Explaining Social Processes 9781594515002, 2007044656, 9781594515019

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Expl aining Soci al Processes

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Expl aining Soci al Processes

Charles Tilly

First published 2008 by Paradigm Publishers Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2008 , Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tilly, Charles. Explaining social processes / Charles Tilly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-59451-500-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Social sciences—Research. I. Title. H62.T52 2008 303—dc22 2007044656 ISBN 13 : 978-1-59451-500-2 (hbk) ISBN 13 : 978-1-59451-501-9 (pbk) Designed and typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

For Art Stinchcombe A deep, turbulent intellectual spring

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Contents Prefaceviii Part I. Introduction Chapter 1: Method and Explanation

2

Part II. Concepts and Observations Chapter 2: Systems, Dispositions, and Transactions in Social Analysis  Chapter 3: Observations of Social Processes and Their Formal Representations  Chapter 4: Event Catalogs as Theories  Chapter 5: Iron City Blues  Chapter 6: Why Read the Classics? 

26 36 46 55 62

Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Chapter 7: To Explain Political Processes  Chapter 8: Means and Ends of Comparison in Macrosociology  Chapter 9: Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists  Chapter 10: Linkers, Diggers, and Glossers in Social Analysis 

68 83 93 108

Part IV. Historical Social Analysis Chapter 11: History and Sociological Imagining  Chapter 12: Historical Analysis of Political Processes  Chapter 13: What Good Is Urban History?  Chapter 14: Anglo-American Social History Since 1945  Chapter 15: Three Visions of History and Theory 

120 133 160 175 190

Part V. Conclusion Chapter 16: Epilogue 

202

Index  About the Author 

205 215 vii

Preface The volume before you displays the usual virtues and vices of edited collections. On the virtue side, it identifies connections among disparate intellectual enterprises that might otherwise escape attention and thus conveys the pattern in a program of inquiry. On the vice side, it involves repetitions and inconsistencies that are inevitable as it traces fifteen years or so of that program. As you will see, for example, an essay on urban history written in 1992 anticipates much fuller statements on inequality and other social processes that I wrote after then. Another essay called “History and Sociological Imagining,” written about the same time, describes studies then under way that never reached publication. I have sometimes felt obliged to update material, notably in “Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists,” where the U.S. government’s shifts in reporting conventions after that article’s publication simply shouted for attention. But mostly I have left the articles as originally written in the hope that they will convey a distinctive approach to explaining social processes. This book would never have appeared without the urging of Johann Peter Murmann of the Australian School of Business, Sydney. Peter not only supplied critical comments on the book’s introduction and insisted that my methodological writings deserved more attention but (with the indispensable help of Y. Sekou Bermiss) created a website making almost all of those writings accessible with abstracts: http://professor-murmann.info/index.php/weblog/tilly I am also grateful to Viviana Zelizer, who gave me essential advice on conveying my ideas to nonspecialists, and to Dianne Ewing, who contributed sharp-eyed editing of the text. As if mere scanning of the book’s citations weren’t enough to establish my debt, I have dedicated the book to my old friend and recurrent critic Arthur L. Stinchcombe. 

viii

Part I Introduction

Chapter 1

Method and Expl anation Back in the Dark Ages more than half a century ago, I was a graduate student at Harvard in the composite field called Social Relations. In those distant days, Method meant statistical analysis, and Explanation meant one of three things: 1) location of a phenomenon within some large social structure (at the limit of a society or civilization), 2) discovery of strong correlations between two variables, or (if you were lucky) 3) identification of necessary and sufficient conditions for some important phenomenon. I still retain a vivid image of how the empirical wizard Samuel Stouffer taught us youngsters method and explanation. Imagine a dingy basement room containing a counter-sorter: a machine with an input tray for Hollerith cards (aka IBM cards) at one end, and a dozen trays among which the cards would sort when the operator pushed a button. Stouffer stood before the counter-sorter with a pack of cards in his hand, ash dangling precariously from the eternal cigarette between his lips, and muttered to us, “OK, now let’s try breaking on religion.” Here was the idea: By means of holes punched in designated columns, each card encoded the responses of a single individual to a national survey on civil liberties. If the punches in the column for religion caused the cards to sort very unevenly on another column recording attitudes toward civil liberties, the uneven distribution told us that we were on our way to discovering that a respondent’s religion caused, at least in part, his or her attitudes toward civil liberties. Of course we would have to run the cards through the machine again to control for such possibly confounding variables as gender, class, and region. Still, a David Hume, exhumed, might have smiled as we followed a simple method in a search for constant conjunction, and called it explanation. Later I learned to follow the same logic on a wired tabulator (I even learned to wire it) and then on a mainframe computer (I even learned to program it, if not very expertly), but the logic long remained the same. Yet, while still a graduate student I also encountered historical analysis and realized that the search for constant conjunction and correlation had two serious defects: it ignored transformative processes and it promoted premature simplification. My own research concerned responses to the Revolution of 1789–1794 in rural France (Tilly 1964). Once I entered French archives and left textbook schemes behind, I had no 2



Chapter 1: Method and Explanation  3

choice but to analyze transformative processes and to keep a grip on complexity at least until I could see what features of those processes required explanation. Explaining variable rural responses to the Revolution, it turned out, required close attention to dynamic processes: extraction, mobilization, repression, and polarization. The conventional simplification—traditional peasants versus modernizing urbanites—completely obscured the changing alignments that occurred between 1789 and 1794. It fostered a premature search for the presumably unchanging fundamental motives of the major parties in the rural revolution (Tilly 1961, 1963). I never forgot the lesson. Although by no means an intellectual autobiography, this book displays the lifelong impact of that early encounter with complex historical processes. In reviewing my own work as a background for producing the book, I was surprised to discover that about a quarter of the roughly 700 scholarly items I have ever published deal primarily with method and explanation. That happened, I now see, because my peculiar situation at the edge of history and social science meant that people on one side or the other of the boundary kept asking me to interpret the mysterious ways of researchers across the boundary from them (see, e.g., Landes and Tilly 1971, Tilly 1981, 1985, 1997a). History matters to social science because history matters to social processes: when and where a social process unfolds affects how it unfolds. All social processes incorporate locally available cultural materials such as language, social categories, and locally shared beliefs. Processes therefore vary as a function of historically determined local cultural accumulations. Even if urbanization has universal properties, for example, how cities grow and gain importance in any particular setting depends significantly on earlier urban experience in the same setting. Again, once a process (e.g., immigration) has occurred and acquired a name, both the name and one or more representations of the process become available as signals, models, or threats for later actors. National authorities, for instance, often try to stave off what they see as the evil consequences of previous migration waves by restricting the current wave (Zolberg 2006). In these and other ways, what has happened in the past shapes what happens now. This collection of papers presents tentative conclusions from a lifetime effort to develop methods and explanations suitable for complex social processes and to place them in appropriate historical perspectives. Suitable methods and explanations need not be complex themselves, but they must somehow capture the ebb and flow of dynamic social interactions. As chapter 3 (“Observations of Social Processes and their Formal Representations”) explains in detail, methods and explanations usually work better if they involve formal representation of the elements within the processes under study—not just convincing narratives, but explicit matching of concepts and observations with the portions of the processes that require explanation. Many of the book’s chapters undertake just that sort of matching. The book inevitably draws disproportionately on the social processes I have studied most closely: revolution, contentious politics, state formation, migration, urbanization, generation of inequality, democratization, capitalist transformation,

4  Part I. Introduction and population change. As a result, it has more to say about the large scale than the small scale, more about collective than individual experience, more about Europe and America than elsewhere, more about the last few hundred years of human history than before. Nevertheless, I am confident that its general approaches to method and explanation apply well outside its empirical range. As for methods, I have occasionally done sample surveys, intensive interviews, streetcorner observations, and analyses of statistics collected by public agencies. But the bulk of my systematic empirical work has consisted of constructing uniform event catalogs from published or archival sources, then analyzing connections, sequences, and settings over substantial numbers of events. (This book’s chapter 4—“Event Catalogs as Theories”—lays out the logic of such a method.) Construction of event catalogs involves high-risk adventure; catalogs absorb a great deal of preliminary effort, and only when the catalog becomes extensive does an analyst know whether it reveals any patterns worth the investment of energy it entails. Still it offers important compensations: the collection of data event by event absorbs an investigator in the richness of the phenomenon under investigation from the start. When the inquiry goes well, furthermore, it provides indications of cause and effect that even participants in the events could hardly grasp. In what follows, however, you will not plod through a manual for construction of event catalogs. Nor will you learn much about specific techniques for collection, measurement, or analysis of evidence concerning social processes. Instead, the book deals much more generally with the acquisition of reliable knowledge concerning social processes. The acquisition of reliable knowledge requires choices in three fundamental areas: epistemology, ontology, and logics of explanation. Let us look at each of them in turn.

Epistemology Smart analysts avoid two opposite extremes: naïve inductivism and radical subjectivism. At one extreme, debris of meaningless observations, however glittering. At the other, no means of observing the world, much less of comparing objects in it. At either extreme, no reliable systematic knowledge and therefore no possible social science. At the inductive extreme, we face the call for nothing but the facts. Yet, as a generation of philosophers has established, the situation of discovery always shapes what observers and analysts recognize as facts, not to mention the significance of one fact or another. At the subjective extreme, no one can acquire reliable knowledge of anything but her own consciousness—regardless of whether real phenomena actually exist outside the range of her senses. Before sinking into the subjectivist swamp, however, sentient humans always have the option of forming hypotheses about what lies outside them, then checking those hypotheses by such means as kicking walls to see if it hurts or insulting other people to see whether they kick back. In an age of postmodern skepticism any such assertion readily gives rise to the riposte “But it’s all a social construction.” Race, class, gender, religion, and similar



Chapter 1: Method and Explanation  5

categories, goes the argument, are all illusions resulting from mutual persuasion (Jung 2006). At the subjectivist extreme, the position again denies the possibility of reliable knowledge on one of two grounds: 1) the already familiar claim that no one can leap the boundaries of individual awareness or 2) the less familiar, but ultimately more threatening, claim that all knowledge resides within particular cultures and languages and is therefore at best comparable within an epistemic community. If either position holds, a transcultural social science becomes impossible. To the extreme positions, this book replies, “Let’s see whether we can identify and verify unexpected regularities that cross the boundaries of individuals and cultures.” To the more general argument of social construction, it responds instead, “Yes, it’s social construction all the way down. Social interaction generates what people experience as race, class, gender, or religion. The relevant conventions vary across periods, places, and population. So let’s see how social construction works, then build systematic knowledge of social construction into superior analyses of social processes” (Tilly 2005a). Fortunately, many intermediate epistemological positions exist. In an argument that should appeal to social scientists, philosopher Louise Antony has argued for truth as relative correspondence between a social environment and the competing theories adopted by different groups of analysts: So let it be supposed that scientists’ commitment to their theories is accounted for, in causal/historical terms, by a variety of factors, including non-rational, or even irrational factors like loyalty to colleagues or desire for fame and fortune. And let it be supposed, furthermore, that some biasing factors are ubiquitous and ineliminable. If [Thomas] Kuhn and [John Stuart] Mill are right, the hope that theories that result from these unholy mixes of motivations will approximate truth, lies in the constitution of the social environment. Objectivity, in other words, is not secured by the scrupulousness of individual scientists, but rather by the effects of competition among the ideas of contending groups of theorists. (Antony 2006: 69)

No social scientist can declare flatly, “I saw it, so what I say is true.” But it is perfectly feasible to say that a theory conforms more closely to what we can jointly observe of the social environment than the next best available approximation. In such a view, relative truth is possible, but always remains subject to revision as a better approximation comes along. That position informs the essays in this volume. “Linkers, Diggers, and Glossers in Social Analysis” (chapter 10) deals most fully with epistemological problems.

Ontology In this volume’s essays, ontology occupies a far larger place than epistemology. The greater emphasis on ontology results from my concern that social analysts frequently arrive at false conclusions by assuming the existence of fundamental entities such

6  Part I. Introduction as social systems without doing the work required to establish the presence of those entities. (The critique of the great historical sociologist S.N. Eisenstadt’s work on civilizations and societies in chapter 5, “Iron City Blues,” takes Eisenstadt to task for just such assumptions.) Within social science, major ontological choices concern the sorts of social entities whose coherent existence analysts can reasonably assume. Major alternatives include methodological individualism, phenomenological individualism, holism, and relational realism. Methodological individualism insists on decision-making human individuals as the basic or unique social reality. It not only focuses on persons, one at a time, but imputes to each person a set of intentions that cause the person’s behavior. In economists’ versions of methodological individualism, the person in question contains a utility schedule and a set of assets, which interact to generate choices within well-defined constraints. In every such analysis, to be sure, figures a market-like allocative structure that operates externally to the choice-making individual—but it is astonishing how rarely methodological individualists examine by what means those allocative structures actually do their work. The less familiar term phenomenological individualism refers to the doctrine that individual consciousness is the primary or exclusive site of social life. Unlike methodological individualism, it makes no assumption that individuals are rational decision makers, much less that something like a market adjudicates their decisions. Phenomenological individualism veers into solipsism when its adherents adopt the epistemologically extreme position that adjacent minds have no access to each other’s contents, therefore no observer can escape the prison of her own awareness. Even short of that analytically self-destructive position, phenomenological individualists tend to regard states of body and mind—impulses, reflexes, desires, ideas, or programs—as the chief motors of social action. In principle, they therefore have two ways to account for large-scale political structures and processes: 1) as summed individual responses to similar situations; 2) as distributions and/or connections among individual actions. In the first case, social scientists and historians sometimes constitute collective actors consisting of all the individuals within a category such as peasant or woman. In the second case, they take a leaf from those social scientists who see national political life as a meeting place, synthesis, and outcome of that shifting distribution of attitudes we call public opinion or from the social psychologists who see individual X’s action as providing a stimulus for individual Y’s action. Even there, they hold to the conception of human consciousness as the basic site of social life. Holism is the doctrine that social structures have their own self-sustaining logics. In its extreme form—once quite common in social science but now unfashionable—a whole civilization, society, or culture undergoes a life of its own. Less extreme versions attribute self-reproducing powers to major institutions; treat certain segments of society as subordinating the rest to their interests; represent dominant mentalities, traditions, values, or cultural forms as regulators of social life; or assign inherent selfreproducing logics to industrialism, capitalism, feudalism, and other distinguishable varieties of social organization.



Chapter 1: Method and Explanation  7

Relational realism, the doctrine that transactions, interactions, social ties, and conversations constitute the central stuff of social life, once predominated in social science. Classical economists Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel all emphasized social relations, regarding both individuals and complex social structures as products of regularities in social relations. During the twentieth century, however, relational realism lost much of its ground to individualism and holism. Only in American pragmatism, various versions of network analysis, and some corners of organizational or labor economics did it prevail continuously. With the retreat of structural Marxism and the advance of various institutionalisms, however, relational reasoning has once again started to prosper. Relational realism concentrates on connections among people and social sites—for example, households, neighborhoods, associations, firms, or organized occupations. It sees those connections as concatenating, aggregating, and disaggregating readily, forming organizational structures at the same time as they shape individual behavior. Relational analysts follow flows of communication, patron-client chains, employment networks, conversational connections, and power relations from the small scale to the large and back. For example, interactions between interpersonal networks of trust and national political institutions turn out to play crucial roles in democratization and de-democratization (Tilly 2005b, 2007). Intellectual synthesizers can, of course, create combinations of the four basic ontologies. A standard combination of phenomenological individualism and holism portrays a person in confrontation with society, each of the elements and their very confrontation having its own laws. Methodological individualists usually assume the presence of a self-regulating market or some other allocative institution. Individualists vary in how much they allow for emergents—structures that result from individual actions but once in existence exert independent effects on individual actions, much as students enter a lecture hall one by one, only to see the audience’s distribution through the hall affect both the lecturer’s performance and their own reactions to it. Relational analysts commonly allow for partly autonomous individual processes as well as strong effects on social interaction by such collectively created structures as social categories and centralized organizations. Nevertheless, the four ontologies lead to rather different accounts of social processes. They also suggest distinctive starting points for analysis. Methodological individualists can treat social ties as products of individual calculation, but above all they must specify relevant individual actors before launching their analyses. Phenomenological individualists likewise give priority to individuals, with the double qualifications that a) their individuals are sites of consciousness rather than of calculating intentions, and b) they frequently move rapidly to shared states of awareness, at the limit attributing shared orientations to all members of a population. A holist may eventually work her way to the individuals that live within a given system or the social relations that connect individuals with the system, but her starting point is likely to be some observation of the system as a whole.

8  Part I. Introduction Relational realists may begin with existing social ties, but to be consistent and effective they should actually start with transactions among social sites, then watch when and how some transactions bundle into more durable, substantial, and/or consequential relations among sites. In the following chapters, you will encounter a thoroughgoing relational realism. The essay called “Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists” (chapter 9), for example, counters the frequent portrayal of the terrorist as a particular type of person with an analysis of terror as a strategic relation among social sites.

Logics of Explanation Epistemologies and ontologies provide the (often invisible) philosophical grounding of social analysis. Epistemologies and ontologies limit what sorts of explanations are logically possible—a holist can’t appeal to individual motivations as her ultimate causes. But they do not dictate logics of explanation by themselves. Social scientists and historians have experimented with a number of different competing logics for the explanation of social processes. They include: a) proposal of covering laws for complex structures and processes; explanation here consists of subjecting robust empirical generalizations to higher and higher level generalizations, the most general of all standing as laws (see chapters 6 and 7) b) specification of necessary and sufficient conditions for concrete instances of the same complex structures and processes c) variable analyses in which statistical analysis shows the extent to which one or more predictor variables (often called “independent variables”) account statistically for variation in an outcome variable (often called the “dependent variable”) d) location of structures and processes within larger systems they supposedly serve or express, for example through the claim that element X serves function Y within system Z e) stage models in which placement within an invariant sequence accounts for the episode at hand, for example the stages of revolution or of economic growth f) identification of individual or group dispositions just before the point of action as causes of that action—propensity or disposition accounts g) reduction of complex episodes, or certain features of those episodes, to their component mechanisms and processes In the interest of exhortation, chapter 2—“Systems, Dispositions, and Transactions in Social Analysis”—reduces modes of explanation to the three of its title, which means essentially d), f), and g) on this list. Chapter 12 (“Historical Analysis of Political Processes”), in its turn, enumerates four classes of explanations: covering law-, propensity-, system-, and mechanism-based. But a full accounting of the last half century’s social science and history includes all seven logics on the list.



Chapter 1: Method and Explanation  9

Most of these explanatory modes, as it happens, exclude history as a significant shaper of social processes. History can, of course, figure in any of these explanatory conceptions. In a covering-law account, for example, one can incorporate history as a scope condition (e.g., prior to the Chinese invention of gunpowder, war conformed to generalization X); or as an abstract variable (e.g., time elapsed or distance covered since the beginning of an episode; see Roehner and Syme 2002). Nevertheless, ­covering-law, necessary-sufficient condition, and system accounts generally resist history as they deny the influence of particular times and places. Stage models do incorporate time, but they usually run roughshod over the actual complexities of historical social processes. Propensity accounts respond to history ambivalently, since in the version represented by rational choice they depend on transhistorical rules of decision making, while in the versions represented by cultural and phenomenological reductionism they treat history as infinitely particular. Mechanism-process accounts, in contrast, positively welcome history, because their explanatory program couples a search for mechanisms of very general scope with arguments that initial conditions, sequences, and combinations of mechanisms concatenate into processes having explicable but variable overall outcomes. ­Mechanism-process accounts reject covering-law regularities for large structures such as international systems and for vast sequences such as democratization. Instead, they lend themselves to “local theory,” in which the explanatory mechanisms and processes operate quite broadly but combine locally as a function of initial conditions and adjacent processes to produce distinctive trajectories and outcomes (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, Tilly 2001). Mechanisms compound into processes: combinations and sequences of mechanisms that produce some specified outcome at a larger scale than any single mechanism. Within contentious politics, analysts commonly invoke such processes as escalation, framing, identity shift, and scale shift (Tilly and Tarrow 2006). But they rarely identify the component mechanisms, much less their combinations and sequences. Nevertheless, in social science as a whole, a substantial intellectual movement has formed to adopt mechanism- and process-based explanations as complements to variable-based explanations, or even as substitutes for them. As is always the case in new movements, competing definitions and practical proposals for the analysis of mechanisms and processes have proliferated wildly (Brady and Collier 2004, Bunge 1997, 1998, 2004, Campbell 2005, Cherkaoui 2005, Elster 1999, George and Bennett 2005, Goodin and Tilly 2006, Hedström 2005, Hedström and Swedberg 1998, Little 1991, 1998, McAdam 2003, Norkus 2005, Pickel 2006, Stern, Dietz, Dolšak, Ostrom and Stonich 2002, Stinchcombe 2005, Tilly 2000, 2001, 2004). No conceptual, theoretical, or methodological consensus has so far emerged. This book will not restore unity to the field. Instead, it concentrates on repairing another defect of the existing literature: a severe shortage of concrete demonstrations identifying coherent mechanisms and processes, with special emphasis on converting observations into measurements (see again chapter 3, “Observations of Social Processes and their Formal Representations”).

10  Part I. Introduction

Event Catalogs in Contentious Politics Over a long career, two theoretically charged questions have motivated more of my research than any others. First, how do repertoires of contention form and change? Translated, the question refers to how people’s forms of public, collective claim making—think street demonstrations, peasant uprisings, and military seizures of power—come into being, cluster, and evolve? Second, in Western countries since 1600 or so, how did the mutations of capitalism and national states shape and reshape those repertoires? My largest inquiries into the two questions have concerned France and Great Britain (Tilly 1986, 1995). Let’s take up the British study and its background as a case in point. It displays a pragmatic epistemology, a relational realist ontology, and a mechanism-process explanatory logic at work. Methodologically speaking, the British inquiry grows out of a strong tradition of event analysis among students of contentious politics. European and American governments began collecting official reports on work stoppages during the later nineteenth century. From that point on, statistically minded analysts began conducting quantitative analyses of industrial conflict based on government data (Franzosi 1989, 1995, Haimson and Tilly 1989, Korpi and Shalev 1979, 1980, Shorter and Tilly 1974). Not until after World War II, however, did analysts dealing with other forms of struggle start constructing parallel data sets for revolutions, coups d’état, international wars, civil wars, and domestic collective violence (Cioffi-Revilla 1990; Rucht, Koopmans, and Neidhardt 1999, Rule and Tilly 1965, Sarkees, Wayman, and Singer 2003, Tillema 1991, Tilly 1969). For many years, investigators sought to do one of two things with those collections: either to explain place-to-place variation in the intensity of conflict or to analyze fluctuations over time. For those purposes, simple counts of whole events served reasonably well. They served well, that is, so long as investigators could agree on what counted as an individual event (Olzak 1989). By and large, analysts who did simple counts worried little about repertoires. To be sure, students of strikes distinguished strikes from lockouts, wildcats from formally registered walkouts, and successful from unsuccessful stoppages. Similarly, studies of collective violence typically employed classifications of intensity (how many killed and wounded, how much property damage) and form (street fights, violent demonstrations, uprisings, and more). They analyzed classified event counts. For them, cross-tabulations and correlations provided information on the nature and characteristic settings of different sorts of claims. Austrian social historian Gerhard Botz, for example, prepared a chronology of strikes and “violent political events” for Austria from 1918 to 1938. The violent events came mainly from his reading of three Viennese newspapers—the Reichspost, Arbeiter-Zeitung, and Neue Freie Presse—over the entire period. Botz then added strike data from 1946 to 1976 (Botz 1983, 1987). He combined two methods: 1) analytic narratives placing the selected events in Austria’s political history and 2) regression analyses relating fluctuations in violent events (1918–1938) and strikes (1918–1938, 1946–1976) to economic growth, unemployment, and trade union membership. Like many other studies in this



Chapter 1: Method and Explanation  11

vein, the quantitative analyses show mainly a broad tendency for strike activity to rise and fall with employment, union membership, and prosperity. About the same time that Botz was working in Austria, Swiss sociologist-­historian Hanspeter Kriesi and his colleagues were cataloging what they called “political activation events” in Switzerland from 1945 to 1978. They combed newspapers, political yearbooks, historical works, archives, strike statistics, and leftist literature collections for occasions on which ordinary citizens initiated collective, public claims over specific political issues (Kriesi, Levy, Ganguillet, and Zwicky 1981: 16–33). They also examined the public responses to those 3,553 events. Their extensive quantitative analyses of the data showed that the Swiss system encouraged plenty of citizen participation (see Frey and Stutzer 2002, Trechsel 2000), but also gave a very cold shoulder to marginal groups and stridently anti-government activists (Kriesi, Levy, Ganguillet, and Zwicky 1981: 596–598). With these results as a background, Kriesi recruited another group of collaborators for a large-scale international comparison of “protest events” in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. They read the Monday issues of four national newspapers from 1975 through 1989, spotting “politically motivated unconventional actions” (Kriesi, Koopmans, Duyvendak, and Giugni 1995: 263; see also Kriesi 1993). They found 7,116 of them, about 120 per country per year. They meant to determine whether the form of the political opportunity structure—for example, very fragmented in Switzerland, highly centralized in France—affected the character and intensity of social movements. Their answer, backed by extensive data: yes, it does. Switzerland provided many more niches for small, differentiated protests while France gave the advantage to nationally coordinated political activity. The Kriesi et al. study represents a sophisticated use of the classified event count, which in recent decades has become the standard method for making descriptions of contentious episodes available for quantitative analysis. For all their other virtues, none of these massive investigations offered much opportunity to look inside contentious performances and discern their dynamics. Some investigators, however, have come closer. Driven by a general interest in how collective behavior works, Clark McPhail took the first steps toward a general account, not just of contentious events, but of all occasions on which people assemble, act together, and disperse. In 1983, McPhail personally observed 46 political demonstrations in Washington, D.C. He broke them down into specific types of gathering, more than one of which sometimes occurred in the same demonstration. The distribution of the 75 gatherings he saw looked like this: rally 34 march 19 vigil 10 picket 6 rally-picket-civil disobedience 3 rally-civil disobedience 1

12  Part I. Introduction picket-civil disobedience 1 civil disobedience 1 (McPhail 1991: 183) McPhail’s observed repertoire thus consisted of five distinct performances: rally, march, vigil, picket, and civil disobedience. Mostly the performances occurred separately, but sometimes they combined. McPhail proposed to group individual gatherings of these sorts into larger sets: events like the demonstrations, campaigns involving multiple events, waves including both individual events and campaigns, and trends. He nevertheless attached particular importance to the fine structure of gatherings: If comparatively few sociologists have given attention to what people do collectively within gatherings, an increasing number have given attention to larger units of analysis, at more macro levels of analysis, e.g., gatherings, events, campaigns, waves, and trends. The relationships between what people do collectively at micro and macro levels of analysis are too important to ignore. These must be considered in relation to rather than at odds with one another. (McPhail 1991: 186; see also McPhail and Miller 1973, McPhail and Wohlstein 1983, McPhail 2006)

Later, McPhail became more ambitious and fine-grained: He decomposed actions and interactions into four broad categories: facing, voicing, manipulating, and locomotion. Joint actions (e.g., simultaneously facing in the same direction) and interactions (e.g., joining hands) counted as collective action (McPhail, Schweingruber, and Ceobanu 2006). Next McPhail and his collaborators broke each of these categories down with finer and finer distinctions. Voicing, for example, first divided into verbalizing and vocalizing, with vocalizing further subdivided into cheering, booing, oohing-ohhing-ahhing, and whistling. A code sheet then permitted observers to record how many people in some assembly were performing each action or interaction at a given point in time and space (Schweingruber and McPhail 1999: 466). Multiple observers and their code sheets thus aggregated into overall characterizations of action and interaction distributions for different episodes. They showed, for example, how much more frequently people cheered in a rally than in a march (Schweingruber and McPhail 1999: 480). The procedure centers attention on actions and especially interactions as the elementary particles of collective performances. McPhail’s promising line of research has not so far yielded either a coherent theory of performances and repertoires or a feasible method for aggregating and disaggregating descriptions of contentious performances into the sorts of characteristics studied by Botz, Kriesi, and other users of classified event counts. But it heads in the right direction. International relations specialists have come at the problem from a somewhat different angle: transcribing international actions such as diplomatic exchanges and military attacks uniformly and voluminously from standard news sources. Political scientist Philip Schrodt and his collaborators have devised methods for making simple



Chapter 1: Method and Explanation  13

transcriptions of newswire reports. Schrodt called the system KEDS, the Kansas Event Data System. As Schrodt describes it, KEDS relies on shallow parsing of sentences—primarily identifying proper nouns (which may be compound), verbs and direct objects within a verb phrase—rather than using full syntactical analysis. As a consequence it makes errors on complex sentences or sentences using unusual grammatical constructions, but has proven to be quite robust in correctly coding the types of English sentences typically found in the lead sentences of newswire reports. On early-1990s hardware, the system coded about 70 events per second, which seemed at the time to be a huge improvement over human coding projects, which typically have a sustained output of five to ten events per coder per hour. (Schrodt 2006: 5)

A technical cousin of KEDS called the VRA (Virtual Research Associates) System likewise processes the leads or first sentences of online news reports, recording subject, verb, and object (Bond 2006). In principle, these related approaches could eventually produce a fast, sophisticated way to assemble detailed accounts of contentious performances and repertoires. For the moment, however, they have not come close to solving the problems of aggregation and disaggregation inherent in any such effort. So far, Sidney Tarrow, Roberto Franzosi, and Takeshi Wada have come closest. Tarrow and I began our long collaboration (see, e.g., Tilly and Tarrow 2006) with my consultation on his largest empirical venture, a study of Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Tarrow examined Italy’s cycle of protest from 1965 to 1975, for which the national newspaper Corriere della Sera yielded 4,980 “protest events.” “Since I was interested in actions that exceeded routine expectations and in which the participants revealed a collective goal,” Tarrow tells us, I collected information on ‘protest events’, a category which included strikes, demonstrations, petitions, delegations, and violence, but which excluded contentious behaviour which revealed no collective claims on other actors. I defined the protest event as a disruptive direct action on behalf of collective interests, in which claims were made against some other group, elites, or authorities. (Tarrow 1989: 359)

Like most of his predecessors, Tarrow produced a single machine-readable record for each event. But he enriched the enterprise in two important ways. First, he incorporated textual descriptions at a number of critical points—summaries of events, grievances, policy responses, and more. That made it possible to refine his classified counts without returning to the original newspaper sources. Second, within the record he placed checklists where two or more features could coexist. As a result, he was able to analyze, not only the overall distribution of events, but also the frequency of such features as different forms of violence—clashes with police, violent conflict, property damage, violent attacks, rampages, and random violence (Tarrow 1989: 78). Thus cross-classifications of broad event types with specific forms of action brought Tarrow closer to a systematic description of performances, if not of repertoires.

14  Part I. Introduction Tarrow consulted me before starting his collection of evidence on Italian contentious events. So did Roberto Franzosi. Franzosi once spent a year working closely with members of my research group. Although he eventually developed his own sophisticated system for recording events, he started his analysis of Italian conflicts since 1919 with a logic my own work has followed closely. The logic uses observed combinations of subject, verb, and object—which Franzosi calls “semantic triplets”—to identify interactions, then attaches further information to the triplets. On 30 August 1920, workers at Milan’s Romeo metalworking plant responded to a management lockout by occupying the factory (Franzosi 2004a: 66). The occupation started a great wave of sit-down strikes—occupazioni delle fabbriche—that eventually became a model for sit-downs in France, the U.S., and elsewhere. Franzosi shows that he can meaningfully reduce the complex story in the Genoese newspaper Il Lavoro to these phases: firm announces lockout workers do not accept decision labor leaders decide factory occupation workers do not leave plant (Franzosi 2004a: 78) This plus further information tagged to these spare elements makes it possible for Franzosi to produce rich analyses first of the single episode and then of many episodes: network representations of relations among the actors, classifications of participants’ actions and their sequences, time-series of different sorts of events, and much more. Packed into the general-purpose data storage and retrieval system Franzosi has developed (Franzosi 2004b), the information becomes available for a great variety of pairings. Properly handled, as Franzosi says, even simple counts tell complex stories. For example, Franzosi’s frequency distribution of the most common actors from 1919 to 1922 identifies an astonishing shift: from heavy involvement of workers and trade unions during the revolutionary years of 1919 and 1920 to their rapid decline; from near-absence of political activists (including Fascists) to their utter prevalence; and no more than a weak presence of government officials as Mussolini’s Fascists began their ascent to power (Franzosi 2004a: 82–84). Those counts then send canny analyst Franzosi back to look more closely at how different actors within these categories interacted, and what claims they made. Takeshi Wada’s work on Mexican politics between 1964 and 2000 displays many affinities with both Tarrow’s and Franzosi’s analyses of Italian contention (Wada 2003, 2004; Wada wrote his doctoral dissertation under my direction). Wada drew accounts of protest events from the daily newspapers Excélsior, Unomásuno, and La Jornada for 29-day periods spanning national elections over the 37 years, a total of 13 electoral periods. From the newspapers he identified 2,832 events, some linked together in campaigns, for a total of 1,797 campaigns. Wada’s subject-verb-objectclaim transcriptions made it possible for him to employ sophisticated network models



Chapter 1: Method and Explanation  15

of who made claims on whom. Overall, they reveal a sharp politicization of Mexico’s collective claim making as the country’s partial democratization proceeded. From claims on business, landowners, and universities, protesters moved to making increasingly strong claims on the government itself. According to Wada’s analysis, the weakening of network ties among the elite (especially as concentrated within the longtime ruling party PRI) provided an opportunity for claimants to divide their rulers. It thus advanced the partial democratization of the 1990s. Technically, Wada broke free of many restrictions imposed by classified event counts. That technical freedom opened the way to a sophisticated treatment of interaction in Mexican politics.

Contentious Events in Great Britain Pinning down performances and repertoires by means of event catalogs requires a vigorous but vital technical effort. Over about ten years, research groups at the University of Michigan and the New School for Social Research worked with me to create a systematic body of evidence on repertoires, and their settings in Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. We invented a series of interactive routines that allowed our researchers to converse with a mainframe computer, store extensive summaries of hand-edited files in a relational data base, and retrieve information from and about contention in an almost infinite variety of ways (Schweitzer and Simmons 1981). We called our enterprise the Great Britain Study. It merited a large effort because the evidence we accumulated helped explain two very large processes: transformations of contentious repertoires and democratization. The central data set we produced includes machine-readable descriptions for 8,088 contentious gatherings (CGs) that occurred in southeastern England (Kent, Middlesex, Surrey, or Sussex) during thirteen selected years from 1758 to 1820, or anywhere in Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales, but not Ireland) from 1828 to 1834. In this study, a CG is an occasion on which ten or more people gathered in a publicly accessible place and visibly made claims which, if realized, would affect the interests of at least one person outside their number. In principle, CGs include almost all events that authorities, observers, or historians of the time would have called “riots” or “disturbances” as well as even more that would fall under such headings as “public meeting,” “procession,” and “demonstration.” Our standardized descriptions of CGs come from periodicals: the Annual Register, Gentleman’s Magazine, London Chronicle, Morning Chronicle, Times, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Mirror of Parliament, and Votes and Proceedings of Parliament; we read these periodicals exhaustively for the years in question plus January–June 1835. Although we frequently consulted both published historical work and archival sources such as the papers of the Home Office in interpreting our evidence, the machine-readable descriptions transcribed material from the periodicals alone. We did not try to find every event about which information was available or even a

16  Part I. Introduction representative sample of such events. Instead, we assembled a complete enumeration of those described in standard periodicals whose principles of selection we could examine, and sometimes even test. Our group created a kind of assembly line: one researcher scanned periodicals for reports of likely qualifying events, another assembled those reports into dossiers of qualifying and nonqualifying CGs, a third hand-transcribed the reports onto preliminary code sheets, an editor reviewed the summary, the next person entered the material in a computer conversation, and so on, until we had a finished entry in the database. Obviously, we could not simply automate the assembly line as the newswire analysts described earlier almost have. On average, we had 2.6 accounts from our periodicals for each CG. That meant we often had to piece together incomplete stories and sometimes had to adjudicate disagreements over such aspects as how many people participated. We also spent plenty of time looking up obscure place names in gazetteers and personal names in histories or biographical dictionaries. Now and then, transcribers made mistakes. Editors had to catch them. In short, it took plenty of conscious, intelligent effort to produce faithful but reduced transcriptions of our sources. The computer-stored records for CGs break into separate sections:



• a general description of each event (8,088 machine-readable records) • a description of each formation—each person or set of persons who acted distinguishably during the event (27,184 records) • supplementary information on the geographical or numerical size of any formation, when available (18,413 records) • a summary of each distinguishable action by any formation, including the actor(s), the crucial verb, (where applicable) the object(s) of the action, and an excerpt of the text(s) from which we drew actor, verb, and object (50,875 records) • excerpts from detailed texts from which we drew summary descriptions of actions (76,189 records) • identification of each source of the account (21,030 records) • identification of each location in which the action occurred, including county, town, parish, place, and position within a one-kilometer grid square map of Great Britain (11,054 records) • a set of verbal comments on the event, or on difficulties in its transcription (5,450 records) • special files listing all alternative names for formations and all individuals mentioned in any account (28,995 formation names, 26,318 individual names)

Except for straightforward items such as date, day of the week, and county names, the records do not contain codes in the usual sense of the term. On the whole, we transcribed words from the texts or (when that was not feasible) paraphrases of those words. Think of formation names: Instead of coding names given to formations in



Chapter 1: Method and Explanation  17

broad categories, we transcribed the actual words used in our sources. For example, the transcription of each action includes the actor’s name, a verb characterizing the action, and (in the roughly 52 percent of cases in which there was an object) the object’s name. Here is a simple case. In its issue of 24–26 January 1758, the London Chronicle reported that some Persons assembled in a riotous Manner on Tower-Hill, and broke several Windows, Candles not being soon enough lighted in Honour of the King of Prussia’s Birth Day. The same night the Mob committed great Violences in Surry-Street in the Strand, particularly at the Coach-Office, not a Window was left with a whole Pane of Glass.

