COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY

MA Program “Global Sociology: Comparative Perspectives”.

Faculty of Sociology, St. Petersburg State University.

Professor Andrey V. Rezaev www.rezaev.comparsociology.com|

Dear Friends• This is a Class of “Comparative Sociology” in MA Program

developed at the Chair of Comparative Sociology, Faculty of Sociology, St. Petersburg State University.

The Program “Global Sociology: Comparative Perspectives” was launched back in 2006 and all the Classes are conducted in English.• The Program has a subtitle: “Comparative Perspectives”. And

this is very important point. • It also means that our Class is one of the Core Courses in the

Program. Here comes

a SURPRISE…

I want to let you know that HISTORICAL perspective is CRUCIAL for an exploration of sociological and comparative visions of a society.

Rationale, Objectives and Goals• Fall 2011 Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and

Historical Sociology Section Volume 23, No.1 [http://www2.asanet.org/sectionchs/newsletter/SCHSfall2011.pdf]

“All Sociology is Historical and Comparative” Neil Fligstein, University of California-Berkeley

Neil FligsteinChancellor's Professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Sociology;Director of the Center for Culture, Organization, and Politics at the Institute of Industrial Relations• (2002) The Architecture of Markets: An Economic

Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies• (1993) The Transformation of Corporate Control • (1982) Going North: Migration of Blacks and Whites

from the South, 1900-50 (Quantitative studies in social relations)

Neil Fligstein:“Historical and comparative sociology is not just a section, a method, or a set of unconnected studies that people engage in for obscure reasons. It should be at the core of how we look at any social process”.

Neil Fligstein:“One cannot study social stratification without understanding its dynamics over time. One cannot do political sociology without a historical sense of institutions and the nature of their current crises and how they are resolved…

Sociology that tries to create understandings of society without regard to context or history cannot help but miss what is going on”.

Types of studies used in sociology

• directly observe people; • formally ask people questions; • those that use data (official records, testimonies,

diaries, etc.); and

• a mixture of data from studies using some or all of the methods mentioned.

Types of Studies (Methodology) used in History

• What does, and what can, history as an academic discipline claim to do?

• Epistemology and memory;• Causation and narrative;• Objectivity;• Historical example and analogy;• Counterfactual history;• Global history; • Advantages and drawbacks of historical

fragmentation.

Marc Bloch(1886-1944)

French historian, co-founder of the Annales School of French social history• Méthodologie Historique (1988); • Les Rois Thaumaturges (1924), his doctoral dissertation• La Vie d'Outre-tombe du Roi Salomon (1925)• Feudal Society: Vol 1: The Growth of Ties of

Dependence (1989); Feudal Society: Vol 2: Social Classes and Political Organisation(1989)

• Apologie pour l'histoire ou Métier d'historien (1949), translated as The Historian's Craft (1953)

Marc BlochAPOLOGIE pour L’HISTOIRE ou METIER D’HISTORIEN

(1949)• «Иногда говорят: «История – это наука о прошлом». На мой взгляд,

это неправильно. Ибо … сама мысль, что прошлое как таковое способно быть объектом науки, абсурдна. Как можно…сделать предметом рационального познания феномены, имеющие между собой лишь то общее, что не современны нам?..(С.16)

• «…История – наука о людях… Это еще очень расплывчато. Надо добавить: «о людях во времени». Историк не только размышляет о «человеческом». Среда, в которой его мысль естественно движется, - это категория длительности…» (С. 18)

• «Люди больше походят на свое время, чем на своих отцов».(С.23)(пер. Е.М. Лысенко, М. Наука, 1986 г.)

Maxim Kovalevskiy(1851-1916)

Needs no Introduction…• «Общественный строй Англии в конце средних

веков» (1880)• «Историко-сравнительный метод в

юриспруденции и приемы изучения истории права» (1880 г)

• «Происхождение современной демократии» (1895—97)

• «Очерк происхождения и развития семьи и собственности» (1939)

Историко-сравнительный метод … есть параллельное изучение общественной эволюции различных народов, древних и современных, которое должно, в конечном счете, дать общую формулу поступательного движения общественной жизни"

«Очерк происхождения и развития семьи и собственности», 1939 (с. 19)

Craig Calhoun(@craigjcalhoun)

President of the Social Science Research Council;Director of NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge;Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science

• (2007) Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. Routledge.

• (2001) Nationalism. Open University Press and University of Minnesota Press.

• (1995) Critical Social Theory. Basil Blackwell.• (1982) The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of

Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution. University of Chicago Press and Basil Blackwell.

Craig Calhoun,Why Historical Sociology?

• “The compelling reason for the existence of historical sociology is embarrassingly obvious ... This is the importance of studying social change. (…) (P.383)

• “…A second compelling reason … It is a way of dispelling the illusions of false necessity. Along with comparison, attention to historical specificity is one of the crucial ways of demonstrating that what happens to be is not what must be…

• …A third compelling reason … is nee to grasp analytic categories in the historical contexts of their production and application. There is no access to past or present or reality … through categories of thought which are themselves historical products and results of conscious and unconscious choice, of social as well as individual selection ... and never more relatively adequate to the pursuit of knowledge”.(P.384)

Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003 (pp. 383 -395)

Craig Calhoun,Why Historical Sociology?

