, for example, ch. 7, 8 in Bendix, , Kings or People.Google Scholar

46 Moore, , Social Origins, p. xiv.Google Scholar

47 In the Preface to Social Origins, Moore observed: ‘Nevertheless there remains a strong tension between the demands of doing justice to the explanation of a particular case and the search for generalizations, mainly because it is impossible to know just how important a particular problem may be until one has finished examining all of them.’ Ibid., p. xvii.

48 Moore, , Social Origins, p. xvii.Google Scholar

49 Lorwin, and Price, , eds., The Dimensions of the PastGoogle Scholar; Moore, , ‘Strategy in Social Science,’Google Scholar in Moore, , Political Power and Social Theory.Google Scholar

50 The recent involvement of sociologists in original historical research is closely connected to the growing interest in subjects that could not be pursued on the basis of existing monographic or even published primary sources. For this reason, much of the primary research by historical sociologists concerns the study of social movements and collective action among lower class groups, subjects long neglected by historians and sociologists alike. Further advances in these areas required new and original research using archival materials and other primary sources.

51 Bendix raises this problem explicitly in the Introduction to Kings or People, p. 16: ‘Comparative studies depend on qualitative judgments and illustrative uses of evidence. I have relied on the judgments of historians but primarily on my own sense of how much illustrative material is needed to give the reader a vivid impression of the point to be made. In practice, I have found it necessary to make the best judgments I can and then warn the reader, as I do here, that these judgments remain tentative and may have to be modified by further scholarly work or by the judgments of scholars more expert in a given field than I can hope to be.’Google Scholar

52 For example, see Smelser's, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution; Bendix's Work and Authority in Industry, Ch. 2Google Scholar; Moore's, Terror and Progress and Injustice. The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1978).Google Scholar

53 Research of this type, much of it by younger scholars, has only recently begun to appear. See Aminzade, Ronald, ‘Breaking the Chains of Dependency: From Patronage to Class Politics, Toulouse, France, 1830–1872,’ Journal of Urban History, 2:4 (August 1977)Google Scholar; Idem, ‘The Transformation of Social Solidarities in Nineteenth-Century Toulouse,’ in Merriman, John, ed., Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: Holmes and Meier: 1979)Google Scholar; Idem, ‘The Development of the Strike in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Toulouse,’ Social Science History, 3: 1 (January 1980)Google Scholar; Bonnell, Victoria E., ‘Radical Politics and Organized Labor in Pre-Revolutionary Moscow, 1905–1914,’ Journal of Social History, 12:2 (March 1979)Google Scholar; Idem, ‘Trade Unions, Parties and the State in Tsarist Russia: A Study of Labor Politics in St. Petersburg and Moscow,’ Politics and Society, 9:3 (1979)Google ScholarMandel, David, ‘Petrograd Workers in 1917,’ 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., Department of Sociology, Columbia University, 1977Google Scholar; Sharlin, Allan, ‘From the Study of Social Mobility to the Study of Society,’ American Journal of Sociology, 84:7 (1979)Google ScholarWiener, Jonathan M., ‘Planter-Merchant Conflict in Reconstruction Alabama,’ Past and Present, 68 (August 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Idem, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860–1885 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).Google Scholar