In the course of the European conflicts historians eventually called the Seven Years War, Britain had recently allied with Prussia, which temporarily made the King of Prussia a popular hero in London. Lighting candles in windows then signaled the occupants’ support for a public celebration. People often marked their disapproval of a building’s occupants by breaking windows. We interpreted the “some persons” as insufficient evidence that ten or more people had gathered in the same place before the attack on the Coach Office, but took “mob” as indicating at least ten persons got together at the office. The machine-readable transcription of the actions in question therefore ran like this: Transcription

subject verb

object

the same night the mob (gathered)

mob

none

#gather

the mob committed great violences in Surry-Street, in the Strand, particularly at the Coach Office, not a window was left with a whole pane of glass mob #break mob #end

owner of Coach Office none

In this case, the #gather, #break, and #end indicate that we inferred the verb from the narrative rather than finding it directly in the text. Most of the time, however, the texts themselves supplied verbs. We did take a few editorial liberties. We defined the event itself as starting when interaction began between the first pair of participating formations (including absent objects of claims, such as Parliament), and ending when interaction ended. That led to two further adaptations: a) dividing actions reported in our sources into three segments, before, during, and after the event, but recording all of them, and b) supplying the verb END at the event’s termination when our sources failed to report how the participants ceased interacting and/or dispersed. That second maneuver placed 5,936 ENDs in the machine-readable action record—almost 12 percent of all verbs, and almost 75 percent of all events.

18  Part I. Introduction We also produced a number of other machine-readable files, including a transcription of Kent’s directory of London trades for various years between 1758 and 1828, county census data, descriptions of London-area parishes, assemblies of ten or more people between 1758 and 1820 that did not qualify as CGs, a transcription of 1830’s Swing events from Captain Swing by E.J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, and a catalog of CGs drawn from a large number of published historical works. In addition, we accumulated massive files of microfilm, photocopy, and notes from British archives, notably including a complete set of county files from the Home Office for 1828–1834. All of these have played their parts in the analysis of changing claim-making. Unlike investigations singling out events in advance for their importance (whatever the criterion of importance), this sort of inquiry leads almost inevitably to a sense of déjà vu, to a realization that the events in any particular time and place fall into a limited number of categories repeating themselves with only minor variations. The ideas of performance and repertoire almost force themselves on a reader of our event catalog. Yet different settings and periods produce different arrays of events: collective seizures of grain, invasions of enclosed fields, and attacks on gamekeepers in one place and time; sacking of houses, satirical processions, and sending of delegations in another; demonstrations, strikes, and mass meetings in yet another. The prevailing forms of action likewise vary by the social class of the actors (burghers dealing with nobles act differently from peasants dealing with burghers), the contentious issues at hand (disciplining a fellow worker differs from seeking royal favors), and the immediate occasion for gathering (festival, election, meeting of legislative assembly, etc.). The arrays of actions obviously bear a coherent relationship to the social organization and routine politics of their settings.

Theories of Evidence, Theories of Process The study of Great Britain builds in some risky epistemological and ontological wagers. Epistemologically, this line of investigation bets that periodicals (at least in Great Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) report enough of political contention sufficiently well for systematic analysis of large-scale change and variation in contentious performances and repertoires. It goes farther, assuming that canny investigators can infer causes and effects of political contention from relationships between public performances and their settings and from relationships among performances as well. Such an approach rejects a common belief: that only by probing the consciousness of individual and collective actors can we develop reliable causal accounts of their actions. It gets at meanings, not by trying to reconstruct each actor’s phenomenology, but by observing how people construct publicly available meanings through social interaction. Ontologically, this sort of event-based study wagers on the likelihood that public political performances constitute causally coherent and distinguishable phenomena—



Chapter 1: Method and Explanation  19

that, for example, we can arrive at valid histories of the strike, the forcible seizure of food, or the public meeting in Great Britain. On the other hand, it denies that public political performances defined in these terms form universal categories for which we might be able to formulate covering laws of the type “All strikes everywhere are X and result from Y.” Indeed, I initiated the study of Great Britain after long immersion in French history precisely because it seemed to me that the two regimes had fostered different patterns of variation and change in contention (Tilly 1986). Eventually this and other comparisons led me to the conclusion that analysts of political phenomena should not be searching for broad transnational empirical generalizations but for the causal mechanisms and processes that in different combinations, sequences, and initial conditions produce political variation and change. An important lesson emerges from the nitty-gritty detail of the Great Britain Study. Conscientious investigators can’t get away with a theory of the phenomenon under study and a simple hope that their methods test the theory. They need two theories: one of the phenomenon, and another of the processes producing their evidence (chapter 4, “Event Catalogs as Theories,” elaborates on the point). In this case, the theories overlap: the same big processes that transformed Britain’s contentious repertoires between the 1750s and the 1830s also transformed the sorts of evidence available for studying those repertoires. Here are some examples. The periodicals from which we drew our uniform catalogs of CGs were becoming abundant as the literate public for political reporting expanded. In the archives, we see how much more assiduous both central authorities and their regional correspondents became in reporting contentious events during the long domestic struggles of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, when a repressive British state clamped down on what its leaders saw as the threat of revolutionary contamination. In both published and archival sources, furthermore, we see enhanced sensitivity on the part of reporters once a new actor, organization, or form of action appears. The popular mass meetings and regional political unions that surged as the Napoleonic Wars ended and state repression declined attracted worried attention from authorities and reporters alike. In order to make sure that increased or newly biased reporting was not producing what we took to be genuine alterations in repertoires, we had to do a great deal of cross-checking between our national sources and regional or local reports of contentious events (Tilly 1995, appendices). Testing theories about our evidence took almost as much effort as testing theories about transformations of repertoires. Nevertheless, my collaborators and I did draw some strong conclusions about repertoire transformation from our analyses. We discovered, for example, that the increasing centrality of Parliament to British national politics strongly affected how people made claims (Tilly 1995, 1997b, Tilly and Wood 2003). Parliamentarization had several significant effects: enhancing the importance of individual Members of Parliament as links between local populations and national centers of power, thereby displacing local officials, landlords, and priests as intermediaries, making the public

20  Part I. Introduction meeting with appeals to Parliament a central site of contention, and facilitating the growth of national social movements. Without the painstaking effort of cataloging individual contentious events between 1758 and 1834, we would never have been able to document processes of this sort.

What’s to Come Except for a couple of pages in chapter 11 (“History and Sociological Imagining”), you will find only passing references to the Great Britain Study in the following chapters. The chapters consist instead of broadly methodological papers I wrote from 1990 onward. The first cluster of papers (Concepts and Observations) stresses the necessity for informed self-consciousness in the formulation of questions about social processes. The second bunch (Explanations and Comparisons) goes much farther into the epistemology, ontology, and explanatory logic of comparative analysis. The third and final group of papers (Historical Social Analysis) continues the themes of the first two but deals more explicitly with the interplay of history, social science, and the time-bound phenomena they examine. A brief epilogue (chapter 16) draws lessons from the ensemble of essays.

References Antony, Louise (2006). “The Socialization of Epistemology,” in Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bond, Doug (2006). “IDEA: Integrated Data for Events Analysis,” www.vranet.com/idea/, viewed 17 January 2007. Botz, Gerhard (1983). Gewalt in der Politik. Attentate, Zusammenstösse, Putschversuche, Unruhen in Österreich 1918–1938. Munich: Wilhelm Fink. ——— (1987). Krisenzonen einer Demokratie. Gewalt, Streik und Konfliktunterdrückung in Österreich seit 1918. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Brady, Henry E., and David Collier, eds. (2004). Rethinking Social Inquiry. Diverse Tools, Shared Standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Bunge, Mario (1997). “Mechanism and Explanation,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 27: 410–465. ——— (1998). Social Science under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———v (2004). “How Does It Work? The Search for Explanatory Mechanisms,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34: 182–210. Campbell, John L. (2005). “Where Do We Stand? Common Mechanisms in Organizations and Social Movements Research,” in Gerald F. Davis, Doug McAdam, W. Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Zald, eds., Social Movements and Organization Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cherkaoui, Mohamed (2005). Invisible Codes. Essays on Generative Mechanisms. Oxford: Bardwell Press.



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Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio (1990). The Scientific Measurement of International Conflict. Handbook of Datasets on Crises and Wars, 1495–1988 A.D. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Elster, Jon (1999). Alchemies of the Mind. Rationality and the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Franzosi, Roberto (1989). “One Hundred Years of Strike Statistics: Methodological and Theoretical Issues in Quantitative Strike Research,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 42: 348–362. ——— (1995). The Puzzle of Strikes. Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2004a). From Words to Numbers. Narrative, Data, and Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2004b). “PC-ACE (Program for Computer-Assisted Coding of Event),” www.pcace.com. Frey, Bruno S., and Alois Stutzer (2002). “What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research?” Journal of Economic Literature 40: 402–435. George, Alexander L., and Andrew Bennett (2005). Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goodin, Robert, and Charles Tilly, eds. (2006). The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haimson, Leopold, and Charles Tilly, eds. (1989). Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an International Perspective. Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hedström, Peter (2005). Dissecting the Social. On the Principles of Analytical Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hedström, Peter, and Richard Swedberg, eds. (1998). Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric, and George Rudé (1968). Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprisings of 1830. New York: Pantheon. Jung, Courtney (2006). “Race, Ethnicity, Religion,” in Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korpi, Walter, and Michael Shalev (1979). “Strikes, Industrial Relations and Class Conflict in Capitalist Societies,” British Journal of Sociology 30: 164–187. ——— (1980). “Strikes, Power and Politics in the Western Nations, 1900–1976,” in Maurice Zeitlin, ed., Political Power and Social Theory. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Kriesi, Hanspeter (1993). Political Mobilization and Social Change. The Dutch Case in Comparative Perspective. Aldershot, UK: Avebury. Kriesi, Hanspeter, Ruud Koopmans, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Marco G. Giugni (1995). New Social Movements in Western Europe. A Comparative Analysis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kriesi, Hanspeter, René Levy, Gilbert Ganguillet, and Heinz Zwicky (1981). Politische Aktivierung in der Schweiz, 1945–1978. Diessenhofen: Verlag Ruegger. Landes, David S., and Charles Tilly, eds. (1971). History as Social Science. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Little, Daniel (1991). Varieties of Social Explanation. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science. Boulder, CO: Westview. ——— (1998). On the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Microfoundations, Method, and Causation. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

22  Part I. Introduction McAdam, Doug (2003). “Beyond Structural Analysis: Toward a More Dynamic Understanding of Social Movements,” in Mario Diani and Doug McAdam, eds., Social Movements and Networks. Relational Approaches to Collective Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly (2001). Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McPhail, Clark (1991). The Myth of the Madding Crowd. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. ——— (2006). “The Crowd and Collective Behavior: Bringing Symbolic Interaction Back In,” Symbolic Interaction 29: 433–464. McPhail, Clark, and David Miller (1973). “The Assembling Process: A Theoretical and Empirical Examination,” American Sociological Review 38: 721–735. McPhail, Clark, David D. Schweingruber, and Alin Mihai Ceobanu (2006). “Bridging the Collective Behavior/Social Movement Gap,” paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal. McPhail, Clark, and Ronald T. Wohlstein (1983). “Individual and Collective Behaviors within Gatherings, Demonstrations, and Riots,” Annual Review of Sociology 9: 579–600. Norkus, Zenonas (2005). “Mechanisms as Miracle Makers? The Rise and Inconsistencies of the ‘Mechanismic Approach’ in Social Science and History,” History and Theory 44: 348–372. Olzak, Susan (1989). “Analysis of Events in the Study of Collective Action,” Annual Review of Sociology 15: 119–141. Pickel, Andreas (2006). The Problem of Order in the Global Age: Systems and Mechanisms. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Roehner, Bertrand M., and Tony Syme (2002). Pattern and Repertoire in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rucht, Dieter, Ruud Koopmans, and Friedhelm Neidhardt, eds. (1999). Acts of Dissent: New Developments in the Study of Protest. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Rule, James, and Charles Tilly (1965). Measuring Political Upheaval. Princeton: Center of International Studies, Princeton University Sarkees, Meredith Reid, Frank Whelon Wayman, and J. David Singer (2003). “Inter-State, Intra-State, and Extra-State Wars: A Comprehensive Look at Their Distribution over Time, 1816–1997,” International Studies Quarterly 47: 49–70. Schrodt, Philip A. (2006). “Twenty Years of the Kansas Event Data System Project,” www. ku.edu/~keds, viewed 17 January 2007. Schweingruber, David, and Clark McPhail (1999). “A Method for Systematically Observing and Recording Collective Action,” Sociological Methods & Research 27: 451–498. Schweitzer, R.A., and Steven C. Simmons (1981). Interactive, Direct-Entry Approaches to Contentious Gathering Event Files,” Social Science History 5: 317–342. Shorter, Edward, and Charles Tilly (1974): Strikes in France, 1830 to 1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, Paul C., Thomas Dietz, Nives Dolšak, Elinor Ostrom, and Susan Stonich (2002). “Knowledge and Questions After 15 Years of Research” in Elinor Ostrom, Thomas Dietz, Nives Dolšak, Paul C. Stern, Susan Stonich, and Elke U. Weber, eds., The Drama of the Commons. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. (2005). The Logic of Social Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tarrow, Sidney (1989). Democracy and Disorder: Social Conflict, Political Protest and Democracy in Italy, 1965–1975. New York: Oxford University Press.



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Tillema, Herbert K. (1991). International Armed Conflict since 1945. A Bibliographic Handbook of Wars and Military Interventions. Boulder, CO: Westview. Tilly, Charles (1961). “Some Problems in the History of the Vendée,” American Historical Review 67: 19–33. ——— (1963). “The Analysis of a Counter-Revolution,” History and Theory 3: 30–58. ——— (1964). The Vendée. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (1969). “Methods for the Study of Collective Violence,” in Ralph W. Conant and Molly Apple Levin, eds., Problems in Research on Community Violence. New York: Praeger. ——— (1981). As Sociology Meets History. New York: Academic Press. ——— (1985). Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ——— (1986). The Contentious French. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (1995). Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (1997a). Roads from Past to Future. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ——— (1997b). “Parliamentarization of Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834,” Theory and Society 26: 245–273. ——— (2000). “Processes and Mechanisms of Democratization,” Sociological Theory 18: 1–16. ——— (2001). “Mechanisms in Political Processes,” Annual Review of Political Science 4: 21–41. ——— (2004). “Social Boundary Mechanisms,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34: 211–236. ——— (2005a). Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. ——— (2005b). Trust and Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2007). Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, Charles, and Sidney Tarrow (2006). Contentious Politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Tilly, Charles, and Lesley Wood (2003). “Contentious Connections in Great Britain, 1828–1834,” in Mario Diani and Doug McAdam, eds., Social Movements and Networks. Relational Approaches to Collective Action. New York: Oxford University Press. Trechsel, Alexander (2000). Feuerwerk Volksrechte. Die Volksabstimmungen in den scheizerischen Kantonen 1970–1996. Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn. Wada, Takeshi (2003). “A Historical and Network Analysis of Popular Contention in the Age of Globalization in Mexico,” unpublished doctoral dissertation in sociology, Columbia University. ——— (2004). “Event Analysis of Claim Making in Mexico: How Are Social Protests Transformed into Political Protests?” Mobilization 9: 241–58. Zolberg, Aristide (2006). A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Source Note Written for this volume.

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Part II Concepts and Observations

Chapter 2

Systems, Dispositions, and Tr ansactions in Social Analysis Shortly before his premature death in 2003, the brilliant political analyst Roger Gould completed a superb, coherent, vivifying book while undergoing intensive treatment for cancer. As a fellow cancer victim who survived and as a longtime fan of Gould’s work, I read his Collision of Wills with triple interest: as evidence of my good fortune, as a tribute to his courage, and as a memorial to his intellectual contribution. But you need not have heard of Roger Gould before to benefit from hearing about his book, for it bears directly on this book’s theme: explanation of social processes. Although Gould’s book concentrates on accounting for small-scale interpersonal violence, it raises much more general issues of explanation. We can use Gould’s work to think more generally about the intellectual stakes of the issues addressed by this outstanding collection of papers. First a bit more about Roger Gould. Reading Collision of Wills brings home how much we have lost with his departure. In plain, well-crafted prose the book lays out an original, persuasive account of social processes that generate small-scale lethal conflicts. It accomplishes much more than that, presenting forceful views of good and bad social science, offering a serious challenge to the (widely prevalent) attribution of uniform propensities to collectivities, and fashioning a remarkable theory of group differences in past-, present-, and future-orientation. Now that his cancer-delayed edited volume, The Rational Choice Controversy in Historical Sociology, is in press, a much wider range of readers will recognize that Gould was becoming not only a widely admired craftsman of social scientific research but also a distinctive major voice in criticism and synthesis. In writing Collision of Wills, Gould recurrently wore his heart on his sleeve, striking out against social scientific confusions and errors: dangers of insisting that explanations of behavior rely on the categories that the actors themselves employ, risks of imputing coherent interests and identities to collectivities, fallacies of composition, and much more. He often used footnotes for reflections, critiques, and extensions of 26



Chapter 2: Systems, Dispositions, and Transactions  27

this sort. Students and fellow social scientists can therefore profit from three rather different readings of the book: the first for argument and evidence, the second for asides and critiques, the third for reflection on general explanations of social processes. Let us concentrate here on the third point: general explanations. Crudely speaking, general descriptions and explanations of social processes divide into three categories: systemic, dispositional, and transactional. Systemic accounts posit a coherent, self-sustaining entity such as a society, a world economy, a community, an organization, a household, or at the limit a person, explaining events inside that entity by their location within the entity as a whole. Systemic descriptions and explanations have the advantage of taking seriously a knotty problem for social scientists: how to connect small-scale and large-scale social processes. They have two vexing disadvantages: the enormous difficulty of identifying and bounding relevant systems, and persistent confusion about cause and effect within such systems. Dispositional accounts similarly posit coherent entities—in this case more often individuals than any others—but explain the actions of those entities by means of their orientations just before the point of action. Competing dispositional accounts feature motives, decision logics, emotions, and cultural templates. When cast at the level of the individual, dispositional descriptions and explanations have the advantage of articulating easily with the findings of neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary analysis. They have the great disadvantage of accounting badly for emergence and for aggregate effects. Transactional accounts take interactions among social sites as their starting points, treating both events at those sites and durable characteristics of those sites as outcomes of interactions. Transactional accounts become relational—another term widely employed in this context—when they focus on persistent features of transactions between specific social sites. Transactional or relational descriptions and explanations have the advantage of placing communication, including the use of language, at the heart of social life. They have the disadvantage of contradicting commonsense accounts of social behavior, and thus of articulating poorly with conventional moral reasoning in which people or groups take responsibility for dispositions and their consequences. Systemic, dispositional, and transactional approaches qualify as metatheories rather than as directly verifiable or falsifiable theories. They take competing ontological positions, claiming that rather different sorts of phenomena constitute and cause social processes. The three therefore generate contradictory lines of explanation for social processes. In the nature of the case, however, sustained competition between social scientific explanations usually takes place within one of these ontological lines rather than across them; systemic explanations compete with other systemic explanations, and so on. Nevertheless, fierce arguments sometimes take place across metatheoretical divides. In presenting my own preferred transactional accounts of social processes, I have often heard the complaint that my explanations were all very interesting, but they only described how things occurred while neglecting to say why they occurred. On further discussion, “why” has almost always turned out to mean where the phenomenon at

28  Part II. Concepts and Observations hand fit into some system, what dispositions lay behind the phenomenon, or both: how X serves the capitalist system, for example, and/or why capitalists want X. Choices among these strategies of explanation confront a wide range of important topics, especially democratization, boundaries, markets, and states. Take the widely discussed process of democratization and its less widely discussed reversal, de-democratization. Systemic accounts of democratization and de-­democratization typically identify the society or polity as the relevant unit of analysis, stressing the dependence of democratic institutions and practices on such aggregate characteristics as wealth, cultural homogeneity, and level of civic participation; controversies concern which aggregate characteristics of political systems make the difference. Dispositional accounts of democratization and de-democratization (which dominate current discussions of the subject) center on attitudes and incentives that promote or inhibit willingness of different actors to play the democratic game; controversies concern which attitudes and incentives make a difference, and how. Transactional accounts of democratization and de-democratization characteristically feature the sorts of relations among major political actors that promote their sustained participation in competitive public politics; controversies concern which relations matter, and how they work. In my own transactional account, for example, relations of trust and distrust, relations of equality and inequality, and relations of public claim-making interact to move regimes toward or away from democracy (Tilly 2007). Accounts of political identities likewise sort into systemic, dispositional, and transactional varieties. No longer so popular as when I entered social science half a century ago, systemic analyses of identity treat it as a location within a larger whole such as a society, a nation, or a regime, or (in a somewhat more subjectivist version) the experience of occupying such a location. Controversies then swirl around which locations matter, and how. Even more so than in the case of democratization and de-democratization, however, dispositional analyses dominate social scientific treatments of political identity. Identity, in such a view, equals some combination of motivation, self-awareness, and internalized culture. Disagreements abound, however, over how such identities form, which ones matter, and by what means they produce their effects. When it comes to transactional views, political identities become aspects of or reactions to relations with others. One implication is that instead of a single identity, every person has as many identities as they do significant social relations; only at the extreme of a completely bifurcated population might we find a single pair of identities, X to Y and Y to X. Obviously, transactional analysts of identity go at it hammer and tongs about which relations matter most and in what ways, how much identities stamp individual experience, and what processes alter prevailing identities. In my own formulations, all political identities come in pairs featuring a boundary separating us from them, relations connecting us with us, other relations connecting them with them, still more relations connecting us with them, and shared stories—usually more than one—concerning the boundary and the relations. A similar division appears in analyses of inequality. When I began my work on the subject years ago, systemic views of inequality dominated the social sciences:



Chapter 2: Systems, Dispositions, and Transactions  29

social systems, or something like them, located people or groups within them, and gave them differential awards. Even today, that abstract entity “the market” often plays such an explanatory role, as competition with unequal effort or talent yields unequal rewards. Such a view promotes disagreement over which attributes a given system favors, and why. Dispositional accounts of inequality, in contrast, usually suppose a set of sorting mechanisms at a more concrete level than “the market” considered in general: grades in school, competition for jobs, entrance examinations, racial discrimination, and the like sort people into different categories and careers. Given the sorting mechanisms, however, dispositional accounts attribute variable individual or group outcomes to variation in characteristics and/or performances of the individuals and groups in question. I need hardly point out how vigorously dispositional analysts dispute which sorting mechanisms, which characteristics, and which performances produce the unequal outcomes they observe. Transactional accounts of inequality shift the emphasis to unequal relations and their production or reproduction. Here some sort of negotiated interaction, however asymmetrical, between individuals or groups generates, maintains, or alters social inequality. In my own analyses, four mechanisms, which I call exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation, combine in different circumstances to produce categorical inequality—inequality across such distinctions as male-female, black-white, or Hindu-Muslim (Tilly 1998). Transactional analysts, however, differ widely with regard to the inequality-generating mechanisms actually at work. One more example comes from the study of trust. Trust has come in for renewed attention recently because of the insistent claims by Robert Putnam and others that trust is essential to the viability of democratic regimes, that trust emerges from the activity of civic organizations, and that trust is declining in contemporary democracies, especially the United States. But conceptions of trust also come in systemic, dispositional, and transactional packages. Analysts most often treat trust as an individual or collective disposition that fluctuates as a result of individual or collective experience. But a significant minority treats trust as a systemic property, and a few renegades, including me, consider it to be something that happens in relationships: you and I build up relations of trust. My own work on the subject focuses on the politics of trust networks: sets of social ties in which members’ relations to each other put major long-term collective enterprises at risk to the malfeasance, mistakes, or failures of other network members (Tilly 2005). Most or all members of trust networks place major valued collective enterprises such as the preservation of their faith, placement of their children, provision for their old age, and protection of personal secrets at risk. Accordingly, trust networks constitute only a tiny subset of all interpersonal networks. These relatively rare forms of social organization matter, however, because their connections with centers of political power vary from utter concealment from rulers to full integration within regimes, with enormous consequences for public politics; with one form of extensive integration, we have theocracy; with another, democracy.

30  Part II. Concepts and Observations The point of these quick examples is not to survey competing explanations of democratization, political identities, inequality, and trust but to establish that genuine differences exist among systemic, dispositional, and transactional accounts of major social processes. When it comes to Roger Gould’s own question of collective violence, systemic accounts often trace the character or intensity of violence to mismatches of societal elements, for example between the general ethos and the opportunity structure. Dispositional accounts (which, as with democratization, identities, and trust, prevail these days) commonly highlight incentives and opportunities available to individuals who already have violent propensities. Transactional accounts, in their turn, often center on trajectories of negotiations between individuals or groups. Of course absolutely pure versions of systemic, dispositional, or transactional accounts rarely appear in serious social scientific work. My own preferred descriptions and explanations of social processes avoid systems and assign a fundamental place to transactions. They nevertheless incorporate dispositions by recognizing that transactions endow social sites, including persons, groups, and social ties, with information, codes, resources, and energies which in turn shape the participation of those sites in subsequent transactions. As matters of priority, nevertheless, systemic, dispositional, and transactional accounts point social scientific work in different directions. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, systemic thinking preoccupied major social analysts from Auguste Comte to Talcott Parsons, only to lose considerable ground during the later twentieth century. Dispositional thinking held its own from the utilitarians onward, but became even more prevalent as systems lost their social scientific sway and the prestige of a very dispositional economics grew. Transactional thinking never dominated nineteenth- or twentieth-century social science, but the names Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, George Herbert Mead, and John R. Commons recall its long-term presence as a minority alternative. As the twentieth century drew to a close, furthermore, transactional accounts of social processes enjoyed something of a renaissance. Richer and more dynamic forms of network analysis in sociology, institutionalism and constructivism in political science, plus the increasing prominence of organizational, institutional, and transaction-cost analyses in economics illustrate the trend. Gould’s Collision of Wills contributes significantly to the revival and renewal of transactional accounts in social science. Peter Bearman’s preface to the book puts the point nicely: In this book Gould develops an original framework for making sense of what appears on the surface to be senseless violence between individuals and small groups. Taken at face value, most accounts of interpersonal violence suggest that violence erupts because of the most trivial things. One idea prevalent in the literature is that violence is about trivial things because all people encounter opportunities for conflict at some time, that most of these opportunities are about silly things, and that some people are simply prone to violence, so in the end, most violence is about things that don’t matter much. Gould challenges this idea and shows that interpersonal violence is a property of relations, not persons. (Gould 2003: xi–xii)



Chapter 2: Systems, Dispositions, and Transactions  31

In my own, more ponderous language, Gould’s analysis avoids system accounts, criticizes dispositional accounts, and adopts a mainly transactional account of collective violence at the small scale. Except in its final chapter, the book’s analysis centers on common properties of crucial social relations across a wide variety of lethal conflicts: bar fights in Renaissance Flanders, vengeance in nineteenth-century Corsica, homicide in twentieth-century American cities and elsewhere, killing in response to witchcraft in a number of different times and places, and still more instances in footnotes and asides. Leaving aside the book’s many polemics and sermons, the main argument concerns situations in which at least one party is claiming deference from another in the absence of wellestablished supports for that deference in the form of previously established relations between the parties, widely available definitions of the relationship, or third-party enforcement of the claim for deference. No social setting establishes perfect stability or consistency in these regards, Gould points out, so that a) all social relations involve some asymmetries that are open to contestation and b) small-scale struggles over deference claims occur all the time. But such struggles become more frequent and more destructive, he argues, when established relations among parties are changing, conflicting definitions of relations are becoming more salient, and third-party supports are uncertain or ineffective. The last line of analysis allows Gould to formulate one of his most striking arguments: that in times of political crisis crimes of violence rise not (or at least not exclusively) because people get caught up in political conflict but because such crises destabilize supports for existing deference patterns. Although one might give a systemic gloss to this final argument, it clearly centers on transactions. It raises serious doubt that any dispositional account could predict the involvement in collective violence of Flemish barflies, Corsican stiletto-carriers, American urban murderers, or observers of witchcraft across the world. The general argument also implies that: 1. Conflict occurs more frequently in symmetrical than in asymmetrical relationships. 2. Violent conflict occurs especially in relatively symmetrical but inconsistent relationships. 3. Instability in adjacent relationships increases the likelihood of conflict in the relationship at hand. Much of the book consists of sequences in which Gould lays out some portion or implication of this general argument with exquisite care, fends off frequent confusions and/or competing arguments, then presents a simple but telling body of evidence to support the argument. The most extended treatment concerns homicide in ­nineteenth-century Corsica, but similar care goes into such analyses as the treatments of homicide’s annual fluctuations in Corsica, France, Italy, and Finland.

32  Part II. Concepts and Observations The final chapter breaks with this mode in a remarkable series of reflections on two linked topics: how social settings that set a high value on masculine honor actually operate, and what difference it makes to social life (including conflict) whether people have strong investments in a) maintaining their past selves, b) gratifying their present selves, or c) ensuring their future selves. In Gould’s stimulating view, willingness—or obligation—to sacrifice past and present selves on behalf of future selves encourages people to accept subordination within well-defined hierarchies, and dramatizes acts of rebellion in which the rebels renounce benefits that prudence or submission would guarantee for their future selves. Like the best social science, Gould’s analysis of violence in small-scale interpersonal confrontations immediately suggests analogies, extensions, and applications outside its immediate empirical range. Many observers of violent entrepreneurs such as Mafiosi have argued, for example, that protection services, however illegal, commonly provide ways of securing advantageous outcomes to risky, consequential transactions where trust is in short supply; the mechanisms involved in that supply of trust look like the same mechanisms that generate lethal encounters in Gould’s account, but now reversed. Willingness to accept current subordination in anticipation of fulfillment for future selves also directly parallels a major conundrum in the study of democracy: under what conditions and how people accept current sacrifices ranging from military service and heavy taxes to having one’s party lose an election, yet instead of fleeing or subverting the regime persist in participating. Long career ladders in which people abandon their pasts and climb the steps though years of subordination deserve Gouldian attention. We might even apply Gould’s insights to careers in social science, including the deference and respectful citation required of junior scholars. We survivors and heirs of Roger Gould should not let the matter rest there, with simple celebration and dutiful citation of an insightful book. We can do more. Let’s return to the explanation of collective violence, but now think about the larger scale. In sociology, political science, economics, and journalism, prevailing analyses of collective violence rely heavily on dispositional accounts. The relevant actors range from genes to persons to groups to whole civilizations. Relevant dispositions vary from ideas to impulses to calculations of advantage. Across all variants, however, one dispositional understanding prevails: explaining collective violence means singling out the crucial actors and identifying their dispositions to violence. In a dispositional mode, analysts who abhor the violence in question then hope to alter violent dispositions, reduce incentives or circumstances that currently activate those dispositions, block their realization, or divert them to harmless outcomes. Gould’s transactional account challenges all such prescriptions. It points instead toward alterations in social relations as the effective means of reducing violent ­encounters. Such alterations might include stabilizing deference patterns, reducing the inconsistency of those patterns, separating parties to uncertain deference relations, inserting third-party monitors or mediators, reducing access of the parties to lethal weapons, and increasing opportunities for those who accept today’s subordination to insure their future selves.



Chapter 2: Systems, Dispositions, and Transactions  33

Collision of Wills leaves a large agenda for transactional analyses of collective violence. Considered in terms of total deaths, wounds, and property damage, the great bulk of collective violence does not occur in the small-scale encounters on which Gould’s book properly concentrates. Militias, gangs, armies, disciplined villagers, ethnic activists, dealers in contraband and other organized groups specializing in coercion figure widely in larger-scale collective violence. We might, of course, conclude that such violent specialists and the deferencecontesting pairs described by Roger Gould inhabit such different causal worlds that Gould’s insights do not apply. We might even conclude that for all the value of transactional explanations in cases of interpersonal rank ambiguity, large-scale collective violence requires systemic or dispositional explanations. After all, the existing literature on ethnic conflict, civil war, interstate war, and related phenomena overwhelmingly adopts systemic and/or dispositional accounts. Why not just ride the mainstream? That would be a mistake. The approach sketched by Roger Gould has powerful implications for the analysis of larger-scale collective violence. To take only the most obvious extension, the same sorts of contests over ambiguous social rank that set Gould’s individuals at each other’s throats also operate between categories and groups: interacting castes, neighboring villages, rival gangs, competing militias, members of adjacent racial categories, and more. Further afield, Gould’s approach suggests ways of thinking about the largest puzzles in the study of collective violence: 1. Why does collective violence, unlike suicides and individual homicides, concentrate in large waves, often with one violent encounter appearing to trigger the next, then subside to low levels for substantial periods of time? 2. How and why do people who interact without doing outright damage to each other shift rapidly into collective violence, then back (sometimes just as rapidly) into relatively peaceful relations? 3. In particular, how and why do people who have lived with their categorical differences (often cooperating and intermarrying) for years begin devastating attacks on each other’s persons and property? 4. Why do different kinds of political regimes (for example, democratic and authoritarian regimes) host such different levels and forms of collective violence? 5. How and why do peacekeeping specialists such as police and soldiers so regularly and quickly switch between violent and nonviolent action? I do not claim that we can read out answers to these five pressing questions directly from the pages of Gould’s book. But I do make two claims: first, that systemic and dispositional answers to the questions, which are legion, have not proven very satisfactory; second, that the very sort of transactional reasoning we find in Gould leads to fruitful programs of theory and research in all five regards. Changes in uncertainty about interactions across established us-them boundaries, for example, exert strong effects on switching between violent and nonviolent collective interactions. Uncertainty commonly increases when:

34  Part II. Concepts and Observations









• overarching political authorities lose their ability to enforce previously constraining agreements binding actors on both sides of the boundary (example: subordination of Catholics weakens in eighteenth-century Ulster as a prospering linen industry alters patterns of inequality, and Protestant-Catholic conflict intensifies) • those same authorities take actions that threaten survival of crucial connecting structures within populations on one side of the boundary while appearing to spare or even benefit those on the other side (example: between 1829 and 1835, British authorities expand Catholic political rights while banning both the Catholic Association and the Protestant Orange Order, thus threatening Protestant hegemony) • the declining capacity of authorities to police existing boundaries, control use of weapons, and contain individual aggression facilitates cross-boundary opportunism, including retaliation for earlier slights and injustices (example: police withdraw from black neighborhoods during early stages of Los Angeles and Detroit confrontations of the 1960s, then both looting and attacks on ostensibly white property spread) • leaders on one side of the boundary or the other face resistance or competition from well-organized segments of their previous followers (example: Algerian Islamic purists turn simultaneously against secular leaders and defecting villagers, engaging in widespread massacres of Muslims in the process) • external parties change, increase, or decrease their material, moral, and political support for actors on one side of the boundary or the other (example: French revolutionary authorities send troops to the Vendée in support of beleaguered Patriots, thereby threatening the rural people who are harassing the Patriots)

You will not find these causes of rising relational uncertainty, hence of collective violence, listed explicitly in Collision of Wills. No doubt Roger Gould, never an easy sell, would have rejected, resisted, respecified, or modified some of them. I may have gotten them wrong. Nevertheless, the main point remains: well outside the small-scale world of lethal one-on-one confrontations, the sort of description and explanation Gould has bequeathed to us promises to improve our understanding of conflict processes at large. What guidance does all this metatheory provide for the analysis of identities, institutions, and inequalities? I see help arriving at two levels. First, my Gould-inspired survey of explanations should help us recognize the difference between disagreements within and across metatheoretical boundaries. Many current disputes over identities, for example, do not pit competing explanations of the same phenomena against each other but bring into play incompatible ideas concerning the location and character of identities in the first place. Consider an everyday question: whether globalization is sweeping away old identities. The question has a different meaning depending on whether we adopt systemic, dispositional, or relational accounts of the question’s two elements: globalization and



Chapter 2: Systems, Dispositions, and Transactions  35

identities. Systemic theorists often treat globalization and identities as, respectively, a systemic property and a consequence of location within the system. Relational theorists counter that globalization consists of alterations in connections among persons, groups, and social sites, which in their turn alter the array of identities available to those persons, groups, and social sites. No body of evidence will in itself resolve disputes between systemic and relational accounts. That brings us to the second level. Locating a concrete argument correctly in its metatheoretical frame will clarify how the argument is proceeding and what competing arguments are immediately relevant. Review the papers in the average social science journal, and you will immediately see implicit references to all three sorts of metatheory: systemic accounts of national policies, dispositional accounts of political mobilization, transactional accounts of intergroup relations, and more. Despite my personal preference for transactional accounts of social processes and my sense that systemic accounts almost always cause confusion, I am not for a moment suggesting a scorecard in which, perhaps you might get 10 points for a transactional argument, 0 points for a dispositional argument, and –10 points for a systemic argument. My sermon reduces to a much simpler lesson: we’ll all do better analyses of political processes if we know what sorts of arguments we are advancing, and what sorts of arguments we are confronting.

