Explaining historical change is difficult because it involves analyzing a moving object. Historical explanations address this problem by dividing historical change into moments of discontinuity and periods of continuity. They explain discontinuities by retracing the generative processes that ultimately produced a change. Historical explanations explain continuities by drawing on path-dependent explanations. Such explanations involve specifying an early mover advantage during a historical discontinuity and following up by identifying so-called increasing return mechanisms that compound the causal effects of the early mover advantage over time. This compounding effect serves to epxlain why certain changes, once they are in place, reproduce themselves and hence endure.

This chapter first introduces Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes: material cause, formal cause, efficient cause and final cause. It is followed by the covering law model with its two versions: the deductive-nomological model, which is deterministic, and the inductive-statistical model, which is probabilistic. There are a number of counterexamples revealing the flaws of the covering law model, and the chapter discusses three: the barometer, the birth-control pill and the flagpole. A key defect of the model is that it does not involve the notion of causal mechanism. In contrast, mechanismic explanation traces the causal chain that produces the effect of interest and avoids the problems represented by the three counterexamples. Intentional explanation attempts to explain human behavior by intentional causation that treats reasons as causes. Although the terms teleological explanation and functional explanation are often used interchangeably, teleological explanation deals with conscious intent to achieve goals and is only applicable to human actions whereas functional explanation is concerned with the contribution of an entity to the future maintenance of a system of which the entity is a part. Historical explanation focuses on explaining the occurrence of some particular event by describing how it came to be. Finally, in contrast to variance theorizing that only examines the covariation among independent and dependent variables, process organization studies take time sequencing and ordering of events to be critical in conjuring up an explanation.