Theda Skocpol

The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry

Comparative history is not new. As long as people have investigated social life, there has been recurrent fascination with juxtaposing historical patterns from two or more times or places. Part of the appeal comes from the general usefulness of looking at historical trajectories in order to study social change. Indeed, practitioners of comparative history from Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber to Marc Bloch, Reinhard Bendix, and Barrington Moore, Jr. have typically been concerned with understanding societal dynamics and epochal transformations of cultures and social structures. Attention to historical sequences is indispensable to such understanding. Obviously, though, not all investigations of social change use explicit juxtapositions of distinct histories. We may wonder, therefore: What motivates the use of comparisons as opposed to focussing on single historical trajectories? What purposes are pursued—and how—through the specific modalities of comparative history?

Vision and Method in Historical Sociology

Preface 1. Sociologys historical imagination Theda Skocpol 2. The social and historical landscape of Marc Bloch Daniel Chirot 3. Beyond the economistic fallacy: the holistic social science of Karl Polanyi Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers 4. Configurations in history: the historical sociology of S. N. Eisenstadt Gary G. Hamilton 5. Theoretical generalization and historical particularity in the comparative sociology of Reinhard Bendix Dietrich Rueschmeyer 6. Destined pathways: the historical sociology of Perry Anderson Mary Fulbrook and Theda Skocpol 7. E. P. Thompson: understanding the process of history Ellen Kay Trimberger 8. Charles Tillys collective action Lynn Hunt 9. The world system of Immanuel Wallerstein: sociology and politics as history Charles Ragin and Daniel Chirot 10. Discovering facts and values: the historical sociology of Barrington Moore Dennis Smith 11. Emerging agendas and recurrent strategies in historical sociology Theda Skocpol An annotated bibliography on methods of comparative and historical sociology Notes on the contributors.

Bringing the State Back In: State Structures and the Possibilities for “Keynesian” Responses to the Great Depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States

When the Great Depression of the 1930s swept across the Western industrial democracies, it undermined classical liberal orthodoxies of public finance. Economic crisis called into question the predominant conviction that government should balance its budget, maintain the gold standard, and let business reequilibrate of its own accord during economic downturns. Demands were voiced for extraordinary government actions on behalf of industrial workers, farmers, and other distressed groups. Established political coalitions came unraveled, and new opportunities opened for politicians and parties that could devise appealing responses to the exigencies of the decade. One of the greatest dilemmas was how to cope with an unprecedented volume of unemployment in suddenly and severely contracted economies. Out of the traumas of the 1930s came new political and theoretical understandings of the much more active roles that states might henceforth play in maintaining growth and employment in advanced industrial-capitalist democracies. Thus was born the “Keynesian era,” as it would retrospectively come to be called in honor of the breakthrough in economic theory embodied in John Maynard Keyness 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money . National reactions to the crisis of the depression varied widely, however. In many cases either conservative stasis or a turn toward authoritarianism prevailed. Among the countries that avoided the breakdown of democratic institutions, Sweden and the United States were the sites of the boldest responses to the crisis by reformist political leaderships.

Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal

DESPITE all that has been observed since Marx’s time, as to the operations of elites, bureaucracies, etc., Marxists generally seek to reduce political phenomena to their &dquo;real&dquo; class significance, and often fail, in analysis, to allow sufficient distance between the one and the other. But in fact those moments, in which governing institutions appear as the direct, emphatic, and unmediated organs of

A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Voluntarism in the United States

We challenge the widely held view that classic American voluntary groups were tiny, local, and disconnected from government. Using newly collected data to develop a theoretically framed account, we show that membership associations emerged early in U.S. history and converged toward the institutional form of the representatively governed federation. This form enabled leaders and members to spread interconnected groups across an expanding nation. At the height of local proliferation, most voluntary groups were part of regional or national federations that mirrored the structure of U.S. government. Institutionalist theories suggest reasons for this parallelism, which belies the rigid dichotomy between state and civil society that informs much current discussion of civic engagement in the United States and elsewhere.

Wallerstein's World Capitalist System: A Theoretical and Historical Critique

The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. By Immanuel Wallerstein. New York and London: Academic Press, 1974. Immanuel Wallersteins The Modern World-System aims to achieve a clean conceptual break with theories of “modernization” and thus provide a new theoretical paradigm to guide our investigations of the emergence and development of capitalism, industrialism, and national states. This splendid undertaking could hardly be more appropriately timed and aimed. For quite some time, modernization approaches have been subjected to telling critical attacks (e.g., Gusfield 1967; Frank 1966; Bendix 1967; Tipps 1973; Smith 1973; Tilly 1975, chap. 9). They have been called to task for reifying the nation-state as the sole unit of analysis, for assuming that all countries can potentially follow a single path (or parallel and converging paths) of evolutionary development from “tradition” to “modernity,” and, concomitantly, for disregarding the world-historical development of transnational structures that constrain and prompt national or local developments along diverse as well as parallel paths. Moreover, modernization theorists have been criticized for the method of explanation they frequently employ: a historical ideal types of “tradition” versus “modernity” are elaborated and then applied to national cases; if the evidence seems to fit, one assumes that a particular historical instance is adequately explained; if not, one looks for the “chance” factors that account for its deviation. In the opening pages of The Modern World-System , and in a related essay (also published in 1974) called “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System,” Wallerstein unequivocally defines his approach in direct opposition to these features of modernization theory.