References Gould, Roger (2003). Collision of Wills. How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———, ed. (2007). The Rational Choice Controversy in Historical Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tilly, Charles (1998). Durable Inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. ——— (2005). Trust and Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2007). Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Source Note This chapter was published originally as “Systems, Dispositions, and Transactions in Social Analysis” in Rachel Beatty Riedl, Sada Aksartova, and Kristine Mitchell, eds., Bridging Disciplines, Spanning the World. Approaches to Inequality, Identity, and Institutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, 2006.

Chapter 3

Observations of Social Processes and Their For m al Representations Social scientific journals like to advertise their catholicity (or their tolerance) by listing a wide variety of scholars as members of their editorial boards. More years ago than I care to recall, the journals Theory and Society and Social Science Research recruited me to their editorial boards. Somehow neither one ever got around to firing me. As a consequence, I still regularly review papers submitted to the two journals, and at least scan every issue. No chance of confusing one with the other: select an article from Theory and Society at random, and you have almost no chance of encountering a table, a mathematical formula, or a graphic representation of data. Choose an article from Social Science Research, on the other hand, with great assurance that you will encounter numbers, graphs, and/or tables. Two different versions of social science seem to be in play. Yet the enticing comparison leads easily to a false conclusion. Sociologists would spend less time ventilating uselessly if no one had ever invented the vivid but misleading conceptual and institutional division between “qualitative” and “quantitative” research. Of course, a reader of sociological journals will find some of them (like Social Science Research) filling their pages with numbers and others (like Theory and Society) depending almost entirely on verbal distinctions. Clearly, styles of reporting sociological research differ considerably from one segment of the discipline to another. Indeed, if the qualitative-quantitative division applied only to style of presentation, it would do little harm, especially if its users recognized it as a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. The distinction becomes much more slippery, however, if applied to research methods. Even when it eventually produces numbers, after all, the bulk of sociological research involves making nonquantitative observations before any quantitative transformation or analysis of the evidence. For all their final quantitative form, interview-based surveys begin, not with numbers, but with conversations between interviewers and respondents. Even demographers who start their work with published 36

Chapter 3: Social Processes and Their Formal Representations  37 vital statistics are actually drawing their evidence from previously written registrations of individual births, deaths, and marriages, each one described in its particularity. Although this chapter’s references include a wide variety of publications explicitly adopting formalisms in the study of social processes, the essay itself falls far short of a comprehensive survey of formalisms in social science. It neither reviews previous claims for and against the qualitative-quantitative division nor covers the full range of available social scientific formalisms. Drawing mainly on my own long, varied, but still highly selective experience in social research, I argue here that:



• Dichotomization of social scientific research methods and subjects into qualitative and quantitative does more harm than good. • Such a division misrepresents the actual choices facing social researchers. • It also obscures a genuine, consequential choice between using and avoiding formalisms in the transformation and analysis of evidence on social processes. • Formalisms are available and useful for the analysis of all sorts of social scientific evidence, including the evidence commonly gathered in fields that participants often call qualitative. • Formalisms have two signal advantages for social research: first, when well chosen they discipline an inquiry from the outset; second, they make it easier to discover that an otherwise plausible formulation is actually mistaken, and therefore to improve on previous knowledge. • Every social scientist will therefore benefit from serious exposure to formalisms, even if they play a minor part in the practitioner’s own research and writing.

If these points are correct, they imply that graduate education in social science should regularly include serious exposure to the use of formalisms in the analysis of evidence concerning social processes. It certainly makes no sense to divide social phenomena at large into inherently, irreducibly qualitative or quantitative; no such distinction exists in nature (Darrow 2001, Desrosières 1998, Katz 2001, 2002, Mahoney 1999, 2000, Munck 1998, Podolny 2003, Ragin 2000, Ragin and Becker 1992, Tufte 1997, Harrison White 2002). What is more, the qualitative-quantitative divide obscures a contrast of great importance for the integrity of social research: between a) employing rigorous, theoretically informed formalisms for confrontation with the evidence at hand and b) interpreting the evidence directly without the discipline of formalisms. In the hope of dispelling confusion induced by the quantitative-qualitative distinction, this brief paper focuses on the place of formalisms in social research. By formalism, I mean an explicit representation of a set of elements and of relations among them. Formalisms that matter here represent elements of social processes and relations among those elements. Relations may consist of cause and effect, but they may also involve proximity, simultaneity, connection, or similarity. Familiar examples in social science include probability-based statistical models, network analyses, grammars, other rigorous treatments of conversation, time-budgets, ­identification of

38  Part II. Concepts and Observations sequences, measurement models, collective biography, life tables, analysis of games, formal recasting of narratives, simulations, mathematical models, spatial mapping, and straightforward tabular comparisons, so long as those comparisons are theoretically motivated. Such representations count as formalisms when investigators adopt or create them in logical independence of their observations of social processes, then make rigorous comparisons between the representations and the observations. Thus a demographer constructs a life table for the population at hand and compares it with the CoaleDemeny South model on the expectation that its pattern of mortality over lifetimes will more greatly resemble those of Italy and Spain than those of Sweden and Norway (Coale and Demeny 1966), a political scientist sets up a game to represent choices faced by members of linguistic minorities in newly independent countries (Laitin 1998), or a sociologist uses network models to specify the argument that greater connection among persons prior to some crucial, risky collective action promotes participation in that action (Diani and McAdam 2003, Fernandez and McAdam 1988). In social research, formalisms sometimes figure in the initial disciplining of the evidence, as when coders translate responses of interviewees into standardized categories. They often help in reordering data, as when researchers cluster multiple responses into indicators of more general orientations such as radicalism or optimism. At times they serve for the examination of bias in the selection of respondents, sources, or information. They play central parts in hypothesis testing, as investigators work out the logic of one explanation or another, then determine whether the evidence matches that logic. A common prejudice, to be sure, divides the social world into phenomena that are suitable for quantification (population distributions, social mobility, et cetera) and those that are irreducibly qualitative: conversation, narratives, biography, ethnography, and history often serve as examples. Formalisms can and do, however, clearly apply to these phenomena as well (see, e.g., Aminzade 1993, Bearman 1993, Collier 1999, Fitch 1998, Franzosi 1998a, 1998b, Kalb 1997, Kosto 2001, van Leeuwen and Maas 1996, Markoff 1996, Maynard 2003, Mohr 1998, 2000, Murmann 2003, Roy 1997, Sawyer 2003, Steinberg 1999, Steinmetz 1993, Stinchcombe 1996, Voss 1993, Wengraf 2000, James White 1995). Although researchers frequently discard or modify formalisms in response to inadequate or surprising matches, the self-conscious employment of formalisms disciplines the encounter of argument and evidence. How so? Most social researchers learn more from being wrong than from being right—provided they then recognize that they were wrong, see why they were wrong, and go on to improve their arguments. Post hoc interpretation of data minimizes the opportunity to recognize contradictions between argument and evidence, while adoption of formalisms increases that opportunity. Formalisms blindly followed induce blindness. Intelligently adopted, however, they improve vision. Being obliged to spell out the argument, check its logical implications, and examine whether the evidence conforms to the argument promotes both visual acuity and intellectual responsibility.

Chapter 3: Social Processes and Their Formal Representations  39 My claim rests on the assumption that, within limits, researchers can learn the truth about social processes. At a minimum, they can distinguish between totally inadequate and less inadequate representations of social processes, thus opening the way to increasingly reliable knowledge. If you think, on the contrary, that social processes are intrinsically chaotic and/or that investigators have no way of comparing the adequacy of competing accounts, you will necessarily reject my advocacy of formalisms as a delusion and a waste of energy. In that case, you will have to figure out your own alternative justification for doing social science at all. At this point, I assume that any remaining readers cling to the possibility of verification and falsification. Let me repeat: I claim nothing like full familiarity with the research methods and formalisms currently employed in social science. Over a checkered career, I have assembled and analyzed data on urban residential areas (e.g., Tilly 1961), conducted sample surveys (e.g., Tilly 1965), recast Census data into analytical comparisons (e.g., Tilly 1968), combined criminal and other administrative statistics with newspaper reports in analyses of the changing geography of crime and violence (e.g., Lodhi and Tilly 1973), synthesized strike data with a wide variety of evidence on changes in industrial and social organization (e.g., Shorter and Tilly 1974), constructed collective biographies (e.g., Lees and Tilly 1974), produced geographic analyses of urban change and contentious events (e.g., Schweitzer and Tilly 1982), carried on simple demographic analyses (e.g., Tilly 1984), and conducted formal network analyses (e.g., Tilly 1997). Straddling fields often separated as quantitative and qualitative, I have often had to write on historiography, on quantification in history, and on methodological problems in the study of political processes (e.g., Tilly 1997, 2001a, 2001b, 2002a). But I can only claim to have made a substantial methodological contribution to social science in one area: with regard to the invention, improvement, and analysis of event catalogs for different sorts of political processes, especially conflict processes (for reviews of event catalogs, see Beissinger 2001, Franzosi 1995, 2004, Olzak 1989, 1992, Rucht, Koopmans, and Neidhardt 1998, Tilly 1995, 2002b, James White 1995). Nevertheless, my varied research experience provides some ground for reflection on formalisms. Take the case of historical research, which some analysts treat as quintessentially interpretive, hence inaccessible to formalisms. That characterization of historical research rests on a double misunderstanding: identification of historical research entirely with the collection of evidence, identification of historical analysis with the writing of narratives. As a historian I have, of course, done plenty of both. I have spent years in European and American archives, carefully reading and copying out such sources as administrative correspondence. Formalisms appear only fleetingly in that phase of the research, and mainly in the form of schemas employed by the authors of the texts. I have also written my share of historical narratives, telling sequential stories in the effort to show that relations among their elements parallel—or, for that matter, fail to parallel—those in a general argument, my own or someone else’s. No one should take this essay as a polemic against slogging archival work and synthetic narrative.

40  Part II. Concepts and Observations Let us assume, then, that good historical work always includes respectful collection of evidence and often culminates in synthetic narratives. Formalisms play their parts in the space between the initial collection of archival material and the final production of narratives. In my own historical research, formalisms figure prominently from early in the ordering of evidence to late in its analysis; they range from estimates of selectivity in the sources to tabular analysis, blockmodeling, and standard statistical treatments (see, e.g., Tilly 1995: 393–405). As it happens, many other historians rush from sources to reasoned narratives without pausing to employ formalisms, or even to reflect very self-consciously on the logical structure of their arguments, hence on what the evidence should show if their arguments are correct. Precisely at that point lies the difference between social scientific and conventional forms of history (Landes and Tilly 1971, Monkkonen 1994, Tilly 1981, 1985, 1987, 2001c). History joins with social science when its organizing arguments become explicit, falsifiable, and theoretically informed. Formalisms cement the junction. Relevant formalisms range across demographic accounting formulas, sequence analyses, models of discourse, economic models, mathematical models, network analyses, statistical treatment of the evidence, and much more (e.g., Abbott 2001, Bearman, Faris, and Moody 1999, Büthe 2002, Franzosi 2004, Gould 1995, 2003, Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal 2000, Kaufman 2002, Mohr and Franzosi 1997, Padgett and Ansell 1993, Roehner and Syme 2002, Shapiro and Markoff 1998). Good formalisms make explicit the analyst’s claims about relations among the elements under observation. They thereby make those claims available to falsification and modification as a result of comparison with the evidence. Speaking more generally, available formalisms vary in roughly the way described by Figure 3.1. In one dimension, we observe variation in how closely the structure of the formal representation corresponds to the structure of the available evidence. In the other, we observe variation in the extent to which the formalism relies on numbers, as distinguished from its reliance on topological relations among its elements. (Purists including my son-in-law the algebraic geometer point out that a more precise description would run from standard metrics to topologies without metrics, but the approximation will do.) These are of course continua: vertically from creation of mathematical models in precise mimicry of the data structure to formation of analogical schemes facilitating recognition that ideal and observed patterns resemble each other, horizontally from employing precise numerical representations to identifying spatial relations among the elements. The catchall “schematics” appears in the topological-analogical corner of the diagram to situate diagrams and flow charts in which connecting lines, arrows, and/or spatial contiguity represent proximity, simultaneity, similarity, or cause­effect relations. (Figure 3.1 itself presents an elementary schematic, including weak claims about similarities and principles of variation.) Spatial maps appear in the upper right-hand corner to capture their direct representation of the elements’ distribution in topological, not numerical, space, as when country-by-country maps

Chapter 3: Social Processes and Their Formal Representations  41 Direct

Mathematical models

Spadal maps

Probability-based statistics

Network analysis

Measurement models Directness of Correspondence

Analogical

Tabular analysis

Simulation

Schematics

T opological

Numerical Form of Correspondence

Figure 3.1  A Rough Typology of Formal Representations in Social Science

show us worldwide variations in the extent of poverty, inequality, or internet access. Simulation nestles in the lower left-hand corner because (despite the existence of mechanical and even theatrical simulations) on the whole social scientific practitioners of simulation work with numerical approximations of the processes they are trying to reproduce and are satisfied if they can produce recognizable analogies to those processes. Tabular analysis occupies the diagram’s center. From the simple yes-no/yes-no truth table to the multidimensional array by period, category, and/or place, the venerable table provides a visible, vigorous version of formal representation. It almost always depends on a radical reduction of the data’s complexity; hence its vertical placement between “direct” and “analogical.” It also generally substitutes nominal or ordinal for cardinal measurement, even where individual observations fall into interval scales; hence its location halfway between numerical and topological correspondence to the original evidence. Some tabular presentations—for example, those of the Census—hide the theory that goes implicitly into their construction (see, e.g., Curtis 2001, Kertzer and Arel 2002). But those tables that investigators create themselves almost compel them to make arguments in the form “the more X, the more Y,” “If X, not Y,” “X plus Y is a necessary condition for Z,” and the like. In short, tabular analysis illustrates the use of formalisms in its elementary version.

42  Part II. Concepts and Observations My placement of analytic modes in the space will surely bother some practitioners, for example those users of simulation who make precise comparisons between their models’ outputs and some parallel set of empirical observations. But in general the diagram makes the crucial point: formalisms vary greatly in structure, style, and logical underpinnings. To apply formalisms in social science does not mean conforming to a single dominant understanding of how the world works. On the contrary, the choice among formalisms commits their users to substantially different theoretical and metatheoretical understandings. That is not their vice, but their virtue. To adopt formalisms in the course of social scientific work means making the adoption of arguments explicit, serious, and consequential. It means increasing the chance of discovering that you were wrong, and therefore of learning something new.

References Abbott, Andrew (2001). Time Matters. On Theory and Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aminzade, Ronald (1993). Ballots and Barricades. Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830–1871. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bearman, Peter S. (1993). Relations into Rhetorics. Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540–1640. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bearman, Peter, Robert Faris, and James Moody (1999). “Blocking the Future: New Solutions for Old Problems in Historical Social Science,” Social Science History 23: 501–534. Beissinger, Mark (2001). Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Büthe, Tim (2002). “Taking Temporality Seriously: Modeling History and the Use of Narratives as Evidence,” American Political Science Review 96: 481–494. Coale, Ansley J., and Paul Demeny (1966). Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Collier, Ruth Berins (1999). Paths toward Democracy. The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and South America. New York: Cambridge University Press. Curtis, Bruce (2001). The Politics of Population. State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Darrow, David (2001). “From Commune to Household: Statistics and the Social Construction of Chaianov’s Theory of Peasant Economy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43: 788–818. Desrosières, Alain (1998). The Politics of Large Numbers. A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Diani, Mario, and Doug McAdam, eds. (2003). Social Movements and Networks. Relational Approaches to Collective Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fernandez, Roberto, and Doug McAdam (1988). “Social Networks and Social Movements: Multiorganizational Fields and Recruitment to Mississippi Freedom Summer,” Sociological Forum 3: 357–382. Fitch, Kristine L. (1998). Speaking Relationally. Culture, Communication, and Interpersonal Connection. New York: Guilford.

Chapter 3: Social Processes and Their Formal Representations  43 Franzosi, Roberto (1995). The Puzzle of Strikes. Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1998a). “Narrative Analysis, or Why (and How) Sociologists Should Be Interested in Narrative,” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 517–554. ——— (1998b). “Narrative as Data: Linguistic and Statistical Tools for the Quantitative Study of Historical Events,” International Review of Social History 43, Supplement 6: New Methods for Social History, 81–104. ——— (2004). From Words to Numbers. A Journey in the Methodology of Social Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gould, Roger V. (1995). Insurgent Identities. Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— (2003): Collision of Wills. How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoffman, Philip T., Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (2000). Priceless Markets. The Political Economy of Credit in Paris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kalb, Don (1997). Expanding Class. Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands, 1850–1950. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Katz, Jack (2001). “From How to Why. On Luminous Description and Causal Inference in Ethnography (Part 1),” Ethnography 2: 443–473. ——— (2002). “From How to Why. On Luminous Description and Causal Inference in Ethnography (Part 2).” Ethnography 3: 63–90. Kaufman, Jason (2002). For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kertzer, David I., and Dominique Arel, eds. (2002). Census and Identity. The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kosto, Adam J. (2001). Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia. Power, Order, and the Written Word, 1000–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laitin, David D. (1998). Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Landes, David S., and Charles Tilly (1971). History as Social Science. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Lees, Lynn, and Charles Tilly (1974). “Le peuple de juin 1848,” Annales; Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 29: 1061–1091. van Leeuwen, Marco H.D., and Ineke Maas (1996). “Long-Term Social Mobility: Research Agenda and a Case Study (Berlin, 1825–1957),” Continuity and Change 11: 399–433. Lodhi, A.Q., and Charles Tilly (1973). “Urbanization, Criminality and Collective Violence in Nineteenth-Century France,” American Journal of Sociology 79: 296–318. Mahoney, James (1999). “Nominal, Ordinal, and Narrative Appraisal in Macrocausal Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology 104: 1154–1196. ——— (2000). “Strategies of Causal Inference in Small-N Analysis,” Sociological Methods and Research 28: 387–424. Markoff, John (1996). The Abolition of Feudalism. Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Maynard, Douglas W. (2003). Bad News, Good News. Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mohr, John (1998). “Measuring Meaning Structures,” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 345–370.

44  Part II. Concepts and Observations ———, ed. (2000). “Relational Analysis and Institutional Meanings: Formal Models for the Study of Culture,” special issue of Poetics 27, nos. 2 & 3. Mohr, John W., and Roberto Franzosi, eds. (1997). “Special Double Issue on New Directions in Formalization and Historical Analysis,” Theory and Society 28, nos. 2 & 3. Monkkonen, Eric H., ed. (1994). Engaging the Past. The Uses of History Across the Social Sciences. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Munck, Gerardo L. (1998). “Canons of Research Design in Qualitative Analysis,” Studies in Comparative International Development 33: 18–45. Murmann, Johann Peter (2003). Knowledge and Competitive Advantage. The Coevolution of Firms, Technology, and National Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olzak, Susan (1989). “Analysis of Events in the Study of Collective Action,” Annual Review of Sociology 15: 119–141. ———. (1992). The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Padgett, John F., and Christopher K. Ansell (1993). “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434,” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1259–1319. Podolny, Joel (2003). “A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Symbols: A Sociologist’s View of the Economic Pursuit of Truth,” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 92: 169–174. Ragin, Charles C. (2000). Fuzzy-Set Social Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ragin, Charles C., and Howard S. Becker, eds. (1992). What Is a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roehner, Bertrand M., and Tony Syme (2002). Pattern and Repertoire in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roy, William G. (1997). Socializing Capital. The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rucht, Dieter, Ruud Koopmans, and Friedhelm Neidhardt, eds. (1998). Acts of Dissent. New Developments in the Study of Protest. Berlin: Sigma Rainer Bohn Verlag. Sawyer, R. Keith (2003). Group Creativity. Music, Theater, Collaboration. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schweitzer, R.A., and Charles Tilly (1982). “How London and its Conflicts Changed Shape, 1758–1834,” Historical Methods 5: 67–77 Shapiro, Gilbert, and John Markoff (1998). Revolutionary Demands. A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Shorter, Edward, and Charles Tilly (1974). Strikes in France, 1830–1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinberg, Marc W. (1999). Fighting Words. Working-Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Steinmetz, George (1993). Regulating the Social. The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. (1996). Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tilly, Charles (1961). “Occupational Rank and Grade of Residence in a Metropolis,” American Journal of Sociology 67: 323–330. ——— (1965). Migration to an American City. Newark, DE: Division of Urban Affairs and School of Agriculture, University of Delaware.

Chapter 3: Social Processes and Their Formal Representations  45 ——— (1968). “Race and Migration to the American City,” in James Q. Wilson, ed., The Metropolitan Enigma. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (1981). As Sociology Meets History. New York: Academic Press. ——— (1984). “Demographic Origins of the European Proletariat,” in David Levine, ed., Proletarianization and Family Life. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. ——— (1985). Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ——— (1987). “Formalization and Quantification in Historical Analysis,” in Konrad H. Jarausch and Wilhelm Schröder, eds., Quantitative History of Society and Economy: Some International Studies. St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag. ——— (1997). “Parliamentarization of Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834,” Theory and Society 26: 245–273. ——— (1995). Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (1997). “Means and Ends of Comparison in Macrosociology,” Comparative Social Research 16: 43–53. ——— (2001a). “Historical Analysis of Political Processes,” in Jonathan H. Turner, ed., Handbook of Sociological Theory. New York: Kluwer/Plenum. ——— (2001b). “Mechanisms in Political Processes,” Annual Review of Political Science 4: 21–41. ——— (2001c). “Historical Sociology” International Encyclopedia of the Behavioral and Social Sciences, Vol. 10. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 6753–6757. ——— (2002a). “Neuere angloamerikanische Sozialgeschichte,” in Günther Lottes and Joachim Eibach, eds., Kompass der Geschichtswissenschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ——— (2002b). “Event Catalogs as Theories,” Sociological Theory 20: 248–254. Tufte, Edward R. (1997). Visual Explanations. Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. Voss, Kim (1993). The Making of American Exceptionalism. The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wengraf, Tom (2000). “Uncovering the General from within the Particular. From Contingencies to Typologies in the Understanding of Cases,” in Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf, eds., The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science. Comparative Issues and Examples. London: Routledge. White, Harrison C. (2002). Markets from Networks. Socioeconomic Models of Production. Princeton: Princeton University Press. White, James W. (1995). Ikki. Social Conflict and Political Protest in Early Modern Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Source Note This chapter was published originally as “Observations of Social Processes and their Formal Representations,” Sociological Theory 22 (2004), 595–602.

Chapter 4

Event Catalogs as Theories A vivid memory returns from the Parisian Left Bank almost forty years later. On my little Olivetti portable, I type in my tiny, dim garret at the Centre Universitaire International, near the rue des Saints-Pères on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Squinting out of my small window into an interior courtyard, I see a spacious, brightly lit office, where secretaries, research assistants, and famous scholars scurry in and out. Behind a big desk sits Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Do I feel awe? No, I feel envy. Although I still live without secretaries, research assistants, and streams of important visitors, these days I work in a big, brightly lit office. Do I notice envy surrounding me? No, of course I assume that I have earned my comfort, and that other people recognize my just deserts. So, no doubt, did Lazarsfeld in those distant days. He had already, after all, exercised a large, salutary influence on how all of us understood, and sometimes even practiced, social research. With characteristic economy, Lazarsfeld once laid out his approach to proceeding from observation to explanation through measurement in four steps: 1. The original imagery, the intended classification, is put into words and communicated by examples; efforts at definition are made. 2. In the course of this verbalization, often called conceptual analysis, several indicators are mentioned, and these help to decide where a given concrete object (person or group or organization) belongs in regard to the new classificatory concept. As the discussion of the concept expands, the number of eligible indicators increases; the array of these I shall call the universe of indicators. 3. Usually this universe is very large, and for practical purposes we have to select a subset of indicators, which is then made the basis for empirical work. 4. Finally, we have to combine the indicators into some kind of index (Lazarsfeld 1959: 48). Lazarsfeld’s instructions convey a more eclectic view of explanation, a less demanding set of requirements for theoretically grounded priors, and a greater ­readiness to 46



Chapter 4: Event Catalogs as Theories  47

think of variance exhaustion as intellectual success than I would now like my students to take away from their educations. But as a declaration of how much creative theorizing actually goes into what people loosely call measurement, the text serves splendidly. In fact, no one—not even a Lazarsfeld—can pursue empirical social research effectively without deploying and testing two interdependent bodies of theory simultaneously: a theory embodying explanations of the phenomenon under investigation, and another theory embodying explanations of the evidence concerning that phenomenon. The two theories necessarily interact, but they stem from different “originating questions,” as Robert Merton (1959) called them: questions about certain phenomena and questions about the generation of knowledge concerning the same phenomena. The two theories inevitably have implications for each other; a theory concerning effects of associational participation on democracy necessarily interacts with a theory concerning how evidence of associational participation, democracy, and their connections comes into being. Each assertion about the effects of associational participation has implications for how and where we could detect those effects, but each assertion about how we might recognize such effects also has implications for the nature of the effects. Since social scientists have the habit of treating the first, but not the second, as Theory, let me concentrate on theories that embody explanation of the evidence concerning the phenomenon under investigation. I will illustrate my point from the creation of event catalogs as a means of social research, an activity in which I was already engaged when I looked down enviously at Paul Lazarsfeld’s little domain. Three questions clamor for attention: First, how does the phenomenon under investigation leave traces? Second, how can analysts elicit or observe those traces? Third, using those traces, how can analysts reconstruct specified attributes, elements, causes, or effects of the phenomenon? Event catalogs raise these questions emphatically because anyone who builds them worries unavoidably about problems of selectivity, reliability, verifiability, comparability, bounding, and inclusiveness. If compilers of event catalogs do not worry about these problems, their critics surely will. An event catalog is a set of descriptions of multiple social interactions collected from a delimited set of sources according to relatively uniform procedures. Historical demographers produce catalogs of events from religious or civil registration, thus typically taking baptisms, burials, and weddings to represent the births, deaths, and onsets of cohabitation about which their discipline actually reasons. They have no choice but to elaborate additional theories concerning unregistered births, deaths, and cohabitation; indeed, the powerful event-based historical procedure of family reconstitution concentrates on people who live in households and maintain fairly stable residences precisely to reduce the uncertainties surrounding registration of vital events involving mobile individuals (Willigan and Lynch 1982). Similarly, criminologists take recorded complaints, arrests, convictions, and incarcerations as evidence concerning crimes, with due warning about selectivity in all these regards and about the “dark figure” of crime (Hagan, Gillis, and ­Brownfield

48  Part II. Concepts and Observations 1996). Their self-conscious theorizing focuses on the generation of crime, but they cannot escape extensive theorizing about the processes by which crime leaves traces. Event catalogs also figure widely in life course reconstructions, international relations studies, treatments of industrial conflict, social mobility analyses, epidemiology, and a variety of other fields. In all those fields, interdependent theorizing about phenomena and evidence necessarily occurs. Here, however, I concentrate on a field in which event catalogs have become standard tools, and where an abundant literature comparing and criticizing alternative approaches to their construction has welled up: the study of contentious episodes. The very definition of contentious episodes raises precisely the sorts of conceptual and theoretical issues this chapter seeks to clarify. For the moment, nevertheless, it will do to identify a contentious episode as an interaction between at least two parties in the course of which at least one party makes claims that, if realized, would affect another party’s welfare. Demands, attacks, petitions, professions of support, and pleas for help all qualify. Following standard practice in the study of contentious episodes, let us narrow the focus to public, discontinuous, collective claim making where at least one government official figures as a participant or a third party—for example, as an absent object of claims. The narrowing spotlights politically relevant contentious episodes. Catalogs of politically relevant contentious episodes have sometimes singled out strikes, assassinations, terrorist attacks, riots, lynchings, petitions, meetings, or some broader category of events (see, e.g., Bohstedt 1983, Diani and Eyerman 1992, Franzosi 1995, 1998, Gerner et al. 1994, Hug and Wisler 1998, Mueller 1997, Oliver and Maney 2000, Oliver and Myers 1999, Rucht and Koopmans 1999, Rucht, Koopmans, and Meinhardt 1998). A minor industry has also grown up around the cataloging and analysis of political demonstrations (see, e.g., Favre, Fillieule, and Mayer 1997, McCarthy, McPhail, and Smith 1996, Tartakowsky 1997). Demonstrations lend themselves to uniform cataloging because within democratic polities they have acquired strikingly standard forms. Political activists in polities exiting from socialism, furthermore, have regularly adopted demonstrations as a means of pressing and publicizing their claims (see, e.g., Beissinger 2001, Mueller 1997, Oberschall 1994, Titarenko, McCarthy, McPhail, and Augustyn 2001). Students of democratic polities and of transitions from socialism have therefore used catalogs of demonstrations as evidence for change and variation in the actors and issues of popular politics. How did contentious event catalogs come into such widespread use? Neglecting an ample prehistory, let me tell a story of contentious episodes as an object of systematic research from George Rudé to Clark McPhail. In 1959, Rudé’s The Crowd in the French Revolution blazed a trail through political struggle for populist scholars in the overlapping areas of social science and history. They saw the possibility of organizing reports of popular struggles into systematic accounts of change and variation. They would amplify the voices of inarticulate masses. Over the intervening years, they learned how much uncertainty, selectivity, creativity, and interpretation entered into



Chapter 4: Event Catalogs as Theories  49

the ­recording of those voices. As a consequence, the usual procedures for collecting accounts, converting them into comparable records, analyzing their variation, and performing the four steps of Lazarsfeld’s methodological pavane all changed enormously (Olzak 1989). Practitioners of the art have, I think, improved on Rudé. The expansion and acceleration of computers made a huge difference. But at the same time collaboration and criticism among people who were drawing their information chiefly from archival material, chiefly from periodicals, and chiefly from interviews or observations raised the standards of detail and precision prevailing in the study of contentious episodes. When the second volume of Clark McPhail’s meticulous work on the subject appears, we will have not only a painstaking history of all those changes but also an exquisitely precise decomposition of contentious episodes into single, observable actions and interactions. No one imagined such systematic procedures at the start. Even McPhail’s summaries do not quite address, much less resolve, a muffled theoretical debate that persisted throughout the invention and adaptation of contentious event catalogs: just what were investigators measuring? Some scholars (e.g., Wells 1990) thought they were examining protest, frequently conceived of as an expression of popular consciousness. Event catalogs became a means of gathering evidence concerning the ideas and feelings of people who left few written records and fewer public declarations of their shared understandings. In this line of thought, disputes among scholars centered on the meanings of such interactions as seizures of grain, shaming ceremonies, and building occupations, not to mention relations between the orientations of people who actually participated in such interactions and the orientations of the majority who stayed away. Another definition of the problem became more prominent with American ghetto rebellions and student revolts of the 1960s. Specialists in event catalogs were all measuring collective violence (see, e.g., Button 1978, Conant and Levin 1969, Feagin and Hahn 1975, Fine 1989, Fogelson 1971, Graham and Gurr 1969, National Commission 1969, Thompson 2000). Such a definition brought its own perplexities: Since in the events at hand police and other specialists in armed force did so much of the wounding and killing, while other participants concentrated on attacking or seizing property, in what sense could anyone treat total damage as an expression of discontent, disorder, or any other general condition of the relevant social settings? Did it make any sense to equate different sorts of violence, then to sum them up into general indices? What about so-called “structural” violence, in which the damage done occurred indirectly, psychologically, morally, or over the long run rather than in the heat of conflict? We can imagine Paul Lazarsfeld impatiently throwing up his hands, or lighting up another cigar. Despite some fluctuation and overlap, advocates of event catalogs as measurements of protest and of violence both differed from a third theoretical cluster, students of collective action or conflict as a general phenomenon; in individualistic formulations, the fundamental phenomenon becomes collective action rather than conflict, while group-centered formulations typically shift to conflict as their object of explanation

50  Part II. Concepts and Observations (see, e.g., Boulding 1962, Burton 1997, Hardin 1995, Oberschall 1973, Olzak 1992, Schellenberg 1982, Schelling 1960). Once again, theoretically grounded divisions arose. To what extent does conflict ultimately reduce to motivated individual action, strategic interaction, or some other social process not explained by the rational calculations of individuals? Does neoclassical economics, properly specified or adapted, provide an adequate guide to the general explanation of conflict? Given the paucity and unreliability of evidence concerning mental processes in the course of conflict, what would constitute persuasive grounds for preferring one model of collective action or conflict over another? Again theories of measurement interact with theories of the phenomenon under study. A smaller fourth cluster of scholars eventually defected from the first three clusters, arguing that the general phenomenon registered by event catalogs was not protest, violence, collective action, or conflict, but contentious making of claims (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001, Imig and Tarrow 2001, Tarrow 1998). They came to see the elementary particle of that phenomenon as the interpersonal transaction, with transactions compounding into social relations in one direction, into interactive episodes in another direction. Members of this cluster have been backing away from definitions of their subject as protest or violence as they move into uneasy but fruitful alliances with self-styled analysts of collective action and conflict, who in recent times have themselves devoted increasing energy to the study of social settings, institutional changes, and interactive processes (see, e.g., Bates et al. 1998, Levi 1997, Levi and Stoker 2000, Lichbach 1995, Ostrom 1998). Still, members of the four clusters characteristically differ not only in their definitions of what event catalogs are measuring and what sorts of explanations make sense, but also in their practical employment of catalogs. Let us make rough distinctions among three ways of employing catalogs of events: aggregation, incidence, and internal regularity. As specialists often do for vital events, crimes, or strikes, analysts can aggregate counts or selected aspects of events—for example, fatalities—into overall measures for times, places, or social categories, then attempt to explain variation over time, place, or social category. Such a procedure makes some sense for definitions of the basic phenomenon as protest or violence, but rather less sense for ideas of collective action, conflict, or contention. Analysts can also study incidence; they can examine whether distinguishable features of the phenomenon measured by event catalogs co-vary with characteristics of settings, participants, or associated events. Incidence studies remain compatible with understandings of the basic phenomenon as protest, violence, collective action, conflict, or contentious claim making. But to the (large) extent that they lead to further understandings of the phenomena as multifarious rather than monolithic, they sit awkwardly with most attempts to gauge underlying levels of protest or to homogenize violence into a single entity. The search for internal regularities such as recurrent sequences or causal links among apparently separate events requires more sophisticated event catalogs than the simple counts that have often characterized political event analyses. For this purpose,



Chapter 4: Event Catalogs as Theories  51

it does not suffice to determine that more rebellions, sit-ins, strikes, assaults, assassinations, marches, petitions, or looting occurred in one time, place, or setting than another. Analysts have no choice but to break down and recombine narratives of episodes and descriptions of their settings into elements that analysts can then reassemble into representations of the associations or causal connections they have theorized. We reach an interesting moment in the history of catalogs prepared for contentious episodes. As analysts of various theoretical persuasions turn away from studies of aggregation and incidence toward treatment of internal regularities, they arrive at an ontological divide: choices among alternative units of observation become assertions about what exists. Some event catalogers assume, however implicitly, that they are cataloging individual decisions and their consequences in individual behavior. Others remain agnostic about cognitive and emotional processes, insisting on close recording of individual behavior. Some insist that the elementary units consist of interpersonal transactions. A declining number, finally, assume that events as such follow coherent logics: strikes, demonstrations, revolutions, rebellions, riots, and other kinds of contentious episodes each have distinctive recurrent properties. Because construction of event catalogs in any of these forms commonly requires extensive, technically demanding work, of course, many analysts of different theoretical persuasions will continue to borrow whatever data come to hand, bridging the gap between ontology and evidence with well-crafted stories and interpretations. Little by little, nevertheless, the increasing availability of event catalogs that follow connection and variation within events (however conceived by their originators) will almost certainly reduce the popularity of “protest” and “violence” as answers to the question “Exactly what are you studying?” Thus theories of the phenomenon at hand and theories of measurement continue to influence each other. Need I belabor the point? Throughout the history this brief report has traced, assemblers and users of event catalogs have inevitably been supplying answers, however implicit, to the three questions with which we began: How does the phenomenon under investigation leave traces? How can analysts elicit or observe those traces? Using those traces, how can analysts reconstruct specified elements, causes, or effects of the phenomenon? Interweaving with deep theoretical disputes over the character, causes, and effects of protest, violence, conflict, and contentious claim making we have witnessed partly independent but equally theoretical disputes concerning the measurement process itself. In this field, at least, measurement embodies theory, and poses a distinctive set of theoretical challenges.