• “History and sociology both need historical sociology. It is an indispensable help to each in counteracting the baneful effects of the Methodenstreit. This German argument over method … flourished over a hundred years ago, but left an enduringly problematic heritage. (P.385)

• “Historical sociology …stands between the idiographic and the nomothetic in both history and sociology. As it happens, the label is more commonly used among sociologists, though the practice clearly includes historians… one of the oddities of labeling is that ideas of ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ are often used to label opposing approaches in history, and social history is further divided between a ‘social science’ variant that is often quantitative and a more interpretative”(P.386)

Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003 (pp. 383 -395)

Craig Calhoun,Why Historical Sociology?

“Historical sociology is in fact as old as any other sort of sociology. When Comte coined the word ‘sociology’, and certainly when Durkheim launched his discipline-forming project in the 1890s, sociology was already in part a project of historical analysis. Vico, Montesquieu, Ferguson and Tocqueville all figure even before Marx in his dimension of sociology’s history – and its history as historical sociology”(P.386)

Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003 (pp. 383 -395)

Craig Calhoun,Why Historical Sociology?

“…marginalization of historical sociology came from a different quarter. This was the canonization of ‘classical social theory’ by Talcott Parsons and other, which fixed the historical concerns of the founding sociologists as theory rather than as themes for continuing research. Sociologists began to absorb their views of history … from reading Weber and Durkheim rather than studying history directly, either in primary source research or in study of the writings of historians. History became a backdrop to sociology , invoked as part of theory more than the object of research.”(P.387)

Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003 (pp. 383 -395)

• “…One of the results of this was that historical sociology would re-emerge as a challenge to dominant orthodoxies in the discipline, commonly supported by Marxists or a rereading of Weber. It is worth recalling the extent to which the revitalization of historical sociology in the 1970s grew out of the politics of the 1960s, and the sense that grand theory as it then existed wasn’t adequately answering the grand questions of contemporary world”.

Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003 (pp. 383 -395)

Debate on Comparative Analysis in the Social Sciences I

The problem of defining cases or units of comparison:

• How to define cases as the basis of comparative analysis?

• What constitutes a case? What defines the boundaries of the case?

• Are cases (however defined) the appropriate objects of comparative socio-analysis?

Debate on Comparative Analysis in the Social Sciences II

Classic approaches to comparative sociology • The logic of comparison developed by John

Stuart Mill; • The Verstehende comparative practice of Max

Weber; • Emile Durkheim: “Comparative sociology is not a

particular branch of sociology; it is sociology itself, in so far as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts”.

Debate on Comparative Analysis in the Social Sciences III

Very general and concise definition of the comparative analysis:

• “Comparative socio-analysis encompasses a broad range of practices that focus on the juxtaposition of cases or aspects of cases to one another, and the use of either inductive or deductive logic in relation to those juxtapositions, either to test theoretically derived hypotheses or to produce bounded generalizations and “rules of experience”.”( John R. Hall)

Authors in sociology who did important historical research and helped to ‘re-vitalize’ sociology as a

historical sociology I:Neil Smelser;Phlip Selznick;Seymour Martin Lipset; Robert Merton also did it…

Richard Bendix.

Authors in sociology who did important historical research and helped to ‘re-vitalize’ sociology as a

historical sociology II:• Barrington Moore “Social Origins of Dictatorship and

Democracy” (1966);

• George Homans e.g. “English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century” (1941);

• Charles Tilly “As Sociology Meets History” (1981);• Immanuel Wallerstein “The Modern World-System”(1974-

2011).

Authors in sociology who did important historical research and helped to ‘re-vitalize’ sociology as a

historical sociology III:“Michel Foucalt has been the most important French influence on historical sociology after the core Annales school. His work is central to a variety of themes, including….methodological-theoretical about continuity and discontinuity in historical change and the historical specificity and embeddness of categories of knowledge…”

Craig Calhoun, p. 390.

Authors in sociology who did important historical research and helped to ‘re-vitalize’ sociology as a

historical sociology IV:“In Britain, historical sociology … appears largely in the form of theorization of large-scale historical phenomena: nationalism, wars, class relations, gender, power. If theory and research had to be opposed … much of the British writing would look like theory (or synthesis), not research, to Americans.

Craig Calhoun, p. 391

In Europe: (1) Marxists: Jurgen Habermas, E.P. Thomson, Eric Hobsbawm

.

Preliminary Conclusions …

Literature:• Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003

• Vision and Method in Historical Sociolgy / edited by Theda Skocpol, Cambridge University Press, 1984

• Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences / edited by James Mahoney, Dietriech Rueschemeyer, University of Cambridge, 2003

Comparative Perspectives on U.S. & European Societies

“At the beginning of the 21st century it had become abundantly clear that North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan had developed enormously successful forms of modern capitalist societies: immense wealth, extensive social security nets …, vastly expanded health care systems and increased life expectancy, an impressive edifice of education and research with unparalleled scientific advances across many fields, and a vibrant culture for creative and performing arts … reaching larger segments of the population at lower cost and better quality than in any other time in history”.

(Class at the Sociology Department, Berkeley)

Thank You!I welcome any feedback and I would be very

interested in receiving both specific/narrow comments as well as a general or more fundamental critique.

http://comparsociology.com