States, social knowledge, and the origins of modern social policies

Preface 1 Knowledge about What? Policy Intellectuals and the New Liberalism 2 Social Knowledge, Social Risk, and the Politics of Industrial Accidents in Germany and France 3 Social Science and the Building of the Early Welfare State: Toward a Comparison of Statist and Non-Statist Western Societies 4 The Verein fur Sozialpolitik and the Fabian Society: A Study in the Sociology of Policy-Relevant Knowledge 5 Progressive Reformers, Unemployment, and the Transformation of Social Inquiry in Britain and the United States, 1880s-1920s 6 Social Knowledge and the Generation of Child Welfare Policy in the United States and Canada 7 International Modeling, States, and Statistics: Scandinavians Social Security Solutions in the 1890s 8 Social Knowledge and the State in the Industrial Relations of Japan (1882-1940) and Great Britain (1870-1914) Conclusion Notes on the Contributors Index

Voice and Inequality: The Transformation of American Civic Democracy

white men now includes a rainbow of persons, and it has just witnessed the first instance of a woman president handing off the gavel to a female successor. Despite the many changes over the decades, there have been important continuities—so many that Goodnow and his colleagues would surely recognize us today as inheritors of the association and disciplinary vision they launched. Now, as then, organized political science encompasses normative theory as well as empirical research. Now, as then, APSA features comparative research, area studies, and a focus on international politics as well as studies of American politics; and our membership is international. APSA fosters both pedagogy and research. We nurture ties to neighboring disciplines and proudly include scholars who started elsewhere in our ranks. Now, as then, we aim to link responsible citizenship in the larger society to scholarly studies of government and politics. In the words of Pendleton Herring, delivered in his APSA presidential address 50 years ago: “[A]s we . . . develop political science as a discipline we both serve our professional needs and perform the vital function of helping our democracy to know itself better.” Above all, as Goodnow put it in his first presidential address, APSA aspires to be “inclusive.” We do not define political science narrowly, and yet we still seek to nurture solidarity and fellowship, especially by sponsoring “annual sessions” that “offer a common meeting ground in more ways than one for those whose work is mainly or largely political rather than economic or historical.” Ours is a vital association, still benefiting from active member involvement and support, a model of unity nourished by diversity. For 100 years, we political scientists have stuck together and flourished. Let us hope that a century from now our successors can look back and say that we built well on earlier foundations, opening the way for still further growth and intellectual and practical engagement. The centenary of APSA, a thriving voluntary membership group, is a fitting time to reflect on the changing shape of the American civic democracy of which we are a part. U.S. democracy has long been considered distinctive—and a model of sorts for the rest of the world. This is somewhat owing to the U.S. Bill of Rights and electoral contests; perhaps even more so, it is because Americans have long been portrayed as preeminent organizers and joiners of voluntary associations that shape and supplement the activities of government. In the 1890s, Lord Bryce—who later served as the

A Critical Review of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy:

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant In the Making of the Modern World. By Barrington Moore, Jr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966. Many pay lip service to the classical tradition in sociology, but few indeed work in terms of its mandate – which calls upon social scientists to assess, from a comparative and historical perspective, the prospects for freedom, rationality, and democracy in a modernizing world. Of the intrepid few who do consciously carry forward the classical tradition, most elaborate theoretical leads from the enormous scholarly legacy of Max Weber. Barrington Moore, Jr.s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is therefore all the more unusual and interesting because it is not only a work solidly within the classical sociological tradition, but also the product of a Marxist scholarly perspective. And, leaving aside the literature on imperialism, it is virtually the only well-elaborated Marxist work on the politics of modernization to which one can point. Social Origins does not postulate one route to the modern world which must be taken by all countries. Nor does it assign the strategic political roles in modernizing revolutions to the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Yet in deeper and more significant ways, Social Origins is a Marxist work. In it Professor Moore relies for theoretical sustenance upon the central conceptions of Marxist political sociology – “the conception of social class as arising out of an historically specific set of economic relationships and of the class struggle as the basic stuff of politics .”

The Tocqueville Problem: Civic Engagement in American Democracy

Over the past 15 years, my scholarship has been devoted to understanding the patterns, the possibilities, and the impossibilities of politics and social policy in the United States. In this essay, therefore, I have decided to use historical evidence to address current public and scholarly debates about civic engagement in American democracy. As I hope to remind us all, social science historians can speak clearly to contemporary public concerns. We may be able to introduce some better evidence and more sophisticated explanations into ongoing debates.