References Bates, Robert H., et al. (1998). Analytical Narratives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beissinger, Mark (2001). Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

52  Part II. Concepts and Observations Bohstedt, John (1983). Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boulding, Kenneth E. (1962). Conflict and Defense: A General Theory. New York: Harper. Burton, John W. (1997). Violence Explained. The Sources of Conflict, Violence and Crime and their Prevention. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Button, James W. (1978). Black Violence. Political Impact of the 1960s Riots. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Conant, Ralph W., and Molly Apple Levin, eds. (1969). Problems in Research on Community Violence. New York: Praeger. Diani, Mario, and Ron Eyerman, eds. (1992). Studying Collective Action. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Favre, Pierre, Olivier Fillieule, and Nonna Mayer (1997). “La fin d’une étrange lacune de la sociologie des mobilisations. L’étude par sondage des manifestants. Fondements théoriques et solutions techniques,” Revue Française de Science Politique 47: 3–28. Feagin, Joe R., and Harlan Hahn (1975). Ghetto Revolts. The Politics of Violence in American Cities. New York: Macmillan. Fine, Sidney (1989). Violence in the Model City. The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Fogelson, Robert M. (1971). Violence as Protest. A Study of Riots and Ghettos. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co. Franzosi, Roberto (1995). The Puzzle of Strikes. Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1998). “Narrative as Data: Linguistic and Statistical Tools for the Quantitative Study of Historical Events,” International Review of Social History 43, Supplement 6: New Methods for Social History, 81–104. Gerner, Deborah J., et al. (1994). “Machine Coding of Event Data Using Regional and International Sources,” International Studies Quarterly 38: 91–119. Graham, Hugh Davis, and Ted Robert Gurr, eds. (1969). Violence in America. Historical and Comparative Perspectives. New York: New American Library. Hagan, John, A.R. Gillis, and David Brownfield (1996). Criminological Controversies. A Methodological Primer. Boulder, CO: Westview. Hardin, Russell (1995). One for All. The Logic of Group Conflict. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hug, Simon, and Dominique Wisler (1998). “Correcting for Selection Bias in Social Movement Research,” Mobilization 3: 141–162. Imig, Doug, and Sidney Tarrow, eds. (2001). Contentious Europeans. Protest and Politics in an Emerging Polity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lazarsfeld, Paul F. (1959). “Problems in Methodology,” in Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., eds., Sociology Today. Problems and Prospects. New York: Basic Books. Levi, Margaret (1997). Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levi, Margaret, and Laura Stoker (2000). “Political Trust and Trustworthiness,” Annual Review of Political Science 3: 475–508. Lichbach, Mark Irving (1995). The Rebel’s Dilemma. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.



Chapter 4: Event Catalogs as Theories  53

McAdam, Doug, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly (2001). Dynamics of Contention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, John D., Clark McPhail, and Jackie Smith (1996). “Images of Protest: Estimating Selection Bias in Media Coverage of Washington Demonstrations 1982 and 1991,” American Sociological Review 61: 478–499. McPhail, Clark (1991). The Myth of the Madding Crowd. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. ——— (2001): “Beyond the Madding Crowd,” book manuscript in progress, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Merton, Robert K. (1959). “Notes on Problem-Finding in Sociology,” in Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., eds., Sociology Today. Problems and Prospects. New York: Basic Books. Mueller, Carol (1997). “International Press Coverage of East German Protest Events, 1989,” American Sociological Review 62: 819–832. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (1969). To Establish Justice, to Insure Domestic Tranquility. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Oberschall, Anthony (1973). Social Conflict and Social Movements. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ——— (1994): “Protest Demonstrations and the End of Communist Regimes in 1989,” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 17: 1–24. Oliver, Pamela A., and Gregory M. Maney (2000). “Political Processes and Local News­paper Coverage of Protest Events: From Selection Bias to Triadic Interactions,” American Journal of Sociology 106: 463–505. Oliver, Pamela E., and Daniel J. Myers (1999). “How Events Enter the Public Sphere: Conflict, Location, and Sponsorship in Local Newspaper Coverage of Public Events,” American Journal of Sociology 105: 38–87. Olzak, Susan (1989). “Analysis of Events in the Study of Collective Action,” Annual Review of Sociology 15: 119–141. ——— (1992). The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ostrom, Elinor (1998). “A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action,” American Political Science Review 92: 1–22. Rucht, Dieter, and Ruud Koopmans, eds. (1999). “Protest Event Analysis,” Mobilization 4, no. 2, entire issue. Rucht, Dieter, Ruud Koopmans, and Friedhelm Neidhardt, eds. (1998). Acts of Dissent. New Developments in the Study of Protest. Berlin: Sigma Rainer Bohn Verlag. Rudé, George (1959). The Crowd in the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schellenberg, James A. (1982). The Science of Conflict. New York: Oxford University Press. Schelling, T.C. (1960). The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tarrow, Sidney (1998). Power in Movement. Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2nd edn. Tartakowsky, Danielle (1997). Les Manifestations de rue en France, 1918–1968. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Thompson, Heather Ann (2000). “Understanding Rioting in Postwar Urban America,” Journal of Urban History 26: 391–402. Titarenko, Larissa, John D. McCarthy, Clark McPhail, and Boguslaw Augustyn (2001).

54  Part II. Concepts and Observations “The Interaction of State Repression, Protest Form and Protest Sponsor Strength ­During the Transition from Communism in Minsk, Belarus, 1990–1995,” Mobilization 6: 129–150. Wells, Roger A.E. (1990). “Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness, in the English Countryside, 1700–1880,” in Mick Reed and Roger Wells, eds., Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside, 1700–1880. London: Frank Cass. Willigan, J. Dennis, and Katherine A. Lynch (1982). Sources and Methods of Historical Demography. New York: Academic Press.

Source Note This chapter was originally published as “Event Catalogs as Theories,” Sociological Theory 20 (2002), 248–254.

Chapter 5

Iron City Blues Pittsburgh, the Iron City, gives me the blues. Cleaner and quieter than when tall smokestacks filled its valleys with yellow-brown haze, the city now stands as a nostalgic reminder of salty politicians, tough tycoons, rough mill workers, and fixed capital. Such heavy industrial cities of another age inspired the bottom-up social history of my youth, with its reductive assignment of interests, organization, and action to whole categories of people—not only social classes, but also neighborhoods, religious affiliations, and citizens at large. That sort of categorical history by no means excluded attention to leaders, personal influence, and mobilization processes. However great its simplifications and reifications, in fact, it reeked of individual and collective agency. Whence my tempered nostalgia for the Iron City. S.N. Eisenstadt has a very different vision of historical processes. Except for autonomous intellectuals, few efficacious individuals and categories figure in his accounts. In general, his consequential actors are civilizations and societies. Civilizations and societies react to changes besetting them from inside and outside, thus transforming the lives of people who inhabit those civilizations and societies. The trope is familiar, but its logic is not self-evident. Anyone who proposes to make civilizations and societies major actors in human history must at a minimum provide visibly viable identifications of three elements:

• boundaries separating each such unit and its member population from other such units and their populations • distinctive culture—shared understandings and their representations in objects and practices, operating within those boundaries and throughout their extent • self-regulating processes—likewise within those boundaries and throughout their extent

These elements need not be absolute. Boundaries may consist of interstitial zones rather than sharp lines, cultural affinities and exchanges may connect adjacent 55

56  Part II. Concepts and Observations units, self-regulating processes may leave some people, places, or activities within the b­ oundaries untouched, and so on. Nevertheless, to the extent that proposed units lack any of the three elements, describing and explaining social life in terms of civilizations and societies introduces more confusion than comprehension. Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution has many virtues, but with respect to the three crucial elements it sows confusion. Across a long career inspired by a Weberian vision of comparative history, S.N. Eisenstadt has repeatedly tried to pack large-scale social phenomena such as imperial expansion and revolution into self-contained civilizations and societies, explaining those phenomena chiefly as responses to problems and tensions originating within the same civilizations and societies. When he first attracted international attention with his magisterial Political Systems of Empires, that line of argument belonged to a widely practiced genre. Pitirim Sorokin, Talcott Parsons, and Arnold Toynbee had all recently published widely read schematic comparative histories, translations of Max Weber’s historical comparisons were proceeding apace, and Karl Marx’s historicalcomparative writings were likewise receiving an English-language airing. Since then, historians and social scientists have become more skeptical about the autonomy and priority of societies and civilizations. From one side, world historians have challenged the self-containment and self-regulation of such social units. From the other, proponents of microfoundations and analysts of such cross-cutting social processes as migration and technological diffusion have raised doubts about societal and civilizational explanations of social phenomena. While occasionally gesturing toward the gathering dissent, however, Eisenstadt has continued to practice large-scale comparative history on the assumption that societies and civilizations do, indeed, constitute distinct, self-regulating units. Eisenstadt does not shrink from large topics. In addition to his work on empires, he has produced influential books on modernization, European civilization, Jewish civilization, revolutions, inequality, immigration, protest movements, and a half dozen other major subjects. He moves comfortably among philosophy, religion, intellectual history, political theory, and contemporary social processes. While drawing on an enormous range of knowledge, he refrains from daunting readers with his erudition. He never stops thinking—and writing—about important issues. In Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution, Eisenstadt concentrates on twentieth-century mobilizations against modernism within Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. Far from constituting atavistic affirmations of older traditions, he argues, the fundamentalist and sectarian movements in question emerge directly from tensions of modernization. Indeed, they promote a search for transcendental utopias as escapes from modernity. They adopt, furthermore, Jacobin programs characterized by a strong emphasis on social and cultural activism; on the ability of man to reconstruct society according to some transcendental visions; with the closely connected strong tendency to the absolutization of the major dimensions of human experience as well



Chapter 5: Iron City Blues  57 as of the major constituents or components of social order; and with the concomitant ideologization of politics. (Eisenstadt 1999: 73)

Eisenstadt distinguishes among three varieties of reactive sectarianism: protofundamentalist, fundamentalist, and communal-national. How do the three differ? Proto-fundamentalist reactions pursued utopian hopes to restore pristine features of their religious traditions. Arising chiefly in monotheistic civilizations before the modern era, they resembled their modern counterparts in strident rejection of established practices, but lacked the Jacobin urge to reconstruct state, society, and individual through political means. Modern fundamentalism adds just such political programs to utopian ideals. Fundamentalism’s Jacobin programs enlist tight discipline, modern communications, and modern discourse on behalf of reactionary objectives. Social movements translate those programs into political action. Communal-national movements, according to Eisenstadt, differ from both protofundamentalist and fundamentalist mobilizations in being both particularistic and primordial; instead of declaring a universal vision available in principle to all humanity, they stress the eternal uniqueness of their own communities. They resemble fundamentalist movements, nevertheless, in combining tight discipline, efficient communications, modern discourse, and organization in the style of secular social movements. Eisenstadt goes on at length about general features of his categories, but offers little sustained evidence in the form of case histories or specific comparisons. Only two concrete examples of movements occupy more than a page at a stretch anywhere in the book: Israeli ultra-Orthodox sects and India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Neither treatment does much more than assimilate the case to Eisenstadt’s categories. Instead of offering his own descriptions and explanations of particular cases, furthermore, Eisenstadt often identifies families of movements, then relies for their characterization on extensive quotations from other people’s summaries. He offers, for example, a roughly 700-word extract from Nilufer Gîle’s treatment of Turkish Islamic fundamentalism (Eisenstadt 1999: 104–105), followed by a 1,000-word extract from the same source (Eisenstadt 1999: 143–145). Eisenstadt’s own extended descriptions do not concern particular movements (or, for that matter, whole civilizations) but national histories, notably those of Japan, India, and the United States. Japan, furthermore, serves chiefly as a negative case: a modernizing country in which neither fundamentalism nor communal-national movements have had much impact. Nor does Eisenstadt support his arguments with sustained comparisons of Japan, India, and the United States. In short, the book centers on an illustrated typology and a set of general assertions concerning relations between modernization and the emergence of organized alternatives to modernity. Eisenstadt develops his argument with hardly a reference to abundant literatures that deal concretely with his subject matter—most obviously literatures on nationalism, social movements, and ethnic conflict. His bibliography omits Benedict­

58  Part II. Concepts and Observations ­ nderson, Rogers Brubaker, Ted Gurr, Ernst Haas, Donald Horowitz, Sudhir Kakar, A Hanspeter Kriesi, David Laitin, Gérard Noiriel, Beth Roy, Anthony Smith, and Alain Touraine. Although Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm do appear in citations, their books on nationalism do not. The bibliography does include scattered publications on contemporary social movements, but they have had little apparent impact on Eisenstadt’s analysis. As represented by footnotes and bibliography, Eisenstadt’s published sources concentrate on religion, revolution, national histories, and social change in general. That selective approach to relevant literature allows him to ignore the prevalent constructivist and entrepreneurial emphases of recent work on nationalism, the current dominance of political process approaches to social movements, and the antiprimordialism of most contemporary specialists in ethnic conflict. Eisenstadt sees modernization as a creation of Western civilization, which he identifies mainly with Europe and the United States. Modernization, in his view, involved the spread of three interdependent complexes: 1) transformation of social relations by urbanization, industrialization, communications growth, structural differentiation, and other changes documented by students of social development, including Eisenstadt himself, following World War II; 2) “new institutional formations, of the modern nation-state, of modern especially national collectivities, of new and above all capitalist-political economies” (Eisenstadt 1999: 197); and 3) a cultural program centering on perfection of humanity by means of knowledge applied to social arrangements. Unlike many previous analysts of modernization, Eisenstadt neither treats the cultural program as a response to the first two sets of changes nor claims that stress generated by those changes promoted reactionary movements. (At the book’s very end, he inserts those standard explanations into his summary statement, but they play almost no part in the dense discussions of the previous two hundred pages.) Instead, he locates the crucial causes within the cultural program itself. Eisenstadt asserts two sorts of “tensions”: between the modernist cultural program and previously established traditions of the various countries that adopted it, on one side, and between contradictory elements of the program itself. Among the latter he cites:

• • • • • • • • • •

pluralistic vs. totalizing (i.e., Jacobin) approaches to transformation normal vs. revolutionary politics reflexivity vs. active construction of nature and society autonomy vs. control reconstruction of self vs. reconstruction of society liberty vs. equality autonomy of civil society vs. charismatization of state power civil vs. utopian components of the cultural and political program freedom vs. utopian emancipation procedural vs. charismatic legitimation (Eisenstadt 1999: 199)



Chapter 5: Iron City Blues  59

Roughly speaking, the dichotomies pit liberal against extremist programs. Fundamentalism and communal-national movements, in this perspective, reject liberalism in favor of extremism. Under what conditions, how, and why they do so set the book’s central problems. Eisenstadt’s proposed solutions to those problems, alas, take excessively abstract forms. In general, Eisenstadt avoids causal language. Elements and processes are “closely related” or are “shaped by” some list of factors, but their causal priorities and mechanisms remain unclear. As a consequence, readers must work the cause-effect relations out for themselves. The sketchiness of Eisenstadt’s illustrative cases and the opacity of his explanatory passages make the effort risky. Let me nevertheless try to summarize Eisenstadt’s argument as a causal story, suppressing qualms and questions about the story as it unfolds. Civilizations operate as weak systems, sustaining distinctive values and beliefs but not otherwise controlling the lives of people within them. Because of cultural affinities, innovations in values, beliefs, and practices enacting those values and beliefs diffuse more easily within civilizations than across them. The spread of modernity is simply a special case of that diffusion. Societies operate as strong systems, exerting extensive control over people, activities, and resources within their limits. At the level of societies, institutionalized values, beliefs, and practices significantly constrain social action. Modern societies create widespread commitments to transform and improve social life through centrally coordinated intervention. But mass pursuit of those commitments uncovers cultural contradictions. When contradictions become visible, the story continues, intellectual entrepreneurs divide. Some choose one programmatic alternative, others espouse a second alternative, and still others devise new possibilities within limits set by the society’s broadest commitments. Intellectual entrepreneurs vary considerably in their success, but some attract substantial followings, or social movements. Thus competing movements form around alternative cultural programs, and their followers struggle for power to implement those programs. Where the values and beliefs of modernity have spread widely, runs the argument, some of those alternative cultural programs take the form of fundamentalism, which shares the end of social transformation but rejects the means of existing secular institutions. Where age-old solidarities have survived the onslaught of modernity, alternative cultural programs more often take the form of communal-national movements, which reject modernity’s universalism in favor of primordial particularism. Would Eisenstadt endorse this summary? I’m not sure. But it makes most of his detailed argumentation consistent, if not necessarily persuasive. Eisenstadt falls far short of providing sufficient evidence to establish such an argument. But is it plausible in the light of already available evidence? Let us divide the question in two: How well does the general explanatory strategy hold up? Whatever the general strategy, does the analysis help explain contemporary extremist mobilizations? My answer to the first part is: badly. My answer to the second: the book’s descriptions and explanations do

60  Part II. Concepts and Observations not go far enough to revise existing understandings of their subject matter, but they suggest lines of inquiry that deserve further attention. On the general strategy, consider the essential elements of civilizational and societal explanations: boundaries, distinctive culture, and self-regulating processes. Eisenstadt identifies civilizations with cosmologies, especially those of ancient Israel, Second Commonwealth Judaism, Christianity, ancient Greece, Persian Zoroastrianism, early imperial China, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Despite deploying the language of center and periphery, he proposes no criteria whatsoever for bounding such civilizations. He does not even say whether he regards them as territorially continuous or organizationally connected. He thereby sidesteps the problems of diasporas and enclaves—in or out? Not a promising start. As for societies, Eisenstadt generally accepts the geographical boundaries of states and empires. His explicitly mentioned societies include not only Japan, India, and the United States, but also Afghanistan, Algeria, Australia, Burma, Canada, China (a civilization-sized society), Egypt, England, France, Guinea, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Ivory Coast, Jordan, Kenya, Korea, Malaysia, Mali, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Roman Empire, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Soviet Union, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, and Vietnam. Regions such as Latin America and “tribes” such as Mongols occupy uncertain positions in Eisenstadt’s taxonomy. As recognized polities, of course, these entities did or do exist. As candidates for autonomous, self-regulating systems, however, they stretch credibility. In any case, Eisenstadt makes no effort to establish their qualifications as coherent units that commit themselves collectively to cultural programs, whether modern or antimodern. Thus he lays down enormous barriers to verification or falsification of his most general arguments. What of distinctive culture? Eisenstadt makes a deep commitment to cosmological or ontological determinism: the “basic premise” of any civilization underlies and permeates its collective life. Presumably one could support such a commitment by means of three demonstrations. First, one might show that within ostensibly unconnected segments of a given civilization or society the same understandings and practices prevail. Second, one might demonstrate that as innovations appear from inside or outside the social unit a strong selection process occurs, such that only innovations compatible with the basic premise flourish while others never take hold. Third, one might offer evidence that on those rare occasions when basic premises do change, alterations occur rapidly within each segment of the civilization or society. Eisenstadt directs no effort toward any of the three demonstrations. His failure to set out criteria for boundaries, furthermore, compounds the difficulty of verifying or falsifying his claims about the influence of ontological premises. Nor does the book offer much help with self-regulating processes. The one program-generating mechanism Eisenstadt does specify—the formulation of new programs by dissident and autonomous intellectuals—does not look in the least like a self-regulating process. On the contrary, it harks back to Max Weber’s idea



Chapter 5: Iron City Blues  61

of charisma’s unpredictable irruption into history. Nor does Eisenstadt’s portrayal of governmental action bespeak much self-regulation; when governments appear in his accounts, they are almost always divided and engaged in struggle. We might try to salvage self-regulation by retrieving the old Toynbee-Sorokin idea of dominant cultural patterns whose possibilities members of a society or civilization eventually use up, whereupon the unit either collapses or renews itself. Despite beginning with ontological premises, however, Eisenstadt does not follow that dubious path. When it comes to general explanatory strategies, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution has little to recommend it. As a source of concrete insights, hypotheses, facts, and unexpected parallels, the book offers a mixed bag. Its accounts of fundamentalism and nationalism suffer from a neglect of politics. The book ignores, for example, the regularity with which Western rulers from 1789 onward imposed state-sanctioned cultural standards, including national languages, on their subject populations, thus generating resistance and rebellion in the names of culturally distinct minorities. Despite passing references to such leaders as Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Mahatma Gandhi, and Ruholla Khomeini, the national studies say little about how cultural entrepreneurs actually do their work. Given the bad name François Furet and other French Revolution revisionists have bestowed on the Jacobins, Eisenstadt might have chosen a less loaded term for the programs that he rejects. Yet Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution does rightly deconstruct the claims of fundamentalists and communal-national activists to forsake today’s corruption and retrieve an earlier, purer way of life. It does correctly deny the common portrayal of fundamentalism and communal nationalism as atavism. It does shrewdly point out the extent to which successful leaders of such movements borrow the techniques and organizational forms of the very politics they deplore. Hence my advice for reading the book: blow up the ungainly conceptual apparatus, then mine the text for gems amid the rubble.

References Eisenstadt, S.N. (1963). The Political Systems of Empires. The Rise and Fall of the Historical Bureaucratic Societies. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. ——— (1999). Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution. The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Source Note This chapter was originally published as “Iron City Blues,” History and Theory 40 (2001), 128–134.

Chapter 6

Why Read the Cl assics? “Who cares,” I once heard George Homans groan, “what old Durkheim said?” With these words, Homans disrupted a recurrent departmental discussion about the place of sociological theory in the curriculum. Despite his interest in English villagers of the thirteenth century, what counted for Homans was today’s ideas and evidence, not yesterday’s. His vivid, livid roar represented one corner of a triangle. From Homans’s angle, we should banish the classics because the whole point of social science is to get on with the matching of ideas and evidence, thereby leaving old, inferior ideas behind. From a second angle, the classics matter profoundly because they pose problems and point to possible solutions of those problems in ways that incremental investigations can never manage. Yet from a third angle, sociological classics take their places as puny parodies of such giants as Aristotle and Montesquieu; why should we prefer Tönnies to Thucydides? Having set up not one but three straw men—one per angle—let me burn each of them to make space for a less flammable figure: a case for classics not as objects of veneration or as manuals for research but as available sources of justification for contemporary arguments. To put it another way, classics state crucial questions, not perennial answers. Before proceeding to that claim, let’s torch the straw men:

• Can we leave the classics behind so easily? Homans’s groan actually disguised the extent to which his own work relied on a utilitarian tradition reaching back to John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. • Must we read the classics because they dig deeper than today’s analyses? Claims for the classics’ greater profundity assume that classic authors’ successors failed to incorporate classic insights into self-correcting research programs. • Should we abandon sociological landmarks in favor of literary, philosophical, and historical classics? Dismissal of the sociological classics as lesser intellectual endeavors denies the desirability or feasibility of cumulative research programs with regard to human affairs. 62



Chapter 6: Why Read the Classics?  63

Just as Bach and Mozart continue to inspire today’s composers without providing precise templates for contemporary compositions, sociological classics remain available as alternative statements of the questions that today’s sociologists can fruitfully pursue. (By “fruitfully,” I mean in ways that produce cumulative, verifiable knowledge.) Karl Marx asked, among other things, how unequal social transactions compound into large, changing systems of exploitation. Max Weber asked, among other things, what produces contrasting modes of domination and the beliefs that support them. John Stuart Mill asked, among other things, what social conditions and processes favor political equality at a national scale. Such classics addressed problems that continue to concern analysts of social processes: how and why large-scale changes in social relations occur, what connects individual experience with massive social phenomena, where powerful new ideas come from, and so on. Classics thus serve as visible, viable justifications for what might otherwise seem trivial, obscure, or idiosyncratic inquiries. They allow investigators to declare, “Look, I’m addressing an old, important question in a new way.” Indeed, new classics join the old standards precisely when they state pressing, fruitful questions the older agenda did not quite articulate. Pivotal works of Robert Park, Erving Goffman, and Pierre Bourdieu come to mind. For that purpose, neither Aristotle nor Montesquieu will do. To be sure, established questions vary in their fruitfulness. Despite a century of effort, for example, sociologists have not much advanced our answers to the standard nineteenth-century question “What drives social change in general?” The question invokes a dubious entity—social change—while pointing toward unlikely, unverifiable general answers. It has not turned out to be fruitful. In contrast, the question “How, when, and why does industrialization occur?” has motivated a cumulative set of inquiries that have produced no monolithic reply but a set of specifications, descriptions, and explanations improving significantly on their nineteenth-century predecessors. In seeking justifications for their current work, investigators should choose their classics with care. How and why does justification matter? It matters in two essential ways. First, it commits researchers, theorists, and synthesizers to a cumulative project: identifying superior answers to the questions at hand. It thereby imports, however subtly, standards of verification, falsification, and valuation for arguments and evidence. Second, justification marks the relation between speaker and audience, identifying the conversation in which they are engaged. Participants pay the price of learning which questions do or don’t belong to the conversation, and in what languages they can address those questions intelligibly. Better yet, the classics offer convenient ways of distinguishing one mode of question raising from another. Identifying an inquiry with Ferdinand Tönnies does not necessarily commit a contemporary analyst to accept a general societal movement from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, but it does distinguish the question raising at hand from an inquiry inspired by Karl Marx. We heirs of the classics therefore enjoy the luxury of pitting one line of questioning against another either to clarify what we

64  Part II. Concepts and Observations are and aren’t about or to see whether some synthesis produces more valuable results than either line pursued alone. Three pairs of explanatory cartoons illustrate the argument. For explanations of inequality, we can compare caricatures of Karl Marx and Max Weber. For democratization and de-democratization, we can compare John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. For identity change, why not contrast Émile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead? In cartoon form, a Marxist account of inequality begins with negotiated relations at the point of material production. As Marxists, we ask how relations of production generate unequal returns that become bases of inequality across other spheres of social life. We need not accept Marx’s own enumeration of successive modes of production—feudal, capitalist, socialist, and so on—to draw inspiration from Das Kapital. A cartoon of Weber singles out three partly independent arenas: a social order in which honor serves as the denominator, a market in which purchasing power serves as the denominator, and a political order in which coercive capacity serves as the denominator. To ask questions in a Weberian vein, we need not accept Weber’s own account of how relations of people to the three arenas sometimes crystallize into status groups, classes, and parties. Justification? Appeal to Marx commits an analyst at least to focus on unequal social relations, their dynamics, and their consequences. It calls up an approach to evidence in which changes of social interactions and material conditions figure more centrally than shifts in expressed attitudes. It brings its speaker into a conversation featuring such terms as exploitation, resistance, and struggle. Appeal to Weber commits an analyst at least to differentiate multiple bases and sites of inequality, to give structural position priority over negotiated relations, and to regard historically accumulated culture as exerting a significant independent influence on individual and collective striving. Neither line in itself entails definitive verifiable propositions concerning observed social processes. Both lay out ways of posing and answering questions about inequality. At the level of inquiry, they compete. By democratization and de-democratization, let us mean simply any set of political arrangements’ moves toward or away from equal rights, obligations, and protections for all participants. Mill and Tocqueville propose competing ways not only of answering, but also of asking, questions about causes of democratization and de-democratization. Mill asks what conditions place restraints on rulers such that the action of those rulers provides protection (including protection from arbitrary governmental intervention) for all of the ruled. His familiar answers include private property, competitive markets, and a politically autonomous public realm. But his questions concern causes of changes in these underlying conditions as well as their consequences for the behavior of rulers. A cartoon Tocqueville resembles a cartoon Mill in some regards, since both give importance to the social environment within which governments operate; indeed Mill adapted some of his ideas from Tocqueville. But Tocqueville’s questionnaire



Chapter 6: Why Read the Classics?  65

differs from Mill’s in assigning much more prominence to the centralization or decentralization of political institutions, proliferation of independent associations, and relations of different social classes to each other and to governments. Justification of an inquiry into democratization and de-democratization by appeal to Mill authorizes a search for the rise and fall of checks on governmental autonomy, while an appeal to Tocqueville authorizes more extensive investigation of interpersonal and intergroup relations outside the zone of government. By “identity,” let us mean individual and collective answers to the questions “Who are you?” “Who are they?” and “Who are we?” Émile Durkheim tied identity in this sense closely to the character and extent of societal differentiation. Mechanistic solidarity (characteristic of relatively homogeneous societies) produced deeply different identities from organic solidarity (characteristic of highly differentiated societies). A Durkheimian inquiry into identity therefore concentrates on the overall organization of society, variable connections of individuals to that organization, and resulting variations in individual consciousness. George Herbert Mead, in contrast, gave little attention to the overall organization of society. Instead he distinguished the “I” of individual experience from the “me” of negotiated relations to others. Negotiated relations to others constitute social identities for Mead. Whereas a Durkheimian pursues identity changes by examining alterations in general societal conditions, a Meadian emphasizes relational dynamics. Justification of current inquiries by reference to the classics leads to different ways of posing and answering questions. It matters little for present purposes that I personally prefer Marx to Weber, Tocqueville to Mill, and Mead to Durkheim. What matters is the way that the classics, however contestable their own answers, identify distinctive, crucial, durable queries concerning social processes.

Source Note “Why Read the Classics?” is an unpublished paper presented to a session on the value of classical sociological theory, American Sociological Association annual meeting, Atlanta, Georgia, 18 August 2003. 

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Part III Explanations and Comparisons

Chapter 7

To Expl ain Political Processes Asked to explain particular instances of vigilante violence, social movements, citizenship, wars, nationalism, or transformation of states, social scientists search almost instinctively for general, invariant models of those phenomena to which they can assimilate the cases at hand. Reflecting on why the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies so surprised Western analysts, social scientists and historians immediately wonder: Into what general category of recurrent events should they have put the Eastern European experience of the 1980s? Does it belong to revolution, nationalism, democratization, political modernization, imperial disintegration, or something quite different? Social scientists suppose that if they had recognized the category when the process began they would have been able to predict its outcome. S.N. Eisenstadt (1992: 21), for example, places the breakdowns of communist regimes in parallel with other revolutions: “Are these revolutions ‘great revolutions’—the English civil war, the American, French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions—which in many ways ushered in modernity and created the modern political order? Are they likely to lead—after a possibly turbulent period of transition—to a relatively stable world of modernity, with liberal constitutionalism heralding some kind of ‘end of history’? Or do they tell us something of the vicissitudes and fragilities of modernity, even of democratic-constitutional regimes”? Eisenstadt replies that some part of each of these questions is true. The Eastern European transitions qualify as revolutions, he says, but unlike their predecessors they set their faces against, rather than for, modernity. In the very process of identifying differences, Eisenstadt reinforces the idea that a useful model of revolution specifies similarities, invariant general processes. There he joins the majority of other analysts. As Eisenstadt does, moreover, social scientists usually assume that the processes in question occur within self-contained social units—societies, states, aggrieved populations, or something of the sort—in a self-propelled way. They assume coherent, durable monads rather than contingent, transitory connections among socially constructed identities. We can hardly blame them for it; we veterans taught them 68



Chapter 7: To Explain Political Processes  69

to do it in graduate school, because that is also what we learned to do in graduate school years earlier. We learned and in turn taught a practice of this sort: 1) assume a coherent, durable, self-propelling social unit; 2) attribute a general condition or process to that unit; 3) invoke or invent an invariant model of that condition or process; 4) explain the behavior of the unit on the basis of its conformity to that invariant model. The most egregious examples of invariant thinking appear in comparative­historical analyses where nations, states, or societies serve as the objects of comparison. Even methodological individualists frequently follow the same logic, albeit on a smaller scale. They model the necessary or sufficient conditions under which a rational decision maker (or, in other versions, the follower of a unitary vision, illusion, or impulse) would take steps to create a state, start a war, rebel, secede, vote, join a social movement, or carry on some other well-defined political performance. Similar reasoning appears frequently in studies of nationalism, democratization, the disintegration of empires, social movements, transformations of states, wars, revolutions, and other large-scale political phenomena. In the case of nationalism, available theories range from primordialist to constructivist, from realist to subjectivist, but a surprising proportion of them claim not to account for the variable degrees or qualities of nationalism but to place most or all nationalisms in the same box (for convenient surveys, see Anderson 1991, Comaroff and Stern 1993, Connor 1987, Feschbach 1987, Gellner 1983, Haas 1986, Hobsbawm 1990, Kearney 1991, Lerner 1991, Lowi 1992, Lowy 1989, Segal 1988, Williams 1989). The study of social movements offers more promising recent trends, since a number of scholars have taken to relating variation in the organization of movements systematically to differences and fluctuations in political opportunity structure (e.g., Duyvendak 1994, Giugni and Kriesi 1990, Koopmans 1993, Kriesi 1993, Tarrow 1993). Yet even in this area much theorizing has proceeded as if all social movements fell into just two internally homogeneous categories: old and new (Cohen 1985, Diani 1992, Eyerman and Jamison 1991, Mayer 1991, Melucci 1985, 1989). In analyses of democratization and state formation, similar simplifications prevail (for surveys, see Alker 1992, Barkey and Parikh 1991, Bratton 1989, Caporaso 1989, Dahl 1989, Diamond and Marks 1992, Di Palma 1990, Gurr 1988, Gurr, Jaggers, and Moore 1990, Hall and Ikenberry 1989, Held 1987, Kirby and Ward 1991, Krasner 1984, Lee 1988, Mann 1990, Mitchell 1991, O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986, Poggi 1990, Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992, Schmitter and Karl 1991). Most and Starr have long since offered the same kind of complaint about studies of war (1983; see also Levy 1989, Starr 1994). In short, invariant models concerning self-motivating social units continue to wind like honeysuckle through the study of large-scale political processes. If examined closely, the standard practice makes little sense. Coherent, durable, self-propelling social units—monads—occupy a great deal of political theory but none of political reality. Ostensible general conditions such as revolution, nationalism, or war always turn out not to fall at a single point but to stretch along a whole range of

70  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons positions on some intersecting set of continua. The employment of invariant models, furthermore, assumes a political world in which whole structures and sequences repeat themselves time after time in essentially the same form. That would be a convenient world for theorists, but it does not exist. Although the assumption of sharply bounded, self-motivating social units deserves equal criticism, William H. Sewell, Jr. (1992), Margaret Somers (1992), Harrison White (1992), and others have recently criticized monadic thinking so effectively that—however much I disagree with some of their proposed remedies—I have little to add to their critiques. Let me therefore concentrate here on the assumption of invariant conditions and processes. The general structure runs like this: 1. All A’s have characteristics X, Y, and Z. 2. Case a is an A. 3. Therefore a has characteristics X, Y, and Z. A can translate as “revolution,” “nationalism,” “war,” or something else, while X, Y, and Z can constitute necessary conditions, sufficient conditions, standard sequences, correlates, or consequences. A statement in this form can easily reduce to a definition, merely affirming that there exists a set of instances sharing properties X, Y, and Z. The statement need not reduce to a definition, however, since the argument can readily incorporate causal, sequential, or transactional links among the elements. The argument does not assert that all instances of A are identical, but it does assert that they share essential properties setting them off from all cases of non-A; those essential universals mark any such model as invariant. Analysts often arrive at this sort of argument through empirical comparison of cases a, p, I’, and so on, searching for the cases’ common properties that qualify them all as A’s. In the domain of large-scale politics, at least, such reasoning so badly describes what actually occurs as to hinder social scientific and historical analysis. “Invariant” does not equal “general.” Laws concerning variation sometimes cover a very general range. For an example, consider Boyle’s law: at a given temperature the pressure of a certain mass of confined gas varies inversely with its volume. Although we have no well-established social laws with the elegance of Boyle’s formulation, broad and robust empirical generalizations concerning variation—for example, that over large populations infant mortality declines as literacy rises—abound in different realms of social life. I am not challenging the possibility of more explicitly causal laws of extremely general scope, just so long as they stipulate variation. I am instead challenging the common, if often implicit, claim for essential, invariant universals. Such claims appear frequently in comparative-historical analysis. Take the case of revolutions (for helpful reviews, see Berejikian 1992, Boswell 1989, DeFronzo 1991, Dunn 1989, Goodwin and Skocpol 1989, Hobsbawm 1986, Keddie 1992, Kimmel 1990, Knight 1992, Outram 1992, Rice 1990, Schutz and Slater 1990, Taylor 1984, Wickham-Crowley 1991, Zimmerman 1983). Generations of scholars have pursued the chimera of an invariant general model of revolution. Fixation on invariant



Chapter 7: To Explain Political Processes  71

­ odels gives rise to a common but logically peculiar intellectual performance we m may call “improving the model.” It consists of 1) outlining a widely accepted model of phenomenon A, 2) identifying an instance of A that fails to fit the model in one or more ways, and 3) modifying the model so that it now accommodates the previously exceptional instance as well as those instances that already belonged to its domain. Most often the crucial modification respecifies a condition postulated as necessary in the model’s previous version. Thus improving the model expands the claimed scope of the alleged invariance. The procedure is peculiar both because it makes implausible allegations of invariance and because it attenuates whatever empirical grasp the previous model attained. Yet as a reviewer for professional journals I read a half-dozen drafts each year that follow just such reasoning. Similar reasoning motivates whole books. When Farideh Farhi compares the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions that began in 1979, for example, she explicitly sets up the analysis as an extension of Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions on the grounds that Skocpol’s book is “perhaps the most comprehensive attempt to bring together the new concerns about the role of the state, the structure of peasant communities, and the role of international factors in understanding the processes and outcomes of revolutions” (Farhi 1990: 5). Her methodological declaration runs this way: The essence of comparative history is to maintain the particularity of each case while accepting that each particularity is shaped by general forces operating at the societal or global level. Accordingly, the intention is to expose these forces as they impinge on quite specific and unique circumstances in the hope of shedding light on historical specificities as well as the changing structures in the larger world-historical context that make contemporary revolutions not utterly unlike ‘classic’ revolutions but also not totally similar to them. (Farhi 1990: 2)

Thus all revolutions share attributes X, Y, and Z, even if they differ with respect to a great many other attributes; an effective analysis combines specification of universals with enumeration of particulars. True to the challenge, Farhi works with a checklist drawn directly from Skocpol: conditions favoring class coalitions against the regime, circumstances promoting the mobilization of those coalitions for revolutionary action, factors making the state vulnerable to attack, and so on. Almost inexorably, this leads her to propose one-for-one substitutes for the factors Skocpol emphasized—for example, Farhi offers the connectedness and proximity to power of capital cities as a substitute for Skocpol’s solidarity of peasant villages. She finally seeks to build a bridge from Skocpol’s model to her own by a) showing how the world development of capitalism has altered class structures since the times of Skocpol’s revolutions and b) attributing more importance to ideology, including religious belief, than Skocpol was ready to concede in 1979.

72  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Such an analysis aims to generalize Skocpol’s model rather than to extract from it principles of variation. But it misses the mark: the collapsing agrarian bureaucracy overburdened by international pressures and the autonomous peasant communities aligned against their landlords—keystones of Skocpol’s theory—disappear from view, with their replacements in Farhi’s analysis by no means members of the same causal categories. Thus Farhi draws useful questions from Skocpol, but in pursuit of those questions tacitly abandons the effort to generalize an invariant model of revolution. Indeed, she has no choice; the model will not, cannot, generalize that far. Another recent example marks even more precisely the blind alley into which the quest for invariant models has led analysts of revolution. In their excellent compilation on Third World revolutions, Jack Goldstone, Ted Gurr, and Farrokh Moshiri (1991) offer an “analytical framework” that continues the quest for invariance. En route, however, they make two turns that send them in precisely the opposite direction, toward broad and incessant variation. In his theoretical introduction, Goldstone singles out a trio of recurrent causes for revolution: “Declining state resources relative to expenses and the resources of adversaries, increasing elite alienation and disunity, and growing popular grievances and autonomy” (Goldstone et al. 1991: 49). The list echoes Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World, published the same year as the edited volume, but written over many previous years. In that book, Goldstone gives a strong tone of breakdown to his most dramatic statements: The causes of revolutions and major rebellions operate in ways that seem remarkably similar to the forces that build up to cause earthquakes. That is, in the years before such a revolution or major rebellion, social pressures for change build. Yet the existing social and political structures for some time resist change (even though pressures and deformations may be visible). Suddenly, however, some response to the mounting pressure—a state bankruptcy, a regional rebellion—occurs which weakens that resistance (like a block breaking off along the fault). At that point, there is a sudden release of the pent-up forces and a crumbling of the old social structures—a revolution or major rebellion. More concretely, the Scots and Irish rebellions in Great Britain in 1637–1641, and the state bankruptcy and calling of the Estates General in France in 1789, were themselves responses to the mounting social and fiscal pressures in those societies. Yet these particular events also served to unleash far greater social pressures, which overwhelmed these states and led to revolutions. (Goldstone 1991: 35)

Note several features of this statement: its emphasis on sudden collapse in response to long-term change, its claims to generality, its insistence on uniformity rather than variation. In his first contribution to Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century, Goldstone claims continuity in these terms: “In my work on early modern revolutions, I identify three conditions whose conjunction led to state breakdown: fiscal distress, elite alienation and conflict, and a high potential for mobilization of the populace. Although the particular forces that create these conditions may be quite different in contemporary societies than in earlier ones, I believe these conditions remain central to the development of revolutionary crises” (Goldstone et al. 1991: 37–38).



Chapter 7: To Explain Political Processes  73

Leaping nimbly past the problem of specifying how an observer would know in advance of a revolution’s actual occurrence when the three bundles of causes were approaching critical mass, Goldstone immediately concedes that these conditions “may be produced by a variety of forces, depending on how they interact with the institutions and structures in particular societies” (Goldstone 1991: 49). Population pressure, that powerful propellant of state breakdown in Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion, now fizzles to a force that “may have either positive or negative impact” (Goldstone et al. 1991: 40). Goldstone et al. also propose three general stages of revolution: state crisis, the struggle for power, efforts at reconstruction. These stages, however, constitute no verifiable theory; they follow tautologically from the book’s definition of revolution as “the forcible overthrow of a government followed by the reconsolidation of authority by new groups, ruling through new political (and sometimes social) institutions” (Goldstone et al. 1991: 37). At the end of the first turn, then, our voyagers have little more baggage than the explication of a definition. Then they arrive at the second turn: a recognition that post-1945 revolutions occur in quite different ways from their predecessors because geopolitical settings, dominant ideologies, and international intervention have changed fundamentally. Indeed, the cases they consider—Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iran, Poland, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Palestine—amply demonstrate different patterns from the great revolutions of England, France, Russia, and China. “We think now that a state crisis should not be defined as a specific objective condition but rather as a situation in which significant numbers of elites and popular groups believe that the central authorities are acting in ways that are fundamentally ineffective, immoral, or unjust” (Goldstone et al. 1991: 330–331). Thus one of the three general conditions (relative decline of state resources) collapses into the other two (elite alienation and popular grievances) while injustice, previously invisible, squeezes its way into the argument. By this time, the initial promise of an invariant general model has vanished. Just as the once-hot search for crisp predictors of earthquakes has given way to more general debate about the variable operation of plate tectonics (Acton and Gordon 1994, Girdler and McConnell 1994), the search for unique, invariant properties of revolution has ceded to the conception of a variable field within which revolutions occur. I have not chosen my example because I think Goldstone et al. are obtuse or empirically mistaken. On the contrary, they have drawn correct conclusions from their evidence: the conditions for revolution are not uniform, but vary from region to region and period to period. The conditions vary as politics in general varies. Because within a given region and period many states share political arrangements—national and international—rough similarities and explicable variations appear in the experiences of connected states with revolution. The search for comparisons close at hand therefore advances understanding, while the attempt to build transhistorical models of revolution is doomed to eternal failure. Goldstone et al. only err in refusing to recognize the general implications for method and theory of their own compelling analyses.

74  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Similar conditions prevail in the study of social movements, nationalism, democratization, and a wide variety of other political phenomena, as well as in the zones of organizational behavior, crime, or urban structure. Over and over social scientists assume coherent, durable, self-propelling social units, attribute general conditions or processes to those units, invoke or invent invariant models of the relevant conditions or processes, then explain the unit’s behavior on the basis of its conformity to that invariant model. It is time to expunge that intellectual procedure. I am making no plea for historical particularism, much less for epistemological relativism or postmodern linguisticism. I am arguing that regularities in political life are very broad, indeed transhistorical, but do not operate in the form of recurrent structures and processes at a large scale. They consist of recurrent causes which in different circumstances and sequences compound into highly variable but nonetheless explicable effects. Students of revolution have imagined they were dealing with phenomena like ocean tides, whose regularities they could deduce from sufficient knowledge of celestial motion, when they were actually confronting phenomena like great floods, equally coherent occurrences from a causal perspective, but enormously variable in structure, sequence, and consequences as a function of terrain, previous precipitation, built environment, and human response. For hydrologists, a flood is a wave of water that passes through a basin; a severe flood is one in which a considerable share of the water overflows the basin’s perimeter. For our purposes, the equations hydrologists use to compute water flow in floods have three revealing characteristics: they reduce floods to special cases of water flow within basins rather than making them sui generis, their results depend heavily on the hydrologist’s delineation of the basin, while estimation of the flood’s parameters requires extensive empirical knowledge of that basin. Yet the equations embody very general principles, the physics of incompressible fluids in open channels (Bras 1990: 478–482). Note several implications of the analogy. First, every instance of the phenomenon—flood or revolution—differs from every other one; the test of a good theory is therefore not so much to identify similarities among instances as to account systematically and parsimoniously for their variation. Second, in different combinations, circumstances, and sequences, the same causes that produce floods or revolutions also produce a number of adjacent phenomena: smoothly flowing rivers and stagnant swamps on the one side, coups d’état and guerrilla warfare on the other. Third, time, place, and sequence strongly influence how the relevant processes unfold; in that sense, they have an inescapably historical character. Finally, the events in question are far from self-motivating experiences of selfcontained structures; they are local manifestations of fluxes extending far beyond their own perimeters. Floods and revolutions have no natural boundaries; observers draw lines around them for their own analytic convenience. In these regards, they resemble a number of other complex but lawful phenomena: traffic jams, earthquakes, segmented labor markets, forest fires, and many more. I suppose, indeed, that most interesting social phenomena have exactly these characteristics.



Chapter 7: To Explain Political Processes  75

How, then, should we search for the causes of revolutions? Arthur Stinchcombe has long since described one version of the explanatory program: to identify deep causal analogies across detailed features of ostensibly different historical sequences. (The cause of event X is the minimum set of antecedents that [1] actually occurred, [2] is generally sufficient to produce events of type X, and [3] without which X would not have occurred in this setting.) According to Stinchcombe: Concepts are the things that capture aspects of the facts for a theory; they are the lexicon that the grammar of theory turns into general sentences about the world. The argument is that the power and fruitfulness of those sentences is determined by the realism and exactness of the lexicon of concepts, and not by the theoretical grammar. The problem of eliminating false sentences by research, the traditional problem of epistemology, is not as problematic as the problem of having sentences interesting enough to be worth accepting or rejecting. And this is determined by whether or not our concepts capture those aspects of reality that enter into powerful and fruitful causal sentences. (Stinchcombe 1978: 115)

For this purpose, Stinchcombe recommends ignoring the “epochal theories” invoked by a Trotsky or a Tocqueville in favor of the causal reasoning by which these thinkers chain together narratives. That means breaking down big events into causally connected sequences of events, and examining each link in the chain. More generally, Stinchcombe advocates a shift of attention away from a priori theorizing toward rigorous examination and reduction of analogies, step by step within causal sequences (Stinchcombe 1978: 28). At that level, says Stinchcombe, much of the apparent disagreement between a Trotsky and a Tocqueville dissolves. Great historical analysts employ far more similar causal accounts than their competing epochal pronouncements suggest. Stinchcombe stresses epistemology, conditions for the generation of knowledge. I am stressing ontology, the nature of that which is to be known. But our programs dovetail. If the social world actually fell into neatly recurrent structures and processes, then epochal theories, invariant models, and the testing of deductive hypotheses would become more parsimonious and effective means of generating knowledge. Because the social world does not conform to that prescription, we need other programs on both ontological and epistemological grounds. Our programs converge in the historically embedded search for deep causes operating in variable combinations, circumstances, and sequences with consequently variable outcomes. Most of the work therefore concerns, not the identification of similarities over whole structures and processes, but the explanation of variability among related structures and processes. In studies of revolution, the work entails explaining why and how different sorts of social settings produce different varieties of forcible seizures of power over states. There is hope. Not everyone who analyzes revolutions and related phenomena resorts to invariant models. In a wide-ranging synthesis written before the Soviet Union collapsed, David Laitin sketched a promising theory of variation in the readiness of different national elites to break with Moscow. It argued in part that:

76  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons the historical dimension that accounts for distinctions between the national movements in the Soviet Union is based upon a single variable—the degree to which elites in the peripheral nationalities received most-favored-lord status in Russia. The historical data show that in the territories west of Moscow, most-favored-lord status was readily granted, even when there were no indigenous lords. Lords in the Turkic areas were often given elite privileges, but they were not given access to positions of high status by right. In intermediate cases like Georgia and Estonia, elite mobility was possible but circumscribed. Certain predictions follow from this: (1) in the most-favored-lord regions there would be powerful symbolic unity among titulars for full independence but a waning of resolve as the conflict of interest among two branches of the titular elites begins to manifest itself; and (2) in the non-most-favored lord regions, the pressure for independence would come more slowly (but once set in motion, there would be unity among the titular elites, with only settled minority populations seeking to slow the process down). (Laitin 1991: 157)

Laitin simplifies his work by grouping Soviet regions into two categories, but he clearly invokes a continuous principle of variation. He does not, obviously, provide a complete account of the process by which the Soviet Union collapsed, or by which any particular state emerged from the collapse. On the contrary, he offers a promising candidate for one of the many general principles a properly constructed causal account would invoke. By his rational-choice analysis of conditions for secession, Michael Hechter opens another avenue. Hechter argues that secession results from the intersection of four partly independent processes: 1) creation of regions, 2) mobilization for collective action, 3) development of support for secessionist programs, and 4) acceptance of independence by the previously dominant state (Hechter 1992: 269). In each case Hechter identifies conditions affecting the extent of two factors: shared or imposed interest in acting to facilitate secession and the capacity to do so. Under the heading of support for secession, for example, he proposes a) low regional dependence on the host economy and b) perception of the host state’s weakness as major promoters of interest and capacity. Hechter employs a model of logical concatenation rather than of sequence or political processes; except in the sense of logical necessity, he neither offers propositions concerning the interaction of his four processes nor postulates a dynamic in which identities, connections, interests, and capacities alter as a function of struggle or accommodation. Within the standard a priori limits of rational-choice analysis, nevertheless, Hechter’s discussion does provide a framework that lends itself to the analysis of choice making in territorial segmentation, civil war, and regionally based revolution (Berejikian 1992, Connor 1987, Gurr 1993, Licklider 1993, Lustick 1993, Strang 1990, 1991). By depicting secession as a highly contingent outcome of interacting political processes, Hechter breaks sharply with invariant models. In an inquiry that deals more explicitly with structure and sequence than Hechter’s does, Peter Bearman (1993) looks closely at changing relations among gentry in Norfolk, England, during the century before the Civil War, which began in 1640.



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Using the formal techniques of network analysis, Bearman shows that a kinship-based regional structure of power gave way to one based much more heavily on patron-client chains connecting local actors to national centers of power; that gentry experiencing blocked or downward mobility clustered together disproportionately in patron-client networks, forming distinctive, antiregime religious identities; and that these shared identities-cum-networks became major bases of political mobilization (Bearman 1993, Bearman and Deane 1992). At no point does Bearman suggest that blocked mobility, patron-client networks, or the other factors he analyzes generally produce revolution; he promulgates no invariant model. But he does provide another illustration of a program that invokes powerful general causes in a particular reconstruction of revolutionary processes. My own version of that enterprise concentrates on variation within Europe over the last five centuries (Tilly 1993). It distinguishes between revolutionary situations (moments of deep fragmentation in state power) and revolutionary outcomes (rapid, forcible, durable transfers of state power), and it designates as a full-fledged revolution any extensive combination of the two. Chronologies of revolutionary situations in multiple regions of Europe demonstrate the great variation and change in revolutionary processes since 1492. The changes include, for example, an impressive rise in frequency of “national” revolutionary situations: state-fragmenting mobilizations in which at least one party made its claim to state power on the grounds that it represented a coherent, culturally distinct population that was currently receiving unjust treatment. More importantly, the revolutionary chronologies illustrate—prove would be too strong a word—how regionally and temporally variable forms of international relations, state power, administrative structure, military activity, extraction, and repression shaped the character of European revolutions, not to mention other forms of political conflict. To the extent that governmental succession depended on warriorkings recruited from intermarrying royal patrilineages, for example, revolutionary situations concentrated at those points when a child or an incompetent adult came to the throne. In regions of intense commercial activity, for another example, revolutionary situations commonly took the form of urban resistance to princely authority. Revolution turns out to be a coherent phenomenon, but coherent in its variation and in its continuity with nonrevolutionary politics, not in any repetitious uniformity. Its sequences and outcomes turn out to be path-, time-, and situation-dependent, not constant from one revolution to the next. I do not claim to have been the first to notice this degree of variation; in their practical work, as opposed to their introductions and conclusions, most students of real revolutions proceed as if they were dealing with path-, time-, and situation-dependent phenomena whose individual features—but perhaps not their totality—can be explained by general political principles, given sufficient information about the context. Nor do I claim that my own recent work provides all the answers to the big questions that students of revolution have been pursuing for centuries. I make only three simple claims: 1) The construction of invariant models of revolution—which remains a major

78  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons activity among American social scientists—is a waste of time. 2) The poor fit between such models and the actual character of revolutions helps account for the slow accumulation of knowledge on the subject, a problem about which Rod Aya (1990) and James Rule (1988) have properly complained. 3) The same conclusions hold for a wide range of social phenomena, including most or all large-scale political processes. How, then, can we recognize useful alternatives to invariant models of political processes? Valid analyses of political processes rest first of all on plausible ontologies— representations of what is to be explained in terms of a given process’s boundedness, continuity, plasticity, and complexity (e.g., recognizing that nationalism consists of some actors’ claim to act authoritatively on behalf of a coherent and solidary people, a claim whose origins, makers, forms, and effects vary enormously over time and space). For variant phenomena, valid analyses specify the fields of variation within which they fall, which means specifying their relation to connected but different phenomena (e.g., delineating the continuum along which lie army-to-army interstate war, covert military intervention, full-scale civil war, guerrilla activities, and terrorism). These valid analyses break complex sequences into events, each of which invokes its own configuration of causes including the cumulative effects of previous events (e.g., separating the conditions under which a cycle of intense social movement activity begins or ends from the conditions under which one movement or another sees some of its demands realized). Their genera1 propositions consist of principles of variation for analytically separable aspects of the phenomena under examination (e.g., after noticing that democracy entails broad, relatively equal citizenship that grants citizens substantial collective control over governmental personnel and policies as well as significant protection from arbitrary state action, formulating or invoking separate theories of breadth, equality, control, and protection). Such analyses immediately yield counterfactuals, specifications of what else could have happened if the causal configuration had occurred differently; thus a valid theory of democratization yields propositions about the conditions for authoritarianism and oligarchy. Within limits, such analyses of variation also yield contingent predictions. By this I do not mean the unconditional predictions of invariant models, in which the appearance of sufficient conditions X, Y, and Z invariably produce outcome A, but contingent predictions applying phrases such as “insofar as” to variable conditions, their interactions, and their outcomes. In instances such as Eastern Europe’s struggles of 1989, then, we might reasonably hope to specify the fields of variation within which they were occurring, then to anticipate the likely outcomes under various still-contingent conditions. Mine, then, is no counsel of perfection or cry of despair. For, taken separately, these methodological injunctions have the same comfortable familiarity as invariant models. For all their other weaknesses—vulnerability to spatial autocorrelation, assumptions of boundedness and independence of observations, commitments to linearity, and so on—standard sampling designs and multivariate statistics actually presume some such world. Within these limits, which theories of causality and variation analysts should choose remains just as open as before the elimination of invariant models.



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Fortunately, we have no obligation to choose right now; we can wait for results of a productive rivalry, perhaps even of a synthesis, from these contentions. For the present, anyone who believes what I have said about invariant general models and who cares about the validity of broad political analyses has plenty of work to do. The crucial theoretical and empirical work should eventually reduce the likelihood that the next major change in world politics will baffle social scientists.

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80  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Diani, Mario (1992). “The Concept of Social Movement.” Sociological Review 1992: 1–25. Di Palma, Giuseppe (1990). To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Dunn, John. (1989). Modern Revolutions, an Introduction to the Analysis of a Political Phenomenon, 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duyvendak, Jan Willem (1994). Le poids du politique: Nouveaux mouvements sociaux en France. Paris: l’Harmattan. Eisenstadt, S.N. (1992). “The Breakdown of Communist Regimes and the Vicissitudes of Modernity,” Daedalus 121: 21–42. Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamison (1991). Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Farhi, Farideh (1990). States and Urban-Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Feschbach, Seymour (1987). “Individual Aggression, National Attachment, and the Search for Peace: Psychological Perspectives,” Aggressive Behavior 13: 315–325. Gellner, Ernest (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Girdler, R.W., and D.A. McConnell (1994). “The 1990 to 1991 Sudan Earthquake Sequence and Extent of the East African Rift System,” Science (April 1), 67–70. Giugni, Marco G., and Hanspeter Kriesi (1990). “Nouveaux mouvements sociaux dans les années ’80: Evolution et perspectives,” Annuaire Suisse de Science Politique 30: 79–100. Goldstone, Jack A. (1991). Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Goldstone, Jack A., Ted Robert Gurr, and Farrokh Moshiri, eds. (1991). Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century. Boulder, CO: Westview. Goodwin, Jeff, and Theda Skocpol (1989). “Explaining Revolutions in the Contemporary Third World,” Politics and Society 17: 489–509. Gurr, Ted Robert (1988). “War, Revolution, and the Growth of the Coercive State,” Comparative Political Studies 21: 45–65. ——— (1993). Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. Gurr, Ted Robert, Keith Jaggers, and Will H. Moore (1990). “The Transformation of the Western State: The Growth of Democracy, Autocracy, and State Power since 1800,” Studies in Comparative International Development 25: 73–108. Haas, Ernst (1986). “What Is Nationalism and Why Should We Study It?” International Organization 40: 707–744. Hall, John A., and G. John Ikenberry (1989). The State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hechter, Michael (1992). “The Dynamics of Secession,” Acta Sociologica 35: 267–283. Held, David (1987). Models of Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1986). “Revolution,” in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., Revolution in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1990). Nations and Nationalism since 1789: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kearney, Michael (1991). “Borders and Boundaries of State and Self at the End of Empire,” Journal of Historical Sociology 4: 52–72. Keddie, Nikki R. (1992). “Can Revolutions Be Predicted: Can Their Causes Be Understood?” Contention 1: 159–182.



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Kimmel, Michael S. (1990). Revolution: A Sociological Interpretation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Kirby, Andrew, and Michael D. Ward (1991). “Modernity and the Process of State Formation: An Examination of 20th Century Africa,” International Interactions 17: 113–126. Knight, Alan (1992). “Revisionism and Revolution: Mexico Compared to England and France,” Past and Present 134: 159–199. Koopmans, Ruud (1993). “The Dynamics of Protest Waves: West Germany, 1965 to 1989,” American Sociological Review 58: 637–658. Krasner, Steven (1984). “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Comparative Politics 16: 223–246. Kriesi, Hanspeter (1993). Political Mobilization and Social Change: The Dutch Case in Comparative Perspective. Aldershot, UK: Avebury. Laitin, David D. (1991). “The National Uprisings in the Soviet Union,” World Politics 44:139–177. Lee, Su-Hoon (1988). State-Building in the Contemporary Third World. Boulder, CO: ­Westview. Lerner, Adam J., ed. (1991). “Reimagining the Nation,” Millennium 20: 351–525. Levy, Jack S. (1989). “The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence,” in Philip Tetlock et al., eds., Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War, vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press. Licklider, Roy, ed. (1993). Stopping the Killing: How Civil Wars End. New York: New York University Press. Lowi, Theodore J. (1992). “The State in Political Science: How We Became What We Study.” American Political Science Review 86: 1–7. Lowy, Michael (1989). “Internationalisme, Nationalisme et Anti-impérialisme,” Critique Communiste 87: 31–42. Lustick, Ian S. (1993). Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mann, Michael, ed. (1990). The Rise and Decline of the Nation-State. Oxford: Blackwell. Mayer, Margit (1991). “Social Movement Research and Social Movement Practice: The U.S. Pattern,” in Dieter Rucht, ed., Research on Social Movements: The State of the Art in Western Europe and the USA. Frankfurt and Boulder, CO: Campus/Westview. Melucci, Alberto (1985). “The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements,” Social Research 52: 789–816. ——— (1989): Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Need in Contemporary Society. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mitchell, Timothy (1991). “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85: 77–96. Most, Benjamin A., and Harvey Starr (1983). “Conceptualizing ‘War’: Consequences for Theory and Research,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 27: 137–159. O’Donnell, Guillermo, and Philippe C. Schmitter (1986). Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Outram, Dorinda (1992). “Revolution and Repression,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34: 58–67. Poggi, Gianfranco (1990). The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

82  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Rice, E.E., ed. (1990). Revolution and Counter-Revolution. Oxford: Blackwell. Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens (1992). Capitalist Development and Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rule, James B. (1988). Theories of Civil Violence. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Schmitter, Philippe C., and Terry Lynn Karl (1991). “What Democracy Is . . . and Is Not,” Journal of Democracy 2: 77–88. Schutz, Barry M., and Robert O. Slater, eds. (1990). Revolution and Political Change in the Third World. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Segal, Daniel A. (1988). “Nationalism, Comparatively Speaking,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1: 301–21. Sewell, William H., Jr. (1992). “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1–29. Somers, Margaret R. (1992). “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation,” Social Science History 16: 591–630. Starr, Harvey (1994). “Revolution and War: Rethinking the Linkage between Internal and External Conflict,” Political Research Quarterly 47: 481–507. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. (1978). Theoretical Methods in Social History. New York: Academic Press. Strang, David (1990). “From Dependency to Sovereignty: An Event History Analysis of Decolonization, 1870–1987,” American Sociological Review 55: 846–850. ——— (1991). “Global Patterns of Decolonization, 1500–1987,” International Studies Quarterly 35: 429–454. Tarrow, Sidney (1993). “Modular Collective Action and the Rise of the Social Movement: Why the French Revolution Was Not Enough,” Politics and Society 21: 69–90. Taylor, Stan (1984). Social Science and Revolutions. New York: St. Martin’s. Tilly, Charles (1993). European Revolutions, 1492–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. White, Harrison (1992). Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wickham-Crowley, Timothy (1991). Exploring Revolution: Essays on Latin American Insurgency and Revolutionary Theory. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Williams, Brackette F. (1989). “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 401–444. Zimmerman, Ekkart (1983). Political Violence, Crises and Revolutions. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman.

Source Note “To Explain Political Processes,” American Journal of Sociology 100 (1995), 1594–1610.

Chapter 8

Means and Ends of Comparison in M acrosociology Variation in vitro differs significantly from variation in natural history, a fortiori from variation in social history and macrosociology. After laying out his famous Methods of Agreement and of Differences, as well as his often-ignored Methods of Residues and of Concomitant Variation, John Stuart Mill reminded readers that his Methods applied exclusively to experimental procedures. Mill confined them, furthermore, to relatively simple phenomena entailing little interaction among causes, which meant they would not much advance understanding of living organisms. He therefore issued a stern warning: If so little can be done by the experimental method to determine the conditions of an effect of many combined causes, in the case of medical science; still less is this method applicable to a class of phenomena more complicated than even those of physiology, the phenomena of politics and history. There, Plurality of Causes exists in almost boundless excess, and effects are, for the most part, inextricably interwoven with one another. To add to the embarrassment, most of the inquiries in political science relate to the production of effects of a most comprehensive description, such as the public wealth, public security, public morality, and the like: results likely to be affected directly or indirectly either in plus or in minus by nearly every fact which exists, or event which occurs, in human society. The vulgar notion, that the safe methods on political subjects are those of Baconian induction—that the true guide is not general reasoning, but specific experience—will one day be quoted as among the most unequivocal marks of a low state of the speculative faculties in any age in which it is accredited. Nothing can be more ludicrous than the sort of parodies on experimental reasoning which one is accustomed to meet with, not in popular discussion only, but in grave treatises, when the affairs of nations are the theme. “How,” it is asked, “can an institution be bad, when the country has prospered under it?” “How can such or such causes have contributed to the prosperity of one country, when another has prospered without them?” Whoever makes use of an argument of

83

84  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons this kind, not intending to deceive, should be sent back to learn the elements of some one of the more easy physical sciences. (Mill 1887: 324)

Later, Mill identified the chief difficulties in applying his experimental methods to human affairs: not only the complex interaction of causes, but also the fact that his methods required a priori a finite, specified set of hypothetical causes. Aimed at social processes, Mill’s Methods remained always fatally vulnerable to the allegation that a hitherto-unsuspected cause was operating. No one has much improved on Mill’s own initial statement of objections to application of his four experimental methods in the explanation of social processes. Yet, as John Goldthorpe complains, twentieth-century social scientists have often invoked the Method of Agreement and the Method of Differences as justifications for big case comparisons, hereafter BCCs (Goldthorpe 1997). Goldthorpe rightly claims that switching from “variables” to “cases” does not mitigate the problem; in fact, it makes Mill’s own strictures all the more applicable. If they had listened to Mill, social scientists would never have adopted BCCs. Goldthorpe misses the crucial next step. Small Ns, Galton’s diffusion processes, and appeal to black-box causation do bedevil many applications of BCC, but all constitute soluble secondary difficulties. Here is the primary difficulty: BCC provides a fine heuristic but a logically and ontologically flawed basis for serious explanation of social processes. Although they might not have adopted the Comtean evolutionist approach that Mill himself advocated, from the start attentive readers of John Stuart Mill should also have rejected the program Edward Tylor styled the Comparative Method in 1889. No less a figure than Francis Galton, after all, identified the program’s crippling weaknesses at its very unveiling (Hammel 1980). Yet only now, more than a century after Tylor’s explication of the Method, is the program collapsing. Its charms long led social scientists to ignore its fatal vices. As a program for investigating, writing, teaching, communicating, and job­creating, comparative-historical analysis in the BCC mode has seen very good days. Those days will soon pass. Vital, vibrant work on big structures, large processes, and huge comparisons in space-time will continue in sociology and other social sciences. Historical inquiry will thrive, but not in the mode that has come to define the field during the last scholarly generation: BCC. The lining up of civilizations, societies, cultures, wars, revolutions, and other great chunks of social experience for arguments about causes and meanings will persist as the heuristic and literary trope it has been for hundreds of years, but will shrivel as a method of systematic analysis. BCC will shrivel for several reasons: because its faulty ontological premises are finally outweighing its undoubted contributions as a means of disciplining inquiry; because the system of distinct, bounded sovereign states that long served as its implicit warrant is rapidly disintegrating; because the rise of relational, historicist, and institutional thinking in the social sciences is raising insuperable challenges to all portrayals of social life as the work of neatly-bounded, self-motivated, rule-following actors, individual or collective.



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Comparison of large social chunks in search of invariant laws has marked the social sciences since their emergence as self-regarding disciplines—certainly since 1889. In different styles, Max Weber, Oswald Spengler, and Pitirim Sorokin exemplified and justified sociologists’ investment in vast comparative enterprises. During the 1940s, big comparative-historical inquiries lost much of their luster in sociology—in 1959, the American Sociological Association-sponsored volume Sociology Today surveyed the whole field, but offered no sustained discussion of historical or comparative analysis—only to revive handsomely with S.N. Eisenstadt, Reinhard Bendix, Stein Rokkan, Barrington Moore, Jr., and others from the late 1950s onward. That second wave is now subsiding. The sea will survive, but its chief currents already run in other directions. In their time, historical-comparative inquiries provided splendid antidotes for unhistorical and antihistorical maladies in social science. However one disagreed with them on other grounds, such masters as Bendix, Rokkan, and Moore made evident how greatly where, when, and in what order some social process occurred mattered to how it occurred. They exposed the bankruptcy of the quasi-evolutionary pseudohistory in which searchers for the secrets of development lined up whole socie­ ties, generally identified by the existence of a durable state, along a single continuum from least to most advanced, then inferred the standard developmental path from that continuum—or, worse yet, from currently observable characteristics of its most advanced members. They validated concerns about power, freedom, and human agency bequeathed to social science by Karl Marx, Max Weber, and other ancestors. They thereby motivated rich, ambitious historical and comparative examinations of human struggles. From early on, nevertheless, postwar historical-comparative analysis followed multiple paths in addition to the comparison of civilizations, societies, cultures, and momentous events. Inspired partly by a populist hope to reconstruct history from below and partly by collaboration with historians who were trying to renew their own craft through self-conscious adoption of social scientific procedures, students of family structure, population processes, communities, political struggle, and economic change dug deeply into historical materials without concentrating on massive case-by-case comparisons (Abbott 1994, Monkkonen 1994). Despite strident epistemological challenges from postmodern critics, such studies still thrive today (see, e.g., Hanagan 1994). Yet the emblem of comparative-historical analysis, Big Case Comparison, is now fading. BCC is fading because of 1) ontological inadequacy, 2) disintegration of state systems, and 3) relational, historicist, and institutional thinking. Ontological inadequacy? The presumption that distinctive, autonomous, coherent, self-sustaining civilizations, societies, cultures, and/or great events not only exist but possess their own logics sui generis undergirds the BCC program. Where empirically identifiable states, organizations, networks, or connected sequences of action actually constitute the objects of study, to be sure, social scientists have ample reasons to formulate ideas concerning their regularities and to undertake systematic

86  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons comparisons among them. But presuming their intelligible existence a priori, inferring the coherence of societies from the presence of states, or taking historically constructed memories of events—wars, revolutions, social movements, transitions, or others—as grounds for their comparative study founds analysis on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Half-aware of the difficulty, many of BCC’s most ardent practitioners are abandoning it for historically grounded studies of social processes (Lloyd 1993, Smith 1991). Disintegration of the state system? Implicitly or explicitly, the BCC program has always relied on presumptions about the division of the world into coherent nations and states, presumptions that only became prevalent with the consolidation of the European state system and its rapid seizure of world power during the nineteenth century (Janice Thomson 1995). Whether consolidated states as the world has known them for two centuries are now losing their grip or merely adapting as the worldsystem changes remains hotly debated (Tilly et al. 1995). Massive flows of capital, labor, commodities, information, and technology across national boundaries and the increasing prominence of such transnational structures as the European Community and the World Trade Organization are surely both reducing the autonomy of most states and undermining their capacity to regulate activities within their territories. Meanwhile the expansion of communal-ethnic struggles over political power within existing states (Gurr 1994) discredits any easy equation of society or culture with state. Continuation of these trends is already attracting the attention of macroanalysts to non-national webs of social relations; it will eventually destroy the plausibility and interest of comparisons among state-defined societies (Puchala 1995, Ruggie 1993, Wendt 1994, Wendt and Barnett 1993). Relational, historicist, and institutional thinking? As approaches in contemporary social science, we might distinguish systems theories, with collectivities (including that great collectivity called Society) following autonomous and compelling logics; methodological individualism, with its reduction of social reality to the self-­motivated actions of individual actors; phenomenological individualism, with its parallel reduction of social reality to the consciousness of actors, individual or collective; and relational realism, with transactions, interactions, or social ties serving as startingpoints of social analysis. The first three have run their course, while the fourth is gaining strength. In a wide variety of fields, furthermore, the idea of incessant human improvisation that lays down subsequent constraints on behavior in the form of memory, culture, institutions, and social ties contradicts any possibility of chopping social life into neatly-bounded, self-motivated, rule-following actors, individual or collective (Friedman 1995, Nelson 1995, Resnick 1996, White 1992). Macroanalysis will benefit enormously from these new ideas about social process, but not through a continuation of Big Case Comparison. In that sense, the once-dominant program of comparative-historical social science is now writing finis. John Goldthorpe has in fact recently been writing anticipatory obituaries for BCC (e.g., Goldthorpe 1991). He has, however, emphasized secondary traits of our moribund friend. The situation is both worse and better than Goldthorpe claims.



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Worse, because social scientists including Goldthorpe have wasted a great deal of time fretting about the logic of comparing whole countries to account for similarities and differences among those countries, when for most purposes they should simply have eschewed such comparisons. Better, because social scientists have always had more effective explanatory logics available than BCC. For effective social science, like effective science of any other kind, does not concern cases or variables, but valid causal mechanisms, wherever and at whatever scale they occur. In a limiting case—where behavior of a state or of state-circumscribed institutions is itself at issue—the state-defined country may indeed turn out to be the appropriate unit of comparison. But even there the crucial causal mechanisms will commonly operate at several different scales and be verifiable for precisely that reason. Despite the limited scope for experiment in their inquiries, N=1 has not kept geophysicists, cosmologists, paleontologists, or ecologists from doing valuable scientific work. For practical purposes, N has equaled the number of independent observations they could make of processes in action or their outcomes. Historical students of large-scale social processes similarly take advantage of multiple purchases on crucial causal mechanisms, each intervention into the historical record constituting another opportunity to be proven wrong. On what grounds, for example, do most students of state formation believe that a) under a wide, roughly specifiable set of historical circumstances successful warfare creates states, and b) in those circumstances different organizations of warfare produce systematically different state structures (Porter 1994, Rasler and Thompson 1990, Starr 1994)? They believe those propositions, not because of large-N statistical analyses or neat John Stuart Millian comparisons of cases, but because for a large range of times, places, and situations they can construct relevant, verifiable causal stories resting on differing chains of cause-effect relations whose efficacy can be demonstrated independently of those stories. They also believe the propositions because they look robust over many kinds and scales of evidence, from statistical analyses of wars to close reconstructions of particular historical sequences. That scholars will eventually supersede such gross, imprecise propositions with more refined, more adequate, and partly contradictory analyses does not gainsay the superiority of the search for widely applicable cause-effect relations over BCC and related searches for invariant sequences or structures. If Goldthorpe rightly stresses the impossibility of identifying such causal mechanisms by means of pure induction from case studies, he somehow fails to recognize the possibility of deducing relevant hypotheses from historically grounded theories of the middle range (Merton 1957: 9). Relevant causal situations far exceed the domain of neatly bounded, mutually exclusive, substantial states. States have been forming in various parts of the world for roughly sixty centuries. In most of those times and places, war-making has dominated state formation. In a nice dialectic, the massive creation of military forces during the last two centuries has actually attenuated the impact of military activity on state structure both a) through promoting the creation of a civilian organizational

88  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons infrastructure having its own autonomous weight and b) through reliance on implicit bargains with major political actors that thereby have gained the power to steer the state toward their own interests. Cause-effect relations linking state structure to military activity include the generalization of concentrated coercive means to nonmilitary compulsion, the creation of centralized administrations as a by-product of extracting means for war, and bargaining with civilian populations over those means. Like the causal mechanisms to which geologists and ecologists appeal, such causal mechanisms appear in different combinations and sequences, with different weights, in concrete historical situations (Stinchcombe 1978a). No more than any geologist imagines all mountains to form as minor variants on the same model does an intelligent analyst of state structure confine the military-state relation to a single invariant pattern; like a wise geologist, she shows how widely applicable causes concatenate into substantially different outcomes depending on initial conditions, subsequent sequences, and adjacent processes. Although all analysts can—and frequently do—aggregate these causes to a national scale, in fact they operate at many scales, from encounters between households and tax collectors to the settlements through international intervention of national rebellions and civil wars. Hence the possibility of verifying the efficacy of ostensible causes at one scale, then aggregating or disaggregating them to trace their analogs at other scales. Do the causal mechanisms involved reduce ultimately to the rational actions of motivated individuals? Some do, most don’t. More of them correspond to the complex, contingent, collective effects of social interaction dealt with by evolutionary economists, transaction-cost organization theorists, and network analysts (Baron 1984, Bowles and Gintis 1993, Granovetter 1988, Merton 1936, Nelson 1995, North 1991, Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993, Simon 1991, Stinchcombe 1978b). Warfare generates centralized administrations, for example, in part because through no one’s intention the seizure of means for military action—men, horses, food, clothing, weapons, information, and money—disrupts nonmilitary routines, creates new social connections among both rulers and ruled, alters the physical environment, produces perverse effects, and stimulates concerted popular resistance. Each of these effects calls forth remedial action on the part of authorities. Repeated, with their own unanticipated consequences and indirect effects, those remedial efforts constitute central administrations. Such a causal web certainly includes intentional action, but much of it consists of errors, unanticipated consequences, indirect effects, alterations of social networks, and influences mediated by the nonhuman environment. In these regards, each state has its own distinctive concatenation of causes; the generation of central administration by land warfare operated differently (and less pervasively) in Holland than in neighboring Prussia. It does not follow, however, that the causes operated chiefly, much less exclusively, at the scale of states. Social scientists have often slipped into the fallacious assumption that if two comparable social units differ with respect to some attribute the difference between them must result from differences in other attributes of the same social units; they have relied on monad



Chapter 8: Comparison in Macrosociology  89

individualism writ large, a generalization to social aggregates of the idea that the cause of any individual’s behavior must be some propensity, trait, or decision of that same individual (Bhargava 1992). In fact, differences among social units commonly result from locations in social networks, from environmental effects, from localized events that cumulatively affect the unit as a whole. An eternity of correlating and comparing aggregate characteristics of the units will never identify the crucial effects. Do we need other examples? We could draw them from the historical study of citizenship, where lawful but variably conjoined causal mechanisms at other scales than the nation clearly contributed to what we now see as entrenched national differences (Cerutti, Descimon, and Prak 1995, Cohen and Hanagan 1995, Somers 1993). We could examine gender inequality in employment, where effects of state policy and educational systems certainly appear, but the great bulk of variation depends on different concatenations of causal mechanisms—notably the fine segregation of jobs—that appear widely across the world (Bielby and Baron 1986, Blau and Kahn 1992, Charles 1992, Petersen and Morgan 1995). We could turn to genocide, infant mortality, aging, nationalism, democratization, revolution, income inequality, or racism: measurable and existentially significant international differences in all these regards exist. They result in part from events and policies at a national scale. Yet, as normally practiced, Big Case Comparison can do no more than discipline our thinking about these complex phenomena in preparation for genuine explanatory efforts. It makes little difference whether we choose large-N multivariate analyses or smallN case studies. If we are to arrive at explanations, we will have to construct relevant, verifiable causal stories resting on differing chains of cause-effect relations, relations whose efficacy can be demonstrated independently of those stories. Those stories will feature strong contingency and path-dependency. Their validity will ultimately depend not on Millian experimental logic, not on deductions from covering laws, not on precise multivariate analyses, but on the demonstrated presence and robustness of the causal mechanisms they enchain.

References Abbott, Andrew (1994). “History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis,” in Eric Monkkonen, ed., Engaging the Past. The Uses of History across the Social Sciences. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Baron, James N. (1984). “Organizational Perspectives on Stratification,” Annual Review of Sociology 10: 37-69. Beramendi, Justo G., Ramón Máiz, and Xosé M. Núñez, eds. (1994). Nationalism in Europe, Past and Present. Santiago, Spain: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. 2 vols. Bhargava, Rajeev (1992). Individualism in Social Science. Forms and Limits of a Methodology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bielby, William T., and James N. Baron (1986). “Men and Women at Work: Sex Segregation and Statistical Discrimination,” American Journal of Sociology 91: 759–799.

90  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Bjørn, Claus, Alexander Grant, and Keith J. Stringer, eds. (1994a). Nations, Nationalism and Patriotism in the European Past. Copenhagen: Academic Press. ——— (1994b). Social and Political Identities in Western History. Copenhagen: Academic Press. Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn (1992). “The Gender Earnings Gap: Some International Evidence.” Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 4224. Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Gintis (1993). “The Revenge of Homo Economicus: Contested Exchange and the Revival of Political Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 7: 83–114. Brubaker, Rogers (1993). “East European, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Nationalisms: A Framework for Analysis,” Research on Democracy and Society 1: 353–378. Burt, Ronald S., and Marc Knez (1995). “Kinds of Third-Party Effects on Trust,” Rationality and Society 7: 255–292. Cerutti, Simona, Robert Descimon, and Maarten Prak, eds. (1995). “Cittadinanze,” Quaderni Storici 30, no. 89: 281–514. Charles, Maria (1992). “Cross-National Variation in Occupational Sex Segregation,” American Sociological Review 57: 483–502. Coase, Ronald (1992). “The Institutional Structure of Production,” American Economic Review 82: 713–719. Cohen, Miriam, and Michael Hanagan (1995). “Politics, Industrialization and Citizenship: Unemployment Policy in England, France and the United States, 1890–1950,” International Review of Social History 40, supplement 3: 91–130. Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Jeff Goodwin (1994). “Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency,” American Journal of Sociology 99: 1411–1454. Friedman, Jeffrey (1995). “Economic Approaches to Politics,” Critical Review 9: 1–24. Goldthorpe, J.H. (1991). “The Uses of History in Sociology: Reflections on Some Recent Tendencies,” British Journal of Sociology 42: 211–230. ——— (1997): “Current Issues in Comparative Macrosociology: A Debate on Methodological Issues,” Comparative Social Research 16: 1–26. Goodwin, Jeff (1994). “Toward a New Sociology of Revolutions,” Theory and Society 23: 731–766. Granovetter, Mark (1988). “The Sociological and Economic Approaches to Labor Markets,” in George Farkas and Paula England, eds., Industries, Firms, and Jobs: Sociological and Economic Approaches. New York: Plenum. Gurr, Ted Robert (1994). “Peoples Against States: Ethnopolitical Conflict and the Changing World System,” International Studies Quarterly 38: 347–378. Hammel, Eugene (1980). “The Comparative Method in Anthropological Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22: 145–155. Hanagan, Michael P. (1994). “New Perspectives on Class Formation: Culture, Reproduction, and Agency,” Social Science History 18: 77–94. Heilbroner, Robert (1990). “Analysis and Vision in the History of Modern Economic Thought,” Journal of Economic Literature 28: 1097–1114. Lloyd, Christopher (1993). The Structures of History. Oxford: Blackwell. Merton, Robert K. (1936). “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” American Sociological Review 1: 894–904.



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——— (1957): Social Theory and Social Structure, revised edition. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Merton, Robert K., Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., eds. (1959). Sociology Today. Problems and Prospects. New York: Basic Books. Mill, John Stuart (1887). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Method of Scientific Investigation, 8th edition. New York: Harper and Brothers. Monkkonen, Eric (1994). “Lessons of Social Science History,” Social Science History 18: 161–168. Nelson, Richard (1995). “Recent Evolutionary Theorizing About Economic Change,” Journal of Economic Literature 33: 48–90. North, Douglass C. (1991). “Institutions,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5: 97–112. Petersen, Trond, and Laurie A. Morgan (1995). “Separate and Unequal: Occupation­Establishment Sex Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap,” American Journal of Sociology 101: 329–365. Petroski, Henry (1992). The Evolution of Useful Things. New York: Knopf. Porter, Bruce (1994). War and the Rise of the State. New York: Free Press. Portes, Alejandro, and Julia Sensenbrenner (1993). “Embeddedness and Immigration: Notes on the Social Determinants of Economic Action,” American Journal of Sociology 98: 1320–1350. Puchala, Donald J. (1995). “The Pragmatics of International History,” Mershon International Studies Review [supplement to International Studies Quarterly] 39: 1–18. Rasler, Karen A., and William R. Thompson (1990). War and State Making. The Shaping of the Global Powers. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Resnick, Mitchel (1996). “Beyond the Centralized Mindset,” Journal of the Learning Sciences 5: 1–22. Ruggie, John Gerard (1993). “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47: 139–174. Schneider, Louis (1975). “Irony and Unintended Consequences,” in The Sociological Way of Looking at the World. New York: McGraw-Hill. Simon, Herbert (1991). “Organizations and Markets,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 5: 25–44. Smith, Dennis (1991). The Rise of Historical Sociology. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Somers, Margaret R. (1993). “Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy,” American Sociological Review 58: 587–620. Starr, Harvey (1994). “Revolution and War: Rethinking the Linkage Between Internal and External Conflict,” Political Research Quarterly 47: 481–507. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. (1978a). Theoretical Methods in Social History. New York: Academic Press. ——— (1978b). “Generations and Cohorts in Social Mobility: Economic Development and Social Mobility in Norway,” Memorandum No. 18, Institute of Applied Social Research, Oslo. Thomson, Janice E. (1995). “State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Empirical Research,” International Studies Quarterly 39: 213–234.

92  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Thomson, Ross (1984). “The Eco-Technic Process and the Development of the Sewing Machine,” in Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright, eds., Technique, Spirit and Form in the Making of the Modern Economies: Essays in Honor of William N. Parker. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Research in Economic History, Supplement 3. Tilly, Charles (1995): “Democracy Is a Lake,” in George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy. New York: New York University Press; Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Tilly, Charles et al. (1995). Tilly, “Globalization Threatens Labor’s Rights,” plus responses from Immanuel Wallerstein, Aristide Zolberg, Eric Hobsbawm, and Lourdes Benería, followed by Tilly reply, International Labor and Working Class History 47: 1–55. Wendt, Alexander E. (1994). “Collective Identity Formation and the International State,” American Political Science Review 88: 384–398. Wendt, Alexander, and Michael Barnett (1993). “Dependent State Formation and Third World Militarization,” Review of International Studies 19: 321–347. White, Harrison (1992). Identity and Control. A Structural Theory of Social Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Source Note “Means and Ends of Comparison in Macrosociology,” Comparative Social Research 16 (1997), 43–53.

Chapter 9

Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists Some vivid terms serve political and normative ends admirably despite hindering description and explanation of the social phenomena at which they point. Those double-edged terms include riot, injustice, and civil society, all of them politically powerful but analytically elusive (Brass 1996, Cohen and Arato 1992, Edwards, Foley, and Diani 2001, Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, and Rucht 2002, Herzog 1998, Moore 1979, Plotz 2000, Schweingruber 2000, Vermunt and Steensma 1991). They also include terror, terrorism, and terrorists. This brief survey shows how and why. In his address to Congress nine days after the devastating attacks of 11 September 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush declared that “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated” (U.S. Dept. of State 2002a: i). “In this global campaign against terrorism,” echoed Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in May 2002: no country has the luxury of remaining on the sidelines. There are no sidelines. Terrorists respect no limits, geographic or moral. The frontlines are everywhere and the stakes are high. Terrorism not only kills people. It also threatens democratic institutions, undermines economies, and destabilizes regions. (U.S. Dept. of State 2002a: iii)

In the words of the President and the Secretary of State, terror, terrorism, and terrorists become inseparable concepts, coherent entities, efficacious actors, and enemies to be eradicated. Students of political processes and collective violence should certainly pay attention to such reification; it exerts a significant influence on world politics. But they should not incorporate the categories wholesale into their own descriptions and explanations of the political processes at hand. In particular, social scientists who attempt to explain sudden attacks on civilian targets should doubt the existence of a distinct, coherent class of actors (terrorists) who specialize in a unitary form of 93

94  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons political action (terror) and thus establish a separate variety of politics (terrorism). This essay argues instead that:





• The word “terror” points to a widely recurrent but imprecisely bounded political strategy. • We can reasonably define that strategy as asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies using means that fall outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within some current regime. • A great variety of individuals and groups engage in terror, thus defined, from time to time, most often alternating terror with other political strategies or with political inaction. • Groups and networks specializing in terror and no other forms of political action do sometimes form, but they typically remain unstable and ephemeral. • Most groups and networks that engage in terror overlap extensively with ­government-employed and government-backed specialists in coercion—armies, police, militias, paramilitaries, and the like. • Even when they organize in opposition to existing governments, specialists in coercion typically adopt forms of organization, external connections, and sources of supply resembling those of government-employed specialists. • Most uses of terror actually occur as complements or by-products of struggles in which participants—often including the so-called terrorists—are simultaneously or successively engaging in other more routine varieties of political claim making. • Terror as a strategy therefore ranges from a) intermittent actions by members of groups that are engaged in wider political struggles to b) one segment in the modus operandi of durably organized specialists in coercion, including government-employed and government-backed specialists in coercion, to c) the dominant rationale for distinct, committed groups and networks of activists. • Despite the publicity it has received recently, variety c) accounts for a highly variable but usually very small share of all the terror that occurs in the contemporary world.

In fact, the State Department’s own reporting on world affairs generally confirms this argument. The State Department tracks the world’s vindictive violence from two distinct perspectives. Mandated by Congress, it issues separate annual reports on human rights and on global terrorism. Under the administration of John F. Kennedy, as Congress appropriated funds for foreign aid it also required the executive branch to report on human rights violations. In its current version, the annual human rights report draws information from American embassies across the world on local instances of government-backed torture, cruel punishment, irregular detention, drastic civil liberties restrictions, compulsory labor, child labor, and related abuses. Issued in May 2002, the State Department’s statement on human rights during 2001 made an obligatory reference to fighting terrorism, roughly equating



Chapter 9: Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists  95

g­ overnments that violate human rights with governments that promote international terror. It declared that its country reports capture: a world still reeling and reacting to the events of last September. Yet the Reports’ central mission remains the same—to give voice to those who have been denied the freedoms and rights provided for in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The Reports confirm that the battle of ideas between those who suppress democracy and human rights and those who would see them flourish remains far from over. Only through the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms can the international community be secure from the scourge of terrorism (U.S. Dept. of State 2002b: 1).

Nevertheless, the 2001 report on human rights, like its predecessors, focused on ways that governments mistreat (or tolerate the mistreatment of) their own citizens. The State Department’s annual human rights report complements the work of such organizations as Human Rights Watch and Freedom House by cataloguing specific abuses one country at a time (see Human Rights Watch 2000, Karatnycky 2000). Each one of these agencies issues an annual inventory of grim governmental actions and of governmental complicity with other people’s assaults on citizens. By no means all the abuses they report qualify as violence in the brute force sense of immediate infliction of physical damage. Only a minority of the violent events, furthermore, qualify as terror defined as asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies using means that fall outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within the current regime. But all of them constitute significant threats to the quality of life in the offending countries. Since the 1980s, the State Department also sends Congress an annual document called Patterns of Global Terrorism (Johnson 2001). The State Department defines terrorism as “politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience” (Ruby 2002: 10). Any such definition has the disadvantage of requiring information on motivations and intentions; in fact, solid evidence on motivations and intentions rarely becomes available for collective violence. Still, the report’s implicit selection principles single out attacks on noncombatant targets by other than regularly constituted national military forces, especially when someone broadcasts political claims on behalf of the attackers. Where do the data come from? By congressional mandate, since the 1980s the State Department has issued an annual report on global terrorism. Until 2003, State Department officials collected annual summaries from embassies across the world, compiling them into a global catalog with simple statistics. After 9/11 and shortly before the American invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration changed the reporting procedure. It created the (ominously named) Terrorist Threat Integration Center. The new center took over responsibility for preparation of the annual catalog, which in turn compiled reports from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal

96  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense. Descriptive details, nevertheless, seem to have come largely from press reports. The new coordination did not work well. The State Department’s annual report for 2003, issued on 29 April 2004, stated that acts of terrorism had declined from 346 in 2001 to 198 in 2002 to a record low 190 in 2003 (U.S. Dept. of State 2004a: 1). Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage took credit for the decline on behalf of the Bush administration’s antiterror efforts. “You will find in these pages,” declared Armitage, “clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight” (Associated Press 2004: 1). After prodding by Congressman Henry Waxman of California, however, on 10 June the department issued a retraction: the 2003 data from the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security Department, and Defense Department were “incomplete and in some cases incorrect” (U.S. Dept. of State 2004b: 1). Between my consulting the 2003 report on 20 June 2004 and my follow-up the next day, the report disappeared from the State Department Web site. By the morning of 23 June, a “Year in Review (Revised)” had appeared at the Web site. The revision not only raised the event count for 2003 from 190 to 208, but also increased some figures for earlier years (State 2004c). At the 22 June press conference releasing the new numbers, Secretary of State Colin Powell conducted an irritable exchange with reporters: Asked if the new statistics meant that the United States was not “prevailing,” Mr. Powell said that he had to leave for a meeting at the White House but that two specialists would explain. “Here are the experts,” he said. “They will tell you.” (Weisman 2004: A12)

Experts J. Cofer Black, coordinator for counterterrorism, and John O. Brennan, director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, blamed an obsolete database and a defective computer program for the previous undercount. More than one critic raised doubts about the explanation (e.g., Krueger 2004, Krueger and Laitin 2004, Krugman 2004). By a year later, in any case, the official story had changed considerably. Philip Zelikow had been executive director of the government’s National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the 9/11 Commission. He had largely authored the commission’s widely read final report. Among a great many other changes in the gathering and dissemination of terror-related intelligence, the report recommended establishment of a National Counterterrorism Center (Commission 2004: 403–406). The government created its new terrorism data center a few months after the report’s publication. By the spring of 2005, Zelikow had become counselor of the State Department. Meanwhile, John Brennan had become interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The new center still reported to the State Department, but now lived a partly separate existence as custodian of a national database on terror.



Chapter 9: Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists  97

To the surprise and consternation of many specialists in the study of terror, the NCTC abandoned the format and procedures of previous annual reports on terror. At a Zelikow-sponsored press conference unveiling the NCTC’s new “Country Reports on Terrorism,” Brennan declared to skeptical reporters that: To ensure a more comprehensive accounting of terrorist incidents, we in the NCTC significantly increased the level of effort from three part-time individuals to 10 full-time analysts, and we took a number of other steps to improve quality control and database management. This increased level of effort allowed a much deeper review of far more information and, along with Iraq, are the primary reasons for the significant growth in a number of terrorist incidents being reported. (Zelikow 2005: 3)

As compared with the (upwardly revised) 208 incidents for 2003, the 2004 report enumerated a full 651 significant international terrorist incidents—a tripling of the count in a single year. Under reporters’ questioning, Zelikow and Brennan denied that the numbers actually recorded an increase in worldwide terrorism, much less that the government’s well-advertised war on terror was failing. They did not, oddly, take the obvious social scientific step: compare the number of events the previous year’s procedures would have yielded with the number produced by the new, superior procedures. But they did concede in passing that in 2004 far more events had shown up from Iraq and Kashmir than the State Department had reported in 2003. The number of Iraqi events rose from 22 to 201, the number of Kashmiri events from 50 to 284 (Zelikow 2005: 3, 5, plus my count from the 2003 report). Those two increases, totaling 413, account almost fully for the rise in total events from 210 to 651. The numbers suggest an at least equally plausible alternative to the official explanation: Kashmir extremists stepped up their terror campaign as the Indian and Pakistani governments took steps toward rapprochement, while in Iraq insurgent attacks on noncombatant foreigners multiplied enormously. The fact that every single Iraqi incident reported for 2003 had already involved an attack on non-Iraqi noncombatants supports the alternative interpretation. The annual reports actually describe two different kinds of events: 1. what they call “significant terrorist incidents”: attacks their specialists regard as crossing international lines—because the attackers came from outside the country, because they received substantial backing from outside, or because they assaulted foreigners 2. other attacks by domestic groups on domestic targets Above a fairly small scale, the State Department’s locally knowledgeable observers probably report the bulk of qualifying actions in the first category for the world as a whole. Those are the events for which they supply synopses one by one and make annual counts. They surely miss the vast majority of the world’s violent events in

98  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons category 2 (cf. Bonneuil and Auriat 2000, Davenport 2000, Martínez 2001, Tilly 2003). Figure 9.1 displays the trend of events in the first category from 1980 through 2004. Clearly the overall trend ran downward, despite the uptick produced by the new reporting procedures in 2004. The State Department’s count of international terrorist incidents reached a high point in 1988, and generally declined thereafter. The number of deaths in attacks rose from 233 to 405 to an estimated 3,547 (including 3,000 deaths assigned to 11 September) from 1999 to 2001. Nevertheless, the 346 attacks of 2001 lay far below the frequencies of the 1980s, and the overall levels of casualties declined as well from the 1980s onward. (The similarly defined Enders-Sandler series for death-dealing events alone from 1970 to 1999 shows a second lethal peak during the early 1990s, and a steep decline thereafter [Enders and Sandler 2002: 161]). From the later 1990s, around half of all tallied attacks consisted not of injuries to persons but of bombs directed at oil pipelines, especially pipelines carrying oil northward to the United States through Colombia. The perpetrators were frequently engaging in shakedowns of oil companies rather than assaults on the United States as such. That fact in itself demonstrates that State Department specialists interpreted the “political motivation” required by their definition of terror rather broadly. When they did voice demands, attackers described in the reports most often called for autonomy or independence for some subnational population or region, replacement of existing governments, or redress of wrongs done to some organization. On the whole, international terrorist incidents identified by State Department observers rose and fell with the activity of independence movements. Whether the minor rise that occurred during the later 1990s represents a new sort of political campaign remains to be seen. The overall trend still runs downward. Unsurprisingly, the State Department’s summaries of international terrorist incidents give special attention to attacks on American interests—American citizens, American service personnel attacked outside of their normal military activity, property owned by Americans or the U.S. government, and United States territory itself. Thus the airborne attacks of 11 September 2001 received exceptional attention in the year’s report, but still counted as just four of the year’s 346 “significant terrorist incidents” (State 2002a). The previous year’s report had explicitly singled out South Asia as a base for terrorism directed toward U.S. interests, called special attention to the Afghan Taliban’s provision of safe haven for Osama bin Laden and his network, linked the lethal bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen (October 2000) to bin Laden, and added: The Government of Pakistan increased its support to the Taliban and continued its support to militant groups active in Indian-held Kashmir, such as the Harakat ulMujahadin (HUM), some of which engaged in terrorism. (U.S. Dept. of State 2001, Asia Overview 2)

Figure 9.1  Total International Terrorist Attacks, 1980–2004 Source: U.S. State Department, Patterns of Global Terrorism, Selected Years, and National Counterterrorism Center, Chronology of Significant International Terrorism for 2004

100  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons As mirrored in its annual reports on the subject, then, the State Department’s working definition of terror singles out violence committed by relatively well-­connected groups and directed against politically significant targets of other nationalities, especially of American nationality. Terrorists are the people who perform such acts, and terrorism is the fact of their performing it.

To Define Terror Although definitions as such cannot be true or false, in social science useful definitions should point to detectible phenomena that exhibit some degree of causal coherence—in principle all instances should display common properties that embody or result from similar cause-effect relations. By that criterion, what violent events actually ought to qualify as terrorism? Beginning with citations from the 1790s, the Oxford English Dictionary gives two definitions for terrorism: “1. government by intimidation as directed and carried out by the party in power in France during the Revolution of 1789–94 . . . 2. a policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted. Both definitions point to the asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within the current regime.” The word terror itself entered the West’s political vocabulary as a name for French revolutionaries’ actions against their domestic enemies in 1793 and 1794. It referred to governmental repression, most directly in the form of executions. About 17,000 legal executions occurred under the Terror, and something like 23,000 more occurred illegally (Greer 1935). Some scholars also argue that deaths in the fierce Vendée civil wars of 1793–1795 should count as consequences of the Terror; their inclusion would bring the total up to the vicinity of 200,000 dead on all sides including regular troops (Gérard 1999, Guenniffey 2000: 234–235). At either extreme of the estimates, historians of the French Revolution continue to think of the original Terror as state-organized or state-backed visitation of violence on France’s dissident citizenry during the two central years of radical revolutionary power. Since the French Revolution, the word terror has expanded in scope. Writers on terror continue to use it for governmental intimidation of citizens, as in Stalin’s use of executions to still dissent within the Soviet Union (Mayer 2000). But they also use the term frequently to designate clandestine attacks on governmental targets by domestic opponents such as Basque separatists, the Irish Republican Army, and Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Schmid 2001). At times, furthermore, such civil-war practices as ethnic cleansing and genocide receive the designation terror (e.g., Taylor 1999). Thus the term sprawls across a wide range of human cruelties. Amid the sprawl, is a coherent phenomenon at work? No useful generalization covers all the different sorts of political interaction for which observers, analysts, and participants sometimes use the term terror, much less for terrorists and terrorism. But we can identify some order in the phenomenon by means of four steps: 1) noticing



Chapter 9: Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists  101

that a recurrent strategy of intimidation occurs widely in contentious politics, and corresponds approximately to what many people mean by terror, 2) recognizing that a wide variety of individuals, groups, and networks sometimes employ that strategy, 3) relating the strategy systematically to other forms of political struggle proceeding in the same settings and populations, and 4) seeing that specialists in coercion ranging from government employees to bandits sometimes deploy terror under certain political circumstances, usually with far more devastating effects than the terror operations of nonspecialists. Terror as a Strategy.  Asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within the current regime does have a crude logic of its own. In addition to whatever harm it inflicts directly, it sends signals—signals that the target is vulnerable, that the perpetrators exist, that the perpetrators have the capacity to strike again. The signals typically reach three different audiences: the targets themselves, potential allies of the perpetrators, and third parties that might cooperate with one or the other. Although some users of terror (for example, a minority of nineteenth-century anarchists) operate on the theory that destruction of evil objects is a good in itself, most terror supports demands for recognition, redress, autonomy, or transfers of power. Considered as a strategy, terror works best when it alters or inhibits the target’s disapproved behavior, fortifies the perpetrators’ standing with potential allies, and moves third parties toward greater cooperation with the perpetrators’ organization and announced program. Multiple Uses of Terror.  From Mafiosi to ruthless governments, people who operate protection rackets intermittently deploy terror against enemies and uncertain clients (Gambetta 1993, Stanley 1996, Varese 2001, Volkov 2000, 2002). Whether or not they operate large-scale protection rackets, repressive governments frequently apply terror to threatening minorities. Weak, beleaguered governments commonly adopt the strategy of exemplary punishment: inflicting terrible public retaliation on those few enemies they manage to seize, with the announced threat of visiting similar punishments on others who dare to challenge them. But dissidents seeking autonomy, striking at their rivals, or trying to bring down governments likewise sometimes engage in asymmetrical deployment of threats and violence against enemies by means that fall outside the forms of political struggle routinely operating within the current regime. During the last few decades, religious and ethnic activists have been by far the most frequent nongovernmental strategists of terror (see, e.g., Beissinger 2001, Gurr 2000, Horowitz 2001, Kakar 1996). Sometimes they have demanded autonomy, sometimes they have sought control of existing governments, but often enough they have struck directly at their religious and ethnic rivals. The terrible Rwandan genocide of 1994 pivoted ultimately on ethnic control of the Rwandan state, and despite the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi ended with seizure of state power by Tutsi-dominated military forces. The genocide itself activated all these different

102  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons uses of terror (Des Forges et al. 1999, Mamdani 2001, Pillay 2001, Prunier 1995, 2001, Taylor 1999, Uvin 2001). Terror and Other Forms of Struggle.  As these varied examples suggest, the strategy of terror appears across a wide variety of political circumstances, in the company of very different sorts of political struggle. Attacks of Irish Protestant and Catholic activists on each other and on governmental targets, for instance, frequently follow the strategy of terror, but they generally intersect with other forms of negotiation at international, national, and local levels (Jarman 1997, Keogh 2001). In many parts of the world, specialized military forces—governmental, nongovernmental, and antigovernmental—frequently engage in kidnapping, murder, and mutilation in addition to their occasional pitched battles with other armed forces. To take just one case, during the late 1990s the self-styled Allied Democratic Forces ravaged the Rwenzori mountain region of western Uganda, brutalizing and killing civilians and looting. Hundreds of civilians were killed in ADF raids and ambushes on unprotected civilian homes throughout the year. Some of those killed by the ADF were mutilated, sometimes by beheading. Civilians, both adults and children, were abducted during ADF raids to serve as porters or for forced recruitment into the rebel army. (Human Rights Watch 2000: 84)

Because armed forces depend on arms, equipment, food, and pay even when they are living off the land, such terror-wielding armies thrive especially where they can seize control of income-generating resources such as drugs, timber, diamonds, and other minerals. They then often adopt terror to maintain control of the crucial resources rather than concentrating on the seizure of state power. Extensive connections with emigrant diasporas magnify those effects, most likely because the exiles both provide external support for rebels and offer conduits for contraband into and out of rebel territory (Collier and Hoeffler 2001). Terror and Specialists in Coercion.  The prominence of organized armed forces in certain types of terror lends itself to analytic confusion. It is all too easy to conflate terror-deploying governments, armies, militias, paramilitaries, and rebels with conspiratorial zealots. The State Department’s general statements about human rights and terror in 2001 featured just such a conflation. We actually need a twofold distinction: first between violent specialists and others, then between actors who deploy terror within their own operating territories and those who direct it elsewhere. Figure 9.2 schematizes the two distinctions, assigning characteristic names to the four corners of a two-dimensional space. Autonomists stand for all those politically active groups whose members sometimes launch terror attacks on authorities, symbolic objects, rivals, or stigmatized populations on their own territories without becoming durably organized specialists in coercion. Zealots maintain similar connections with



  103

Specialists

Militias

Conspirators

Degreeof Specialization inCoercion

Non-specialists

Autonornists Horne Territory

Zealots Outside Horne Territory

Major Loeus ofViolent Attacks

Figure 9.2  A Crude Typology of Terror-Wielding Groups and Networks

D.S. State Department definition of terror: politically motivated violence perpetrated agaimt

noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience

Terror in this diagram: asymmetrical deployment ofthreats and violence agaimt enemies

outside the forms ofpolitical struggle routinely operating within the current regime

Autonomists: all those politically active groups whose members sometimes launch terror

attacks on authorities, symbolic objects, rivals, or stigmatized populations on their own territories without becoming durably organized specialists in coercion. Zealots maintain similar connections with each other, but commit their violent acts outside of their own base territories; they include long-term exiles who return home to attack their enemies. Governmental, non-governmental, and anti-governmental Militias maintain enduring organizations of coercive specialists and exercise terror within their base territories. Compirators organize specialized striking forces for operations away from base. (Terrorinflicting armies that operate abroad also fit into this corner of the diagram, but they strike even more rarely than do mobile organizations of conspirators.)

104  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons each other, but commit their violent acts outside of their own base territories; they include long-term exiles who return home to attack their enemies. Governmental, nongovernmental, and anti-governmental Militias maintain enduring organizations of coercive specialists and exercise terror within their base territories. Finally, Conspirators organize specialized striking forces for operations away from base. (Terror-inflicting armies that operate abroad also fit into this corner of the diagram, but they strike even more rarely than do mobile organizations of conspirators.) The diagram as a whole summarizes this paper’s main point: a remarkable array of actors sometimes adopt terror as a strategy, and therefore no coherent set of cause-effect propositions can explain terrorism as a whole. The crude typology distinguishes four rather different sorts of relations between the authors and victims of terror, hence four different varieties of politics. It also emphasizes a crucial fact about actually existing terror: very little of it actually occurs in the diagram’s upper right-hand corner—where we find specialists in coercion who operate outside their home bases. Most terror occurs on the perpetrators’ own home territory, and nonspecialists—zealots—inflict a significant share of the terror that does occur outside of home territory. The fact does not diminish the horror of 11 September 2001. But it does warn against analyzing all terror as if it consisted of closer or more distant approximations to that terrible series of attacks on the United States. Properly understood, terror is a strategy, not a creed. Terrorists range across a wide spectrum of organizations, circumstances, and beliefs. Terrorism is not a single causally coherent phenomenon. No social scientist can responsibly speak as though it were.

References Associated Press (2004). “U.S. Wrongly Reported Drop in World Terrorism in 2003,” New York Times, June 11, online edition. Beissinger, Mark (2001). Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonneuil, Noël, and Nadia Auriat (2000). “Fifty Years of Ethnic Conflict and Cohesion, 1945–94,” Journal of Peace Research 37: 563–581. Brass, Paul R., ed. (1996). Riots and Pogroms. New York: New York University Press. Cohen, Jean L., and Andrew Arato (1992). Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Collier, Paul, and Anke Hoeffler (2001). “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” unpublished paper, World Bank. Commission (2004). National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report. New York: Norton. Davenport, Christian (2000). “Introduction” to Christian Davenport, ed., Paths to State Repression. Human Rights Violations and Contentious Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.



Chapter 9: Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists  105

Des Forges, Alison, et al. (1999). Leave None to Tell the Story. Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch. Edwards, Bob, Michael W. Foley, and Mario Diani, eds. (2001). Beyond Tocqueville. Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Enders, Walter, and Todd Sandler (2002). “Patterns of Transnational Terrorism, 1970–1999: Alternative Time-Series Estimates,” International Studies Quarterly 46: 145–165. Ferree, Myra Marx, William A. Gamson, Jürgen Gerhards, and Dieter Rucht (2002). “Four Models of the Public Sphere in Modern Democracies,” Theory and Society 31: 289–324. Gambetta, Diego (1993). The Sicilian Mafia. The Business of Private Protection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gérard, Alain (1999). “Par principe d’ humanité . . . “ La Terreur et la Vendée. Paris: Fayard. Greer, Donald (1935). The Incidence of the Terror During the French Revolution. A Statistical Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guenniffey, Patrice (2000). La Politique de la Terreur. Essai sur la Violence Révolutionnaire, 1789–1794. Paris: Fayard. Gurr, Ted Robert (2000). Peoples Versus States. Minorities at Risk in the New Century. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press. Herzog, Don (1998). Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Horowitz, Donald L. (2001). The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkeley: University of California Press. Human Rights Watch (2000). World Report 2000. New York: Human Rights Watch. Jarman, Neil (1997). Material Conflicts. Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland. Oxford: Berg. Johnson, Larry C. (2001). “The Future of Terrorism,” American Behavioral Scientist 44: 894–913. Kakar, Sudhir (1996). The Colors of Violence. Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Karatnycky, Adrian, ed. (2000). Freedom in the World. The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction. Keogh, Dermot (2001). “Ireland at the Turn of the Century: 1994–2001,” in T.W. Moody and F.X. Martin, eds., The Course of Irish History, 4th edition. Lanham, MD: Roberts Rinehart. Krueger, Alan B. (2004). “To Improve Terrorism Data, the U.S. Should Follow the Lead of Economic Statistics,” New York Times, July 22, p. C2. Krueger, Alan B., and David D. Laitin (2004). “‘Misunderestimating’ Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 5: 8–13. Krugman, Paul (2004). “Errors on Terror,” New York Times, June 25, p. A23. Mamdani, Mahmood (2001). When Victims Become Killers. Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Martínez, Astrid, ed. (2001). Economía, Crimen y Conflicto. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Mayer, Arno J. (2000). The Furies. Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

106  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Moore, Barrington, Jr. (1979). Injustice. The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt. White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Pillay, Navanethem (2001). “Sexual Violence in Times of Conflict: The Jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” in Simon Chesterman, ed., Civilians in War. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Plotz, John M. (2000). The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Prunier, Gérard (1995). The Rwanda Crisis. History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (2001): “Genocide in Rwanda,” in Daniel Chirot and Martin E.P. Seligman, eds., Ethnopolitical Warfare. Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Ruby, Charles L. (2002). “The Definition of Terrorism,” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 2: 9–14. Schmid, Alex P., ed. (2001). Countering Terrorism Through International Cooperation. Milan: International Scientific and Professional Advisory Council of the United Nations Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Programme. Schweingruber, David (2000). “Mob Sociology and Escalated Force: Sociology’s Contribution to Repressive Police Tactics,” Sociological Quarterly 41: 371–389. Stanley, William (1996). The Protection Racket State. Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War in El Salvador. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Taylor, Christopher C. (1999). Sacrifice as Terror. The Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Oxford: Berg. Tilly, Charles (2003). The Politics of Collective Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. U.S. Department of State (2000). Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, U.S. Department of State, “Patterns of Global Terrorism 1999,” www.usis.usemb.se/terror/rpt1999/index.html. ——— (2001). Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, “Patterns of Global Terrorism 2000,” www.usis.usemb.se/terror/rpt2000/index.html. ——— (2002a). Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, “Patterns of Global Terrorism 2001,” www.usis.usemb.se/terror/rpt2001/index.html. ——— (2002b). Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2001,” www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/8147pf.html. ——— (2004a). U.S. Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, “Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003,” www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2003/31569.html, viewed 20 June 2004. ——— (2004b). “Correction to Global Patterns of Terrorism Will Be Issued.” June 10 press statement by Richard Boucher, www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/soor/33433.html, viewed 20 June 2004. ——— (2005). U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2004: Peru.” www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/ hrrpt/200/41771.html, viewed 1 March 2005. Uvin, Peter (2001). “Reading the Rwandan Genocide,” International Studies Review 3: 75–99. Varese. Federico (2001). The Russian Mafia. Private Protection in a New Market Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



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Vermunt, Riël, and Herman Steensma, eds. (1991). Social Justice in Human Relations. New York: Plenum. 2 vols. Volkov, Vadim (2000). “The Political Economy of Protection Rackets in the Past and the Present,” Social Research 67: 709–744. ——— (2002). Violent Entrepreneurs. The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Weisman, Steven R. (2004). “State Department Report Shows Increase in Terrorism.” New York Times, June 23, p. A12. Zelikow, Philip (2005). “Remarks on Release of ‘Country Reports on Terrorism’ for 2004,” www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/rm/45279.htm, viewed 21 May 2005.

Source Note “Terror, Terrorism, Terrorists,” Sociological Theory 22 (2004), 5–13. 

Chapter 10

Linkers, Diggers, and Glossers in Social Analysis “In recent years,” declare Hans Medick and David Sabean, social historians have been calling into question many aspects of their practice. They are no longer sure in what way the story which they relate is part of a larger story of political change, the struggle for power, and the analysis of the forces of domination. There is a tendency on the part of some of the profession to regard structures, especially those amenable to statistical abstraction, as the proper object of investigation, whilst others centre their interest on an analysis of agency. (Medick and Sabean 1984: 1)

Thus begins a book devoted to the exploration of agency, of ethnographic approaches to social history, and of doubts about the determinisms that have so far pervaded the thinking of most social historians. A new debate has opened. The debate does not concern method alone. It concerns the aims and presuppositions of valid social history. Social historians differ, as is their right, on the proper mission of social history. Some of them see social history as the analysis of articulation between large structures and processes, on the one hand, and the lives of ordinary people, on the other; let us call these social historians linkers. Some social historians conceive of it as an auxiliary to political history, exploring the social bases of the actions that constitute national and international politics; dub them diggers. And some understand their calling as largely hermeneutic: reconstructing significant past actions in terms of the meanings they had for their actors; since these social historians specialize in the interpretation of texts, we might label them glossers. The distinctions run roughly like this:    FOCUS OF ANALYSIS: SOCIAL PROCESS POLITICS RELATIONAL linkers diggers METHOD: HERMENEUTIC glossers glossers

108



Chapter 10: Linkers, Diggers, and Glossers in Social Analysis  109

Some glossers, that is, focus on the interpretation of social processes, and some focus on the interpretation of politics, but the differences between them are narrower than the divergences between analysts of relations who focus on social processes (linkers) and those who concentrate on politics (diggers). Although most of my own work belongs firmly in the linkers’ camp, this paper will not advocate priorities among the three views. It will take for granted that all three enterprises are legitimate and ask about their implications—individual and collective—for the analysis of systematic variation in social history. The divergence of views lends spice to social history. It also produces uncertainty about the discipline’s boundaries and subdivisions. Any coherent intellectual discipline combines four elements: 1) a set of certified practitioners who communicate with each other, 2) an ensemble of questions that guide the practitioners’ inquiries, 3) a body of evidence those practitioners collectively regard as worthy of attention, and 4) approved ways of using the evidence to answer the questions. (Most disciplines also include a fifth element: an institutional structure in the form of journals, professional associations, meetings, and the like; the institutions matter less for this discussion than do the other four elements.) Linkers, diggers, and glossers disagree somewhat on all four counts: who belongs to the discipline, what questions have priority, what evidence commands attention, what uses of the evidence deserve credence. Glossers, for example, show greater sympathy for oral history than do linkers or diggers and have a greater inclination to cast any source as a text to interpret for coherent meaning. Conversely, they prefer sources containing descriptions and narratives, which are more amenable to textual explication than the administrative byproducts that fill most archives. Linkers, on the other hand, frequently employ routine sources, such as tax rolls and birth registers, that provide little material for interpretation. They turn more readily to the search for patterns in substantial series of documents. That fact supplies the truth in the generally false accusation that they pant after numbers. Linkers, diggers, and glossers, nevertheless, overlap considerably with respect to their definitions of disciplinary membership, proper evidence, and appropriate methods. They disagree especially about the questions worth asking. Linkers ask a great variety of questions, but those questions pivot on the connections between large transformations and small-scale social experiences. Which large transformations and which small-scale experiences depend, of course, on the periods and places in question. Chinese historians inevitably attend to the expansion and contraction of the empire and to the fortunes of patrilineal descent groups, while historians of the Middle East have no choice but to contend with the transformations and divisions of Islam. Among historians of the Western family since 1400, characteristic linking questions concern how capitalism, and then capitalist industrialization affected household composition, how the strategies of proletarian couples influenced employers’ hiring, and whether ideological sea changes such as secularization reshaped relations between parents and children. For most linkers who deal with the recent history of Western

110  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons countries, proper objects of study include population growth, urbanization, changes in family structure, voting preferences, associational life, popular collective action, literacy, capital accumulation, and alterations in popular recreation. Such diverse subjects have a unifying thread: the connection of large social structures and changes with social experience at the scale of the individual or group. When Lawrence Stone hailed the “revival of narrative” in historical writing, he suggested that such problems were losing favor among historians, after two decades of dominating the agenda. Analytic history, he claimed, was giving way to narrative and the interpretation of cultures. Eminent linker Eric Hobsbawm replied, however, that Stone exaggerated the strength of the trend, that analytic history continued to flourish, and that much of the new writing Stone had in mind actually consisted of efforts to convey intelligibly the results of analytic history. He summarized: In short those historians who continue to believe in the possibility of generalizing about human societies and their development, continue to be interested in “the big why questions”, though they may sometimes focus on different ones from those on which they concentrated twenty or thirty years ago. (Hobsbawm 1980: 4)

The big “why” questions include the diggers’ inquiries into social bases of politics, but range well beyond them. They do not ordinarily involve much of the glossers’ textual interpretation. Hobsbawm’s own work in social history, which extends from studies of bandits, agrarian rebels, and tramping workers, to general treatments of capitalist development, exemplifies the linkers’ effort to relate small-scale social life to large transformations. At times, the aspirations of linkers reach to “total history” or “the history of society.” In the style of Fernand Braudel, the aspiration leads to the simultaneous discussion of material life, population trends, economic cycles, changes of regime, and ideological innovations. But it also has a more modest, controlled, empiricist form. Adeline Daumard, for example, examines French comparative and quantitative history so as “to deepen our knowledge of French society and clarify the nature of the transition from the society of the Old Regime to contemporary society” (Daumard 1985: 1). Her examples bear mainly on empirical analyses of changes in wealth, occupation, and class structure in different cities. Clearly, linkers come in many styles. Diggers, when they speak about historical method, commonly show less tolerance than linkers for alternative modes of analysis. When Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese decry the “political crisis of social history,” they make their judgment unambiguous: as admirable as much of the recent social history has been and as valuable as much of the description of the life of the lower classes may eventually prove, the subject as a whole is steadily sinking into a neoantiquarian swamp presided over by liberal ideologues, the burden of whose political argument—notwithstanding the usual pretense of not having a political argument—rests on an evasion of class confrontation . . . No amount



Chapter 10: Linkers, Diggers, and Glossers in Social Analysis  111 of superficial enthusiasm for “popular culture” or the symbolic representation of lowerclass dissent, much less for ostensibly new methods, can obscure the obfuscation of the continuing class struggle between contending social forces as manifested on politically decisive terrain. (Fox-Genovese and Genovese 1976: 214–215)

The condemnation strikes first at linkers, and then at glossers. Fox-Genovese and Genovese condemn as evasion any social history that does not address the question of political power. As compared with linkers and glossers, they draw a different boundary around the specialty—doubting, for example, that quantitative political history, population studies, and cliometric economic history belong in the discipline at all. Although they leave uncertain exactly which bodies of evidence and methods of analysis do qualify as valid social history, they state without cavil that the discipline’s central questions concern class struggle and political power. Similarly, Tony Judt complains that: social history is suffering a severe case of pollution. The subject has become a gathering place for the unscholarly, for historians bereft of ideas and subtlety. The writings thus produced are without theoretical content, a failing disguised by an obsession with method and technique. They represent collectively a loss of faith in history. In their reaction against the chronological imperatives of political and economic history, social historians have all but lost touch with the historical events altogether. (Judt 1979: 66)

Other diggers (e.g., Eley and Nield 1980) state their positions more moderately, but still insist that social history’s central questions concern the social bases of politics. Glossers think very differently. Speaking of the elderly woman, the pim who lives with and nurtures the children of the Luo people in Kenya, David Cohen points out that she lives her life “far from the contentions of the slave trade, colonial domination, the emerging city, and capitalist development.” But Pim, he remarks, along with her charges, serves the purposes of social history because she helps us understand the interior architecture of African society. Pim challenges us to comprehend, visualize, and disinter certain routines of behavior at their source, to understand the intimate structure of thought and activity through which simple routines become powerful repertoires, to see how these are given meaning and impulse. She challenges us to observe how this little social mechanism—aggregated thousands of times in ways pims in their siwindhes over generations each evolved—produces life and gives it order and logic and direction. (Cohen 1985: 195–196; for a rather different view of priorities in African history, see Cooper 1981a, 1981b, and 1983).

Thus, for Cohen, the practitioners of social history merge imperceptibly into the adepts of anthropology and archeology. Their evidence consists of observations and residues of routine social practices. Their central analytic procedures concern the discovery of coherence and significance in those practices. The guiding questions deal with meaning.

112  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Although Cohen certainly includes in African history the rise and fall of kingdoms, creation and re-creation of urban networks, fluctuations of the slave trade, and the ebb and flow of European imperialism, he distrusts any history that makes these externally defined processes the matrix of analysis. Instead, he declares, We must see how people compose their own lives in order to understand the composite forces around them. We must see how little routines have gathered into arrays, and how they rework the forms of social life. We must see how these forms are given meaning, and how force is imparted to them, and how they generate or rework still newer arrays of routines. (Cohen 1985: 227)

The resulting questions take a very general form; they ask about how different kinds of people lived, how they related to each other, how they changed. They amount to a kind of historical ethnography. David Cohen does not say that the social history of the linkers and the diggers is wrong. He only says that it is dangerous for the study of Africa, where it has led mainly to confusion and misrepresentation. He joins the doubts about structure and agency that haunt Hans Medick, David Sabean, and their ethnographophile collaborators. The diverse fragments of social history differ with respect to the importance that they give to the pursuit of systematic variation, and the kinds of systematic variation that preoccupy them. By systematic variation, I mean differences among comparable units that conform to an identifiable principle—declining over time, rising with wealth, falling into a limited number of well-defined types, or something of the sort. The social units in question may be individuals, personal networks, households, communities, firms, kinship groups, industries, national states, military alliances, or any number of other entities, just so long as at least three of them exist and there is a reliable means of determining whether any particular unit belongs to the set. Obviously, the pursuit of systematic variation requires comparison. But is it therefore identical to comparative history? Regrettably, the phrase “comparative history” has come to imply the simultaneous study of two or more of those fictitious entities called “societies.” The trouble starts there. No one has come up with a workable criterion for the identification of a society other than the presence of a national state. Yet theorists insist on endowing societies with properties such as a common culture and a coherent system of social control. For a few historians, “society” means something quite simple: no more than a population that falls under the jurisdiction of a particular national state. For them, comparison can proceed without too much difficulty. The concept runs into acute difficulty, however, under a number of conditions that often apply to comparisons in social history: 1. where and when national states do not exist, which means most of the world before the twentieth century;



Chapter 10: Linkers, Diggers, and Glossers in Social Analysis  113

2. in cases where a state abruptly begins, ceases, subdivides, or changes boundaries: Belgium, Panama, Germany, Texas, Manchuria, and Korea all provide telling instances; 3. in the presence of distinctive regional languages, religions, and social practices within the same state—the United Kingdom, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Malaysia, and Lebanon being evident contemporary examples; 4. to the extent that the analyst postulates the existence of a coherent structure and identity for each “society.” At least one of these conditions, it seems to me, usually obtains in efforts to compare societies. To that extent, we would be better off abandoning such comparisons, and turning to the analysis of structures and processes whose existence we can reasonably presume or verify. They need not be smaller in scale than the so-called societies; we may well compare continents, power blocs, national states, mass migrations, famines, or general wars. We may even compare world systems, if we can decide how to identify them. The point is to be clear and concrete about what we are comparing. For recent history, indeed, national states—and therefore the very units that many historians have actually had in mind when discussing “societies”—often provide appropriate units of analysis. National states became the world’s dominant organizations after 1400 or so, as conquest and consolidation first created the European state system and then imposed it on all the world. As states grew in power, they helped shape national markets, national languages, national churches, and any number of other nationally bounded institutions. With the widespread decolonization that followed World War II, furthermore, almost all the world fell into bounded, nominally autonomous states. Not all these states were similar entities. None came close to the sociological fantasy of an autonomous, coherent society with its distinct value system, general norms, shared beliefs, integrated social roles, mechanisms of social control, and coordinated behavior. The world’s recognized states today include Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Andorra, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burma, Burundi, and on through the alphabet to Vanuatu, the Vatican, Venezuela, Vietnam, Western Samoa, North Yemen, South Yemen, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. All of them have nominal sovereignty, diplomatic representation, control over some autonomous armed force, and some sort of distinctive governmental organization. In that sense, at least, all of them qualify as states. Beyond the defining attributes of a state, however, Albania, Andorra, Bahrain, Brazil, Brunei and Vanuatu have little in common. No one would want to undertake comparisons among them without clear awareness of the limits of any such comparison. Nevertheless, some subsets of these states do lend themselves to comparison, just so long as we recognize that we are not comparing coherent “societies,” but populations subject to the jurisdiction of different national states. It makes sense to

114  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons compare the experience of recently independent states with respect to military bids for power, and the experience of powerful industrial states in regard to inflation and unemployment. But comparisons must take place within a defensible theory of similarities and differences. Relevant similarities and differences appear at many scales. The delineation of world-systems—the largest strongly-connected interpersonal networks—is never easy. In principle, nevertheless, we can compare whole world-systems. At the other extreme, comparing individuals, households, or interpersonal bonds, one by one, frequently yields important returns for social history. The national scale has no particular priority. Despite much talk about states and societies, in fact, most effective comparisons in social history actually deal with much smaller social units. Having established bases of comparison, we still have a choice of strategies: individualizing, universalizing, encompassing, and variation-finding. The distinctions among them rest on the kinds of propositions they produce rather than the strict logic of the comparison. The relevant propositions lie along two continua: This proposition refers to a single instance of the phenomenon The phenomenon takes only one form single instance/one form = individualizing single instance/many forms = encompassing all instances/one form = universalizing all instances/many forms = variation-finding

This proposition refers to all instances of the phenomenon The phenomenon takes many forms

Individualizing comparison, then, contrasts specific instances of a given phenomenon as a means of specifying the particular properties of each instance. Thus James Lang (1975) compares the American colonizing strategies of England and Spain in his pursuit of the peculiar differences that came to separate North from South America. Encompassing comparison locates different instances at various points within the same system in order to explain their characteristics as functions of their variable relationship to the whole system. Thus G. William Skinner (1977) places Chinese cities within the dual hierarchies of markets and imperial administration, then accounts for differences among them by means of their relative positions in the two hierarchies. Universalizing comparison searches for the common properties of a class of instances on the way to propounding a general rule concerning that class. Thus Everett Hagen (1962) scrutinizes the experiences of Russia’s Old Believers, Britain’s Protestant Dissenters and Lowland Scots, Japan’s commoners, and Colombia’s Antiqueños to arrive at a model of the process by which economic innovators arise. Variation-finding comparison, finally, examines systematic differences among instances in hopes of specifying a unitary explanation of the differences. Thus Guy



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Swanson (1967) argues a relationship between a state’s authority structure and its religion, and offers variations in the European response to the Protestant Reformation in support of the argument. If we are searching for the secret of systematic variation, individualizing and universalizing comparison may help clear the way, but they will not get us very far. At their best, the two approaches lead to an accurate specification of a crucial case’s peculiarities or the common properties of a class of cases—no mean accomplishments, but not statements about systematic variation. Our real choice lies between encompassing and variation-finding comparison. On one side, the placement of all cases with respect to some larger structure or process, relations to which help explain the variation among the cases. On the other, identification of some principle of covariation that connects two or more features of each case. In the realm of national states, the distinction approximates the choice between “externalist” and “internalist” accounts of variation. In the realm of firms, it corresponds broadly to the choice between market-position and organizational accounts; in the realm of cities, between urban-hierarchy and economic-base accounts. As the examples suggest, the choices are not mutually exclusive; many explanations of systematic variation compound position in a system with distinctive traits of individual units, or treat one as the cause of the other. Nevertheless, relatively pure examples of encompassing and variation-finding comparisons exist. Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system analyses give high priority to encompassing comparison, while most economic historians’ accounts of the same events treat the various national experiences as relatively autonomous iterations of similar processes. Linkers and diggers separate from glossers at precisely this choice-point. Linkers undertake encompassing comparisons with a bit more enthusiasm than diggers, but the difference is not great. Both linkers and diggers often search for principles of variation that account for many cases, and challenge any proposed general principle on the ground that it does not fit known cases. Glossers, on the other hand, rarely venture into simultaneous comparisons of many cases, preferring to explicate one or two at a time. A combination of taste and fundamental belief constrains the glossers: they prefer to interpret a single experience in loving detail, cherish uniqueness, and doubt that a regular, knowable world exists. The division between them and linkers or diggers has ontological and epistemological roots. Only linkers and diggers take seriously the search for systematic variation by means of multiple comparisons. To glossers, that search seems a bootless enterprise. If they choose any comparison at all, it will be individualizing or universalizing. Where, then, do linkers and diggers separate? At the choice of scales for comparison, and at the value of encompassing comparison. Linkers see no difficulty with comparison at many scales, from the individual to the world-system; they only require that the comparison include the experiences of ordinary people. Nor do they hesitate to undertake encompassing comparisons, establishing how the experiences of ordinary people vary as a function of their relationship to large structures and processes.

116  Part III. Explanations and Comparisons Diggers maintain a stronger attachment to the national level of comparison—or at least to those levels at which they conceive genuine politics to operate. They remain suspicious of encompassing comparison, and more confident of individualizing, universalizing, or variation-finding comparison, because encompassing comparison challenges the base/superstructure analysis with which they prefer to work. For diggers, in the last analysis, systematic variation in politics occurs across distinctive, relatively independent social settings, and stems from differences in the fundamental character of those social settings. Under those circumstances, encompassing comparison makes little sense. In the short run, no single empirical test—however grand—can measure the relative merits of the positions on historical comparison taken by linkers, diggers, and glossers. Yet the choice among them is neither arbitrary nor trivial. In the long run, however, their relative predominance will profoundly influence the character and results of comparative social history. We linkers see both the diggers and the glossers as too narrow, although in different ways. Yet if their premises are correct, much of our work is futile. In that regard, at least, experience will tell. To judge the value of linking, digging, and glossing, let us weigh the actual contributions of the three approaches to social history.

References Braudel, Fernand (1981–1984). Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. New York: Harper and Row. 3 vols. Cohen, David William (1985). “Doing Social History from Pim’s Doorway,” in Olivier Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past. The Worlds of Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Cooper, Frederick (1981a). “Africa and the World Economy,” African Studies Review 24: 1–86. ——— (1981b). “Peasants, Capitalists, and Historians: A Review Article,” Journal of Southern African Studies 7: 284–314. ———, ed. (1983). Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Daumard, Adeline (1985). “Histoire sociale comparative de l’époque contemporaine,” Institut d’Histoire Economique et Sociale de l’Université de Paris I. Recherches et Travaux 14: 1–52. Eley, Geoff, and Keith Nield (1980). “Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?” Social History 5: 249–269. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene Genovese (1976). “The Political Crisis of Social History: A Marxian Perspective,” Journal of Social History 10: 205–220. Hagen, Everett E. (1962). On the Theory of Social Change. How Economic Growth Begins. Homewood, IL: Dorsey. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1980). “The Revival of Narrative: Some Comments,” Past and Present 86: 3–8.



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Judt, Tony (1979). “A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians,” History Workshop 7: 66–94. Lang, James (1975). Conquest and Commerce. Spain and England in the Americas. New York: Academic Press. Medick, Hans, and David Warren Sabean, eds. (1984). Interest and Emotion. Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, G. William (1977). “Cities and the Hierarchy of Local Systems,” in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stone, Lawrence (1979). “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present 86: 3–24. Swanson, Guy E. (1967). Religion and Regime. A Sociological Account of the Reformation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1979). The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Source Note “Linkers, Diggers, and Glossers in Social Analysis,” unpublished paper, except for Polish translation of an early version: “Tkacze, Kopacze i Egzegeci w Historii Spolecznej,” Historyka 19 (1989), 33–45.

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Part IV Historical Social Analysis

Chapter 11

History and Sociological Im agining Sociology without history resembles a Hollywood set: great scenes, sometimes brilliantly painted, with nothing and nobody behind them. Seen only as the science of the present or—worse yet—of the timeless, sociology misses its vocation to fix causation in time. It thereby vitiates its vital influence on historical thinking, its influence as the study of social mechanisms operating continuously in specific times and places. Although, after years of living in the borderland of the two disciplines, little lectures on the complementarity of sociology and history burst from me as easily as bubbles escape from champagne, that pleasant cohabitation will not be my subject here. Instead, I want to advocate theoretically informed historical inquiry as a solution to a major difficulty which social scientists, especially sociologists, frequently create for themselves. What difficulty? Let us call it monadism. Monadism involves the adoption of three closely related assumptions: first, that the elementary units of social life are self-contained, self-directing monads, especially human individuals but also aggregates of individuals up to the level of something vaguely called a “society”; second, that regularities in the social world consist of structures, sequences, and directional processes of those monads that repeat themselves in essentially the same way time after time; and third, that the central task of social science is therefore to create invariant models, one per structure, sequence, or directional process, match them to as many relevant cases as possible, then perfect each model in accordance with observed discrepancies from careful observation of the relevant cases. Thus sociologists create models of social mobility in which characteristics of fathers cause characteristics of sons, with coefficients varying from one setting to another, all within the same basic structure of causation by human capital. In the same mode, urban sociologists formulate invariant models of urban growth and decay within presumably self-contained cities based on the average experience of older capitalist cities, then cope with vastly contrary patterns in Third World cities by postulating a 120



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second urban species to which a quite separate model is supposed to apply. Likewise, we find specifications of the necessary and sufficient conditions for democracy, with little allowance for variation in time and space. Following the same design, sociologists of revolution create unitary models of true revolutions as incidents in the lives of “societies,” line up multiple cases of revolution, tug and haul to make those models fit each and every relevant case . . . then, not incidentally, spend much of their polemical time demonstrating that theorist X’s model doesn’t apply properly to revolution beta or gamma, an exercise that leads instantly to minor revisions of X’s model. Similar models purport to explain crime, war, divorce, secularization, employment discrimination, racial conflict, suicide, homelessness, and dozens of other lugubrious phenomena sociologists have cheerily made their own. The models vary enormously in structure and scope, but have in common the presumption that at bottom the subject concerns a unitary phenomenon having a relatively invariant structure, sequence, or process, a phenomenon happening to some self-contained social unit or aggregate of them. By no means do all models in the social sciences conform to the invariant plan. Some explicitly undertake explicitly to account for variation, as in Arthur Stinchcombe’s brilliant old discussion of the influence of property’s spatial distribution on policing (Stinchcombe 1963). Others represent recurrent and coherent causal mechanisms having wildly variant outcomes, as in Harrison White’s extraordinary account of identity-formation (White 1992). Still others, and many of them, create representations of a single nonrecurrent social structure or process, as in Immanuel Wallerstein’s portrayal of the capitalist world-system (Wallerstein 1974–1989). My polemic concerns only one manner of modeling in the social sciences, but a common one: postulating an essentially invariant structure or process in a self­contained social unit. I aim to make you wary of that common procedure, wary because in actual social life invariant structures and processes are rare or nonexistent. By no means, as you will see, am I advocating historical particularism or epistemological nihilism. Nor am I arguing that social life has no coherent recurrences or that it is fundamentally unknowable. I am advocating clearer reflection about ontology, about the character of the phenomena we purport to describe and explain. History is not immune to monadism. Such reasoning appears as often in history as elsewhere in the social sciences, if only because invariant models of structures, sequences, and processes infest the folk sociology on which historians so regularly draw without being self-conscious about their reasoning. Throughout the labyrinthine historical literature on political conflict in which I spend much of my own time wandering, for example, a limited number of competing models, each invariant, recur in explanations of mass collective action. In caricature, we might call them misery models, madness models, and mobilization models. I confess to having contributed one or two of the latter to the literature myself; my most general representation of mobilizing actors postulates precisely that every person or group that acts collectively is responding in a similar way to an array of interests and opportunities (e.g., Tilly 1978, chapters 3 and 4). The maker of such a model characteristically presumes that

122  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis every time large numbers of ordinary people band together and challenge authorities the same basic process of mobilization, collective action, and demobilization unfolds. Historical knowledge does not automatically eliminate that presumption. Nevertheless, history provides its own antidotes to overdoses of singularity. For real history, carefully observed, does not fall into neat, recurrent chunks; it winds and snarls like a proliferating vine. What is more, in real history time and place make a difference to the way that ostensibly universal processes such as industrialization and secularization unfold; just as the flows of rivers, for all their common properties, depend intimately on the terrain through which they pass, and those terrains result in important part from previous flows of the selfsame rivers, the power of history means that social processes follow strong regularities yet do not repeat themselves; the regularities lie in causal mechanisms, not in recurrent structures or sequences. Among analysts who are self-conscious about such matters, invariant-model reasoning has its own distinctive Method, codified by Charles Ragin as the Comparative Method. Ragin reports that he developed the Method out of his dissatisfaction with the application of multivariate statistical techniques to a number of problems that interested him (Ragin 1987: vii). As a distinctive procedure, he says, comparative analysis in general uses combinatorial logic to explain the characteristics of whole cases. The cases are most often “societies.” In Ragin’s variant, Boolean logic applied rigorously over a number of cases singles out those differences that can actually make a difference. The argument rests ultimately on John Stuart Mill’s paired procedures: the method of agreement, the method of differences (Mill 1892: 221–234; Little 1991: 35–37). (Mill actually distinguished four experimental methods—agreement, difference, residues, and concomitant variation—but somehow his provocative treatments of the latter two have disappeared from social scientific discussions of comparison.) There is, alas, a catch. Mill himself pointed it out: For the pair of methods to be foolproof, the analyst must be able to specify, observe, and even manipulate all possible causes, a circumstance that lies beyond the reach of nonexperimental social sciences. Hoping nevertheless to identify all the obvious candidates for causes of a given outcome, however, adepts of invariant-model arguments commonly forge ahead with comparisons of cases that display the outcome with others that do not, searching for those other conditions that occur uniquely with the outcome. They habitually practice closest-case comparison. Their procedure follows the example of epidemiology in searching for the necessary conditions of a distinctive disease. Thus they conduct comparisons of whole countries to discern the special conditions that distinguish those experiencing major declines in fertility or great gains in per capita income from all others. What’s wrong with this standard modus operandi? Nothing much would be wrong with it if the social world did, indeed, consist of self-contained units, if it did, indeed, fall nicely into recurrent structures, sequences, and directional processes. John Stuart Mill, as a matter of fact, thought it did. He ended his discussion of Historical Method with this bright promise:



Chapter 11: History and Sociological Imagining  123 If the endeavours now making in all the more cultivated nations, and beginning to be made even in England (generally the last to adopt whatever does not originate with herself) for the construction of a Philosophy of History, shall be directed and controlled by those views of the nature of sociological evidence which I have (very briefly and imperfectly) attempted to characterize; they cannot fail to give birth to a sociological system widely removed from the vague and conjectural character of all former attempts, and worthy to take its place, at last, among established sciences. When this time shall come, no important branch of human affairs will be any longer abandoned to empiricism and unscientific surmise: the circle of human knowledge will be complete, and it can only thereafter receive further enlargement by perpetual expansion from within. (Mill 1892: 565)

(Francophiles and sociological chauvinists will be happy to know that Mill’s chief example of Historical Method’s proper application was Auguste Comte, coiner of the word “sociology.”) If we should have learned anything from the sixteen decades of systematic social science that separates us from John Stuart Mill, however, it is that social life doesn’t work that way: Boundaries of social units are porous; structures keep changing; sequences never quite repeat themselves, ostensibly directional processes stop, reverse, or split; what has happened before affects the character of the next structure, sequence, or process. Taken as entire events, neither wars, occupational careers, spurts of urban growth, racial conflicts, nor any of the other social phenomena to which sociologists have commonly applied the suspect modus operandi display enough invariance to make such models useful. The repetitions within them, furthermore, are superficial, at the level of the proximate causes that (given extensive separation of home from work, employment in large workplaces under time-discipline, and reliance on mechanical transportation) produce rush-hour transport peaks twice a day (but not on Sundays or holidays); the knowledge involved is not trivial, especially for transportation planners and traffic cops, but it is superficial and highly vulnerable to changes in boundary conditions. Try applying standard American models of daily traffic flow to today’s Mumbai or Mogadishu! In such circumstances, the search for necessary and sufficient conditions becomes a wild goose chase. Discovering these difficulties, optimists who persist in holding to invariant models conclude that the models need more refinement, pessimists that the world is too complicated for the location of regularities, skeptics that social life is unknowable in any reliable, systematic sense, pragmatists that for the time being we need more than one model, yet far fewer than one model per observation. We have, however, a more hopeful alternative. We could begin to see that the elementary units of social life are neither individuals nor “societies” nor groups, but interactions among social locations. We could recognize that great social regularities do not occur at the level of whole structures, full sequences, or total processes but in the detailed social mechanisms that generate structures, sequences, and processes. Whole networks do not resemble each other in lawful ways, but the principles by which networks form and change do. Wars do not follow standard sequences or burst

124  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis out in only one set of circumstances, but they conform to very strong principles of logistics, organization, and strategy. We could, in short, rediscover history, rediscover the interplay among causal mechanisms, idiosyncratic events, and powerful contingencies. In this sense, we could become historicists. To rediscover history, however, is not to fit invariant models, huge or modest, to great slabs of time and space. Arthur Stinchcombe ends his Theoretical Methods in Social History with a ringing declaration which, regrettably, often rings the wrong bells in readers’ minds: that “it is the details that theories in history have to grasp if they are to be any good” (Stinchcombe 1978: 124). Contrary to a superficial reading, Stinchcombe is not recommending barefoot empiricism, but examination by analogy with other historical situations of the actual mechanisms that generate social structures, sequences, and processes. Properly conducted, historical research has the great virtue of requiring the investigator to locate social actions in time and space, to specify their interrelations, to search for their causes in concrete circumstances. It also leads, as we shall see, to recognizing the tight interdependence and instant mutual modification of culture (conceived as shared understandings and their objectifications) and social structure (conceived of as durable relations among persons). Three inquiries of my own first made me aware of the difficulty, which had bothered me for years without my being able to articulate it well. The topics differed greatly: European revolutions from 1492 to the present, American immigration during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and British popular politics between the 1750s and the 1830s. The first inquiry was a book on European revolutions from 1492 to 1992. On agreeing to write the book, I had implicitly assumed that it would be easy, almost a potboiler, an exercise in locating the best model of revolution around—perhaps Skocpol’s, Kimmel’s, or Goldstone’s—polishing it up a bit for my own purposes, then fitting it to a number of European revolutions: the old game of Improving Karl Marx that self-appointed theorists among us all play so confidently. (These days the thinker Improved is more likely to be Max Weber, Anthony Giddens, Jürgen Habermas, or, heaven help us, even Talcott Parsons, rather than Karl Marx, but the rules remain the same: Explicate the model; single out one or two elements for criticism; correct those elements; glue the updated model back together; congratulate yourself; publish the result.) But I wanted to connect the analysis of revolution to those of state formation and collective action in which I had been dabbling for some years. At length I realized that I was yoking a lion and a hippopotamus together for plowing; I was starting mayhem rather than the neat cultivation of a field. Why? Because my favored models of state formation and collective action concerned continuous variation rather than recurrent invariant phenomena. Although I had perpetrated invariant models of both earlier in my career—we remain creatures of our educations so long! —through protracted struggles with historical material I had first rejected one-track models, then begun to formulate accounts of variable trajectories by searching for deep causal mechanisms. Meanwhile, the available models of revolution, at least in their most general forms, all purported to specify the necessary and sufficient



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conditions for revolution, conceived of as a relatively invariant bundle of structures and processes. The misfit soon became obvious. Attention: I don’t claim to have found the Deep Causes of all changes in the character of states or of all variations in collective action. I only claim to have recognized that the regularities lie in the generating mechanisms rather than in the recurrence of whole structures, the repetition of whole sequences, the reappearance of the same unilinear processes. Such a recognition does not preclude typologizing states or collective actions, mapping sequences of conflict, or even tracing long processes of transformation, but it does entail recognizing that those operations do not yield explanations. They simply specify what is to be explained. In the case of revolution, then, I found that I had to rethink the phenomenon as one zone in a much larger field of variation including many political interactions no one would label revolutionary, then search for clues as to why some peoples, places, and eras spent a lot of their time in that zone while others barely approached it. My first crude device for doing so consisted of analytically separating the conditions for revolutionary situations from those for revolutionary outcomes—revolutionary situations consisting of open splits within polities, revolutionary outcomes consisting of substantial transfers of power over states. I argue that the two sets of conditions vary and change in partial independence of each other. My second crude device was to treat each of those conditions as a continuum—for example, from no split whatsoever in a polity to a split putting every political actor on one side or another. My third was to treat major changes in the organization of states, state systems, and armed force as determinants of the positions of different states and polities on those continua. My answers surely contain defects, but they illustrate another way of thinking about revolution than as a one-track phenomenon. They represent a historicizing of the problem. Any vendor of standard models of revolution, for example, will have trouble selling them to specialists in early modern European history who go beyond fitting their appliances to the English revolution of 1640–1660, the Fronde, and the revolt of Catalonia to asking why so many more forcible attempts to seize state power—revolutionary situations, roughly speaking—occurred, and why so many of them actually succeeded. Close study of the circumstances of those centuries’ revolutionary situations does not produce a new General Model of Early Modern Revolutions. It does, however, reveal the grounding of revolutionary situations in prevailing conditions of indirect rule, military expansion, and dynastic competition. Take the factor of dynastic competition: In Muscovy, then in the Russian empire that grew with Muscovy as its kernel, for three centuries after 1492 every time a tsar died without an adult, militarily competent son or brother to succeed him a serious struggle for the throne ensued, often with wide popular support for one faction or another. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the serious claimants at different times even included thirty or forty men pretending to be tsars or heirs whom everyone else had believed dead—often murdered at the behest of the late ruler. Cossack Emelian Pugachev, who led the great peasant-Cossack rebellion of

126  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis 1773–1775, claimed to be the deposed and dead tsar Peter III. A number of the claimants actually made it to the throne: Boris Godunov; his successor, the false Dmitri; Ivan V; his brother, Peter the Great himself, all became tsar irregularly, outside the standard inheritance rules, through the use of force. Russia was no more extreme in this regard than Poland, Hungary, and a good many other early modern states. Yet by the nineteenth century militarily contested successions had become rare in European monarchies. The whole story of that transition would take too long to tell, and would require too many allowances for variations among, say, Iberia, the Balkans, and the British Isles. But one cluster of factors nicely illustrates my general point: the tight interdependence in early modern European states among the organization of great families; the existence of huge patron-client chains attaching officials, servitors, and tenants to those great families; the embedding of military force in those patron-client chains; and the adoption by great families of out-marriage strategies accomplishing three purposes—first, giving their heirs claims on aristocratic and royal successions elsewhere; second, providing local members of the family (including emperors or kings) with some call on military assistance from grandees or rulers outside their own countries; and, third, arranging another place to survive comfortably if life became too dangerous at home. Together, these circumstances meant that almost every royal succession constituted an opportunity, or at least a hope, for some rival to the most obvious heir, often a foreigner in whom another royal family also had an interest; where the inheritance was unclear or the heir incompetent, the opportunity became a strong incentive to employ autonomous military force, and enlist aggrieved popular support, for a dynastic coup. When Protestant lords invited fellow Protestant William of Orange to England in 1688 to displace the Catholic king James II, they did not simply call on an experienced statesman from a distinguished family; they called on a grandson of Charles I and son-in-law of James himself. An explanation of the Glorious Revolution requires much more than knowledge of William’s family background. Nevertheless, no one will understand it and other revolutions of the time without exploring the mechanisms by which great families attached themselves to each other and to regimes. Such an exploration is deeply historicist. In it, structure and culture interact. Let me underline what this means, and what it does not mean. Considered as wholes, neither lineages nor revolutions had recurrent structures besides those they shared by definition. Invariant models of lineages and revolutions would serve us badly. On the contrary, the regularities lie in the ways that kinship ties affected the formation of alliances, the probability of war, and the claims to succession to supreme positions in dynastic states, which in turn affected the probability and character of revolution. These are not invariant structures or processes, but wide-ranging causal mechanisms whose combinations produced the actual unique histories we observe.



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The second inquiry concerns inequality and American immigration. As Ewa Morawska (1990) has well documented, recent work on immigration has challenged the two dominant models of earlier generations: human capital and assimilation. Human capital models escape my strictures somewhat by deliberately accounting for differential success as a function of variable resources, broadly defined; they deserve suspicion, nevertheless, for their reliance on an invariant model of market-mediated success. Assimilation models clearly qualify as invariant insofar as they posit only one standard path into American life, the chief variation being the speed at which different groups travel that path. As Morawska says, an anti-invariant historicist view helps make sense of the connections between migration and durable forms of inequality, including those forms people organize as ethnicity—as structured differences according to imputed national or racial origin. In thinking about American immigration as a whole, and about my collaborative studies of nineteenth-century French silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, and of twentieth-century Italian peasants in Mamaroneck, New York, I found it useful to ask how the social organization of migration constrained the subsequent opportunities of different groups of migrants and their descendants. In the case of Paterson, I was trying to find out how textile workers from Lyon and its vicinity entered the expanding silk industry of Paterson after 1860, as well as what impact those circumstances had on their experience, and that of their children, in the American labor force. As for Mamaroneck, I was attempting to compare post-1900 migrations from a few villages in the Frosinone, near Rome, to the Lyon metropolitan area, to Mamaroneck and nearby towns, and perhaps eventually to Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Toronto as well, in order to see how differently the survivors of those migrations turned out at their various destinations. How well immigrants do in a new country, and whether they return to the old, depends mainly on five factors: the extent to which they integrate on arrival into networks that embrace a wide range of employment opportunities; the opportunities for individual income with which their networks give them contact, especially at the start; the opportunities for collective capital accumulation at the destination; the degree of obligation to support persons and enterprises in the place of origin; and the relative opportunities for reinvestment of accumulated capital at the origin and the destination. On the whole, the more the migrant group or its subdivisions serves as an accumulator of capital, the greater the incentive to pass jobs through kin and paesani. Thus, durable inequality among immigrant groups and their descendants depends on the initial organization of migration and its capacity for accumulation of collectively available capital. While it sounds strange to put warm matters so coldly, immigrants and their descendants actually know these principles well; their stories of connections, favors, and ethnic differences reek of them. Networks transformed or created by migration create and maintain inequality. Members of immigrant groups often exploited each other as they would not have dared to exploit the native-born. Every act of inclusion, furthermore, also excludes.

128  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis North American immigration produced a remarkable specialization of work by origin, although the precise specializations varied from one locality and migrant stream to another. The characteristic story of Mamaroneck is the present domination of landscape gardening and related fields by Italian immigrants and their heirs; that of Paterson, French, British, German, and Italian workers from well-defined industrial locations entering specific branches of Paterson’s industry.1 Any student of migration can tell similar tales of occupational specialization by regional or national origin. The actual tales refute grand stage schemes of immigration, illustrate the combination of bounded contingency with constraint in social life, and show us powerful causes working consistently as links among events. Generalized, that observation makes my case against monadic ontologies and invariant models, and for historicism concentrating on the discovery of mechanisms that generate social structures, sequences, and processes. Again, culture and structure interact. A third area of research that made me think about these topics concerns changes in the forms of collective contention—for example, why and how sit-ins and similar deliberate occupations of contested spaces rise and fall. For the shared delusions of collective-behavior theorists, sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s generally substituted models of collective rational action: public choice, resource mobilization, political process, and so on. In so doing, however, they (perhaps I should say “we”) stuck unwittingly to monadism, assuming that the main problems were a) to explain the behavior of one coherent actor (individual or collective) at a time, and b) to identify a single model of collective action that, with no more than nudges of a parameter or two, accounted in principle for all instances. In the study of social movements, for example, this reformulation rejected earlier portrayals of prohibitionism or feminism as irrational reactions to the stress of social change, but retained the assumption that the social movement was a kind of selfcontained group whose behavior could be explained by the group’s social situation. Similar, Mancur Olson’s injection of collective-goods models into the analysis of what sociologists previously called collective behavior (Olson 1965) sent sociologists scurrying for alternative invariant models that would accommodate identity, loyalty, and self-satisfaction (see Cohen 1985, Gamson 1990). Let me spare you a detailed critique of standard models for social movements and collective action. Suffice it to say that monadic analyses of contention ignored the strategic interaction among challengers, competitors, and sometime allies that pervades real episodes of contention. (As participants and benevolent observers of social movements, many formulators of monadic models had ample practical awareness of strategic interaction but failed to draw the appropriate theoretical conclusions from their own experiences.) A combination of influences tipped the balance toward interaction: the infiltration of game-theoretic reasoning from economics and political science; the creation of large catalogs of events as alternatives to the treatment of one group, movement, or action at a time; and, above all, the historicization of polemology (as francophones call the systematic study of conflict).



Chapter 11: History and Sociological Imagining  129

In this setting, historicization meant installing time and place as major determinants of contention’s character rather than as proxies for other, more elusive variables such as modernization or level of grievance. To historicize the study of contention meant recognizing that collective claim making entails the simultaneous use and recasting of relations, including shared understandings, among local actors. It meant seeing that each locality and each interacting set of claimants, both challengers and authorities, accumulates its own particular experience, memory, understanding, and practices, and accumulation strongly constrains current contention. My own formulation of these insights adopts the theatrical language of repertoires; contentious actors perform in dramas in which they already know their approximate parts, during which they nevertheless improvise constantly, and of which the exact outcomes remain uncertain. In this formulation, potential actors choose strategically among available performances, engage other actors—including objects of their claims—in those performances, and improvise their way to some conclusion. The conception is at once deeply interactive—that is, structural—and deeply cultural. It reeks of culture, as Arthur Stinchcombe has pointed out, in insisting that shared understanding and their objectifications constrain social interaction (Stinchcombe 1987). My research on the subject uses catalogs of British “contentious gatherings” between 1758 and 1834 to examine how claim making changed during a period that brought Great Britain the demise of Rough Music, collective machine-breaking, invasions of enclosed fields, and many related forms of interaction, as well as the rise of public meetings, demonstrations, petition drives, popular associations, firm-byfirm strikes, and more now-familiar forms of struggle. A contentious gathering, for the purposes of this study, is an occasion on which ten or more people gathered in a publicly accessible place and visibly made claims which, if realized, would bear on the interests of at least one person outside their number. The main machine-readable catalog provides detailed descriptions of 8,088 contentious gatherings that occurred in southeastern England during thirteen scattered years from 1758 to 1820 or anywhere in Great Britain during the seven years from 1828 through 1834. Among other things, my group is analyzing the events in that catalog and complementary evidence to determine whether a strong version of the repertoire model actually holds up to close scrutiny. We are unquestionably seeing profound changes in the texture of British contention, as seizures of grain, invasions of fields, mocking ceremonies, and related forms give way to processions, demonstrations, petition drives, and their kin. The changes pivot on the years of war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and bear plausible relationships to the transformations of the state and economy during the war years. That much verifies at least a weak version of the metaphor. For stronger versions, we must look at innovation and variation within and among contentious gatherings. We think we are finding evidence, for example, of parliament’s increased salience as an object of contentious claims and of the role played by public

130  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis meetings, local assemblies, and popular associations in that shift. We think we can trace the influence of innovators such as John Wilkes, Lord George Gordon, Francis Place, and Daniel O’Connell on cumulative shifts in contentious repertoires. We have some grounds for claiming that collective actors constantly innovate in small ways, and do so at a faster pace when political opportunities are changing rapidly, but that innovations in the forms of contention only stick when associated with visible success for one actor or another. But many questions remain open. I won’t bore you with other results, technical details, and historical problems. I am trying here to illustrate how historical thinking, properly conducted, combats monadism and helps reveal the tight interdependence of culture and social structure. For in the analysis of British contentious repertoires, as in the study of revolutions and of immigrant itineraries, we find the cumulative intersection of history, social ties, and shared understandings. What, then, are these elusive causal mechanisms I have identified as the true locus of regularities in social life? In the case of revolutions, they consist of rapid and visible diminutions of state power, splits in control over the major means of coercion, formation of antiregime coalitions, and other political shifts that singly neither guarantee revolution nor constitute parts of its definition. In the case of immigration, the crucial causal mechanisms consist of the transmission of information about opportunities within existing ties of kinship or neighborhood; the pooling of capital or credit; the hoarding of access to remunerative work, housing, and social life; the remittance of money and other resources to the place of origin; and other collective actions that shape the structure of opportunities, rights, and obligations. All of these operate outside of immigration, indeed quite outside of residential mobility of any kind. In the case of changes in contentious repertoires, we must look for causes in the transformation of political opportunities by innovations associated with successful claim making, in alterations—incremental or sudden—of various political institutions’ capacity to deliver rewards or punishments, in the creation or rupture of links among potential collective actors, and in similar mutations of shared incentives and organizational resources. If revolutions, immigration, and changing repertoires defy invariant models, that is not because they know no regularities. It is because their regularities do not lie in recurrent structures or sequences but in powerful causal mechanisms that in different combinations produce both those phenomena and a host of others.

References Cohen, Jean (1985). “Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements,” Social Research 52: 663–716. Gamson, William A. (1990). The Strategy of Social Protest, 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wads­ worth. Goldstone, Jack A. (1986). “Introduction: The Comparative and Historical Study of



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­ evolutions,” in Jack A. Goldstone, ed., Revolutions. Theoretical, Comparative, and R Historical Studies. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ——— (1991). Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kimmel, Michael S. (1988). Absolutism and its Discontents. State and Society in SeventeenthCentury France and England. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. ——— (1990). Revolution. A Sociological Interpretation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Mill, John Stuart (1892). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, being A Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. London: Routledge. First published in 1843. Morawska, Ewa (1985). For Bread with Butter. Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johns­ town, Pennsylvania, 1890–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1990). “The Sociology and Historiography of Immigration,” in Virginia YansMcLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered. History, Sociology, Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Olson, Mancur (1965). The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ragin, Charles C. (1987). The Comparative Method. Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Skocpol, Theda (1973). “A Critical Review of Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy,” Politics and Society 4: 1–34. ——— (1979). States and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. (1959). “Bureaucratic and Craft Administration of Production,” Administrative Science Quarterly 4: 168–187. ——— (1963). “Institutions of Privacy in the Determination of Police Administrative Practice,” American Journal of Sociology 69: 150–160. ——— (1975). “Merton’s Theory of Social Structure,” in Lewis Coser, ed., The Idea of Social Structure. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ——— (1978). Theoretical Methods in Social History. New York: Academic Press. ——— (1986). “Milieu and Structure Updated,” Theory and Society 15: 901–913. ——— (1987). Review of Charles Tilly, The Contentious French, American Journal of Sociology 92: 1248–1249. ——— (1990). “Work Institutions and the Sociology of Everyday Life,” in Kai Erikson and Steven Peter Vallas, eds., The Nature of Work. Sociological Perspectives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tilly, Charles (1978). From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Random House. ——— (1993). European Revolutions, 1492–1992. Oxford: Blackwell. ——— (1995). Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974–1989). The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press. 3 vols. White, Harrison C. (1970). Chains of Opportunity: System Models of Mobility in Organizations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (1988): “Varieties of Markets,” in Barry Wellman and Steven Berkowitz, eds., Social Structures. A Network Approach. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

132  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis ——— (1992). Identity and Control. A Structural Theory of Social Action. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Source Note “History and Sociological Imagining,” Tocqueville Review 15 (1994), 57–74.

Note 1. As of 2007, it is only fair to note that, because my European collaborators departed with the data and then disappeared into other careers, neither of the studies produced more than a few passages in my Durable Inequality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), and no separate scholarly publications have resulted from the studies. 

Chapter 12

Historical Analysis of Political Processes Good sociology takes history seriously. Good political sociology, however, takes more than political history seriously. If political sociology is to escape from the cramped prison of the present, it must address directly the ways in which time and place affect the character of political processes. Reviewing visions of historical explanation before turning to specific political processes, this chapter urges a renewed search for robust causal mechanisms and processes in history. Here is the plan:

• First, consider when explanation (as opposed to description, interpretation, and critique) should concern historical students of political processes. • Second, review competing conceptions of explanation, arriving at reasons for concentrating on mechanism-based explanations. • Third, inventory, compare, and refine strategies for historical analysis. • Fourth, examine the practical explanatory program implied by historically grounded mechanism-based analysis. • Finally—in the bulk of the chapter—illustrate that program by pursuing a) robust mechanisms and processes, b) explanation of puzzling features in historical episodes, c) explanation of puzzling features in whole classes of historical episodes, and, very briefly, d) detection of analogies among ostensibly dissimilar episodes.

The enterprise centers on generation of visibly viable explanations for complex political processes. Not all sociologists regard explanation as a feasible or laudable end for their inquiries. Sociology could, after all, probably survive as a valued discipline without offering powerful explanations of the phenomena its practitioners study. “Sociology,” David Riesman once declared to me, “is about whether what people think is so, is so.” Sociologists can usefully describe current social conditions, unmask official claims, join moral and political debates, chart directions of change, document social 133

134  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis differences, evaluate consequences of social interventions, or supply information to decision makers and social-movement activists. All these useful sociological enterprises can proceed with no more than crude conceptions of cause-effect relations. In fact, most of what professional sociologists actually do these days belongs to one or more of these pursuits. Historical analysis of political processes more often pursues cause-effect relations. Even it, nevertheless, need not center on causes and effects. We can see that clearly by reviewing the place of explanation in sociology’s major contemporary forms of historical analysis: social criticism, pattern identification, scope extension, and process analysis. Historical social criticism reconstructs the past on the way to informing human choices in the present and future. We do not need a compelling explanation of capitalism to reflect intelligently on its costs and benefits for human welfare. Historical pattern identification searches for recurrent structures and sequences across time and space: standard configurations and trajectories for industrialization, for revolution, for secularization, or perhaps for societal development as a whole. That venerable sociological enterprise usually makes some gestures toward explanation but often settles practically for identifying parallels among cases. Historical scope extension applies techniques, models, or generalizations that sociologists have developed in studies of contemporary social life to historical situations. As in the case of pattern identification, the application of demographic or network models to past settings may involve explaining what happened in those settings, but it often ends with no more than identification of similarities and differences. Finally, historical process analysis examines how social interactions impinge on each other in space and time. Instead of considering space and time as additional variables, it presumes that space-time connections define social processes, and that social processes operate differently as a function of their placement in space and time. As in the previous modes of inquiry, process analysis may reasonably ask largely descriptive questions—for example, whether in a given period and region epidemics, fads, money, artifacts, and news, for whatever reasons, followed essentially the same communication lines. Process analysis lends itself to historical explanation more effectively than do historical social criticism, pattern identification, and scope extension because it explicitly draws attention to temporal and spatial interdependencies. But it is still possible to practice process analysis without much effort at explanation. None of sociology’s standard modes of historical analysis, then, absolutely requires a focus on explanation. Explanations begin to matter when sociologists become intellectually ambitious. Three circumstances make the character and quality of explanation crucial:

• sociologists attempt to identify similarities and differences in the workings of ostensibly distinct social processes such as war, democratization, nationalism, ethnic conflict, and social movements • sociologists seek to confront or integrate their accounts of social processes with those prevailing in adjacent disciplines such as anthropology, neuroscience,





Chapter 12: Historical Analysis of Political Processes  135 economics, evolutionary biology, linguistics, psychology, geography, history, or political science • theorists in one or more of these adjacent disciplines propose to subsume sociological findings under their own explanatory schemes

In all these circumstances, bad explanations cause serious trouble for sociologists. In the liveliest sectors of political sociology, as it happens, all three circumstances prevail. That is notably true of historical analysis. There, sociologists face the challenge of explaining similarities and intersections of apparently disparate forms of politics; confront competing explanations in adjacent disciplines; and encounter many an economist, historian, political scientist, psychologist, or evolutionary biologist who claims to have identified the fundamental explanations of political processes. Sociologists who want to make advances in historical analyses of war, revolution, state formation, democratization, nationalism, social movements, and contentious politics at large have little choice but to take explanatory problems seriously. Both competing explanations and competing views of explanation confront each other in the historical analysis of political processes. In the long run, a discipline’s intellectual vivacity and viability depend on its capacity to generate superior explanations. This discussion therefore addresses students of sociological theory who actually want to recognize, fashion, or verify explanations of historically situated political processes. They have a choice of explanatory strategies. In sociology as a whole, four conceptions of explanation vie vigorously for attention: 1. Covering law accounts consider explanation to consist of subjecting robust empirical generalizations to higher-and-higher–level generalizations, the most general of all standing as laws. In such accounts, models are invariant—that is, they work the same in all conditions. Investigators search for necessary and sufficient conditions of stipulated outcomes, those outcomes often conceived of as “dependent variables.” Studies of covariation among presumed causes and presumed effects therefore serve as validity tests for proposed explanations. Thus some students of democratization hope to state the general conditions under which any nondemocratic polity whatsoever becomes democratic. 2. Propensity accounts consider explanation to consist of reconstructing a given actor’s state at the threshold of action, with that state variously stipulated as motivation, consciousness, need, organization, or momentum. Explanatory methods of choice then range from sympathetic interpretation to reductionism, psychological or otherwise. Thus some students of social movements compare the experiences of different social groupings with deindustrialization in an effort to explain why some groupings resist, others suffer in silence, and still others disintegrate. 3. Although authors of covering law and propensity accounts sometimes use the language of systems, system explanations, strictly speaking, consist of specifying

136  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis the place of some event, structure, or process within a larger self-maintaining set of interdependent elements, showing how the event, structure, or process in question serves and/or results from interactions among the larger set of elements. Thus some students of peasant revolt explain its presence or absence by peasants’ degree of integration into society as a whole. 4. Mechanism-based accounts select salient features of episodes, or significant differences among episodes, and explain them by identifying robust mechanisms of relatively general scope within those episodes. As compared with covering law, propensity, and system approaches, mechanism-based explanations aim at modest ends: selective explanation of salient features by means of partial causal analogies. Thus some students of nationalism try relating its intensity to the extent and character of competition among ethnic entrepreneurs. In such accounts, competition for political constituencies becomes a central (but not exclusive or sufficient) mechanism in the generation of nationalism. System explanations have lost ground in sociology since the days of Pitirim Sorokin and Talcott Parsons, but they still figure prominently in some sorts of organizational analysis and demography. When today’s sociologists fight about explanation, however, they generally pit covering law against propensity accounts, with the first often donning the costume of Science and the second the garb of Interpretation. Explanation by means of robust causal mechanisms has received much less self-conscious attention from sociological methodologists than have covering law, propensity, and system explanations. Nevertheless, a significant, illuminating body of thought recommends the mechanistic approach (see, e.g., Bunge 1997, 1998, Elster 1989, Hedström and Swedberg 1998, Little 1991, 1998, Stinchcombe 1991). This chapter accordingly pursues mechanisms and processes.

Historical Analysis of Political Processes? Let us include as political all social processes in which governments figure significantly. (Governments are organizations controlling the principal concentrated means of coercion within substantial bounded territories and exercising priority in some regards over all other organizations operating within the same territories.) By such a criterion, war, revolution, and democratization clearly qualify as political processes, but communication, exploitation, and production only qualify as political processes when and if governments become parties to them. Of course, governments often do become parties to communication, exploitation, and production. We can adopt either a weak or a strong definition of historical analysis. The weak version simply deals with events and processes that have taken place before the present. All study of the past, in the weak version, constitutes historical analysis. The strong version demands more. It identifies ways that when and where an event or process occurs affects a) how it occurs, b) why it occurs, and c) with what consequences it



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occurs. Strong-version historical studies of democratization, for example, examine how and why democratization takes various forms and has disparate impacts on the quality of life in different periods and regions. Although plenty of work in historical sociology—notably including much of scope extension—depends on the weak definition, here I stress the strong definition. Historical analysis of political processes, for present purposes, means systematic description and explanation of social processes involving governments, processes whose character varies significantly as a function of their location in space and time. The strong definition excludes two extremes: random or unique events and processes that operate identically everywhere, every time they occur. But it excludes few if any significant political processes. All complex, major political processes operate differently in different times and places. That is so chiefly for three reasons: because all political processes incorporate institutions, understandings, and practices that have accumulated historically in their current sites; because prior iterations of a given process affect its subsequent iterations; and because processes that acquire the same names often result from different causes. Why? Political processes such as social movements and civil wars incorporate institutions, understandings, and practices that have accumulated historically in their current sites; despite some family resemblances between seventeenth-century English civil wars and recent civil wars in the Congo/Zaïre, the two unfolded differently because of their historical settings. Prior iterations of a process—say revolution or religious mobilization—affect subsequent iterations by providing models for participants, by altering possible participants’ estimates of likely outcomes to various possible interactions, and by transforming relations among possible participants and third parties. Finally, complex episodes that acquire the same names (e.g., genocide or nationalism) often result from different causes, as in the diverse sequences that produced political independence and international recognition for Algeria, Croatia, and Uzbekistan. Historical analysts must therefore examine how prior iterations of a process affect its subsequent iterations and how political processes incorporate locally accumulated institutions and practices, as well as how causally heterogeneous episodes acquire the same public names. Interesting choices arise at precisely this point: A. Since political processes incorporate institutions, understandings, and practices that accumulate historically in their current sites, analysts might plausibly follow the lead of historians, who remain skeptical about general analyses of those processes. Instead of creating general schemata for all civil wars or all social movements, terre à terre historians prefer to integrate their civil wars and social movements into well-documented historical contexts. B. Since prior iterations of a given process affect its subsequent iterations, however, analysts might plausibly follow the lead of historical sociologists by creating subfields to encompass distinct processes: a sociology of revolution, another

138  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis sociology of democratization, a third sociology of war, and so on. This choice relies on the presumption that each of these forms has a distinctive, continuous organizational and causal structure, even if one iteration affects the next. C. Since causally heterogeneous political processes often acquire the same names, finally, analysts might plausibly concentrate on a twofold strategy: get explanation right by regrouping processes into causally similar categories, but treat the application of a certain name (e.g., this is a revolution, that is genocide) to a political process as a phenomenon deserving explanation for its own sake. My own preferred intellectual strategy combines C and A, but subordinates A to C. It searches for very general political mechanisms and processes—mechanisms and processes that transcend such categories as revolution, democratization, and war—but seeks to explain how they articulate with locally accumulated institutions, understandings, and practices. Strategy B then comes into play, not as a form of explanation, but as a heuristic; it helps clarify what we must explain. Notice the ambitious program of inquiry that follows. We must combine theoretical and empirical work as we identify significant mechanisms and processes that recur across a variety of times, places, and circumstances. We must specify interactions between those mechanisms and processes, on one side, and the contexts within which they operate—to what extent and how, for example, do outcomes of mobilization processes vary as a function of initial conditions? We must trace causal connections between one iteration of a mechanism or process and the next. We must, finally, examine how relatively general mechanisms and processes incorporate or respond to locally accumulated institutions, understandings, and practices. We must, in short, undertake serious historical work without getting lost in historical particularism. For the work at hand, let us adopt a simple conceptual apparatus: episodes (connected sets of events that include phenomena requiring explanation), causal mechanisms (events altering relations among some specified set of elements), processes (causal chains, sequences, and combinations), and explanation (identification of mechanisms and processes that produce crucial political phenomena). After explicating each of these concepts, we can turn to their use in accounting for concrete political events. First we delineate one or more episodes: conveniently or conventionally bounded, connected sets of events that include phenomena requiring explanation. For effective explanation, episodes need not be similar, but the methods used to identify them must be visible and uniform. In some fields of political analysis, researchers have already developed standard ways of identifying comparable episodes: strikes, contentious gatherings, wars, events, revolutionary situations, and the like (Azar and Ben-Dak 1973, Brockett 1992, Cioffi-Revilla 1990, Diani and Eyerman 1992, Favre, Fillieule, and Mayer 1997, Gerner et al. 1994, Gurr and Harff 1994, Shapiro and Markoff 1998, Small and Singer 1982, Sugimoto 1981, Tilly and Rule 1965, White 1993). In these methods, researchers either accept conventional definitions of the events in question (e.g., official listings of strikes) or construct a priori definitions,



Chapter 12: Historical Analysis of Political Processes  139

applying them uniformly to the available evidence (as is common in the study of “protest events”: Franzosi 1998, Mueller 1997, Oliver and Myers 1999, Olzak 1989, Rucht and Koopmans 1999, Rucht, Koopmans, and Neidhardt 1998). It should, in principle, also be possible to use criteria of internal connectedness to delineate comparable events (see, e.g., Bearman, Faris, and Moody 1999). But that approach has not yet been much tried in historical studies of political processes. After delineation of episodes, we proceed to locate causal mechanisms within the episodes. Mechanisms are events that alter relations among some specified set of elements—as, for example, a broker’s creation of a connection between two previously unconnected groups alters the two groups’ behavior. We can conveniently distinguish among cognitive, relational, and environmental mechanisms. Cognitive mechanisms operate through alterations of individual and collective perception; words like recognize, understand, reinterpret, and classify characterize such mechanisms. Relational mechanisms alter connections among people, groups, and interpersonal networks; words like ally, attack, subordinate, and appease convey a sense of relational mechanisms. Environmental mechanisms exert external influences on the conditions affecting political processes; words like disappear, enrich, expand, and disintegrate, applied not to actors but to their settings, suggest the sorts of cause-effect connections in question. For explanatory purposes, then, we search especially for cognitive, relational, and environmental mechanisms that operate in similar fashion across a wide variety of settings. Mechanisms concatenate into broader processes. Processes are causal chains, sequences, and combinations. They deserve recognition as robust when they occur in similar ways across a variety of settings and circumstances. Polarization provides an example of a fairly robust political process that recurs widely. Polarization combines mechanisms of category formation, coalition formation, opportunity/threat spirals, and brokerage: creation of a named boundary with organized relations across and on either side of the boundary; development of coordinated action among two or more actors on each side of the boundary; signaling-reaction sequences that increase distance between the two sides; and establishment of interlocutors (brokers) representing each side. Explanation, in this mechanism-based approach, follows two complementary paths. First, it pursues particular mechanisms and processes across different settings, investigating how they work. Thus a general interest in polarization processes leads to close investigation of category formation, coalition formation, opportunity/threat spirals, and brokerage in different conditions and locales. When do they arise, how do they operate, what produces their effects? Any such investigation is likely to establish that some of its premises erred—that category formation is not uniform across settings, that opportunity/threat spirals reduce to more elementary mechanisms, and so on. Second, explanation entails identifying problematic features of episodes or classes of episodes, then discovering what mechanisms and processes produce those problematic features. The study of episodes is likely to involve close comparison, but not in the style of John Stuart Mill’s classic Methods of Agreement, Difference, Residues,

140  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis and Concomitant Variation. Instead, the most prized comparisons will show whether the mechanisms and processes in question do, indeed, qualify as robust, operating similarly in disparate conditions. Put more schematically, the analytical program that follows has several different versions:

• single out, describe, and explain a single robust mechanism or process, demonstrating its operation in a variety of episodes • identify puzzling features of a given episode, then use systematic comparison with other episodes to locate robust mechanisms and processes producing those puzzling features • do the same thing for a whole class of similar episodes • identify partial causal analogies among ostensibly dissimilar episodes and classes of episodes by locating the same mechanisms and processes within them

All four versions integrate theory with empirical investigation. None can begin without both some empirical sense of the phenomena under investigation and at least a crude theory of their operation. The remainder of this chapter illustrates those four procedures. It emphasizes relational (rather than cognitive or environmental) mechanisms on the grounds that they have received insufficient attention from historical analysts of political processes. More narrowly, it concentrates on relational mechanisms and processes that create, transform, and activate political identities: public, collective answers to the questions “Who are we?” “Who are you?” and “Who are they?” For the most part, analysts have treated political identities phenomenologically, considering them as aspects of individual or collective consciousness. A closer look, however, reveals the relational bases of political identities.

Robust Mechanisms and Processes A number of identity processes depend on, among other things, the twinned mechanisms of certification and decertification—validation (or de-validation) of actors, their performances, and their claims by external authorities. It is the political version of a very general phenomenon. Pondering why weak, peripheral Sweden entered Europe’s raging war in 1630, Erik Ringmar reflects on that general phenomenon: I will stress the social character of identities: people alone cannot decide who or what they are, but any such decision is always taken together with others. We need recognition for the persons we take ourselves to be, and only as recognized can we conclusively come to establish an identity. The quest for recognition will consequently come to occupy much of the time of people or groups who are uncertain regarding who they are. We all want to be taken seriously and be treated with respect; we all want to be recognised as the kinds of persons we claim to be. Yet recognition is rarely automatic and before we gain it we are often required to prove that our interpretations of ourselves



Chapter 12: Historical Analysis of Political Processes  141 indeed do fit us. In order to provide such proof we are often forced to act—we must fight in order to convince people regarding the applicability of our self-descriptions. (Ringmar 1996: 13–14)

Ringmar’s language conveys the unfortunate implication that certification is chiefly a way of satisfying a psychological need. His analysis of Sweden’s intervention in the Thirty Years War, however, amply demonstrates that much more than national self-satisfaction was at stake: international recognition of Sweden as a Great Power because of its war-making prowess altered its relations to all other European powers, gave its diplomacy credibility it previously lacked, and affected the policies of its European neighbors. The treaties of Westphalia (1648) that ended the Thirty Years War, indeed, established a new set of powers, now identified as sovereign states, constituting both the certified major actors on the European scene and, collectively, the certifiers of arrivals and departures on the scene. At the same time, they decertified the Holy Roman Empire (which still nominally included a number of the newly sovereign states) as exclusive international interlocutor for its members. For two centuries thereafter, successors of the great powers continued the process of certification, and eventually extended it to all the world’s states. Beginning with the French Revolution and Napoleon’s conquests, the certification process took on a national twist. Increasingly, Europeans built national and international politics around the equation of nation with state. That equation appears in two competing versions: 1) we have a state, and therefore have the right to create our own nation; 2) we are a nation, and therefore have the right to our own state. The first qualifies as state-led nationalism, the second as state-seeking nationalism. State-led nationalism encouraged rulers to impose national languages, official histories, ceremonies, legal systems, and sometimes other cultural forms, which meant subordinating or suppressing other languages, ceremonies, legal systems, and cultural forms. State-seeking nationalism encouraged aspiring leaders of autonomous political units to resist state-led nationalism in the name of distinctive languages, histories, cultural forms, and prior occupation of a territory. In both cases, external powers played pivotal parts: certifying current rulers as authentic rulers of their nations, certifying claimants to independence as valid representatives of authentic nations. The certification/decertification process actually occurs in every polity, whether international, national, or local in scale. Every polity implicitly establishes a roster of those political actors that have rights to exist, to act, to make claims, and/or to draw routinely on government-controlled resources; it maps members and challengers. In so doing, every polity also implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) broadcasts criteria for acceptable political organization, membership, identity, activity, and claim making. Some organizations specialize in surveillance and certification of acceptable or unacceptable versions of organization, membership, identity, activity, and claim making.

142  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis To take an extreme but significant example, in 1945 the powers that settled World War II, redrawing the European map extensively as they did so, ceded their work of recognizing valid states to the United Nations. During the vast wave of decolonization that soon followed, United Nations officials spent much of their effort screening performances and claims in the form: We are a distinct nation, and therefore we deserve a state of our own. We are an unjustly oppressed people, and therefore we deserve a state of our own. We were once an independent state, and deserve to be independent again. Our colonial masters are ready to concede independence to us. Our claims to lead a new state are more valid than our rivals’. Each claim entailed performances by aspiring national leaders—performances displaying evidence of legal rights, leadership, administrative capacity, popular support, internal military control, economic viability, and backing from at least some great powers. Those performances had to be polyvalent, establishing credibility simultaneously with very different audiences, some of them at odds with each other. The minimum set included not only United Nations officials, but also leaders of former colonial powers, constituencies at home, rival claimants to represent the nation in question, and rulers of adjacent states, who were often making their own territorial claims at the same time. Coached by representatives of great powers, United Nations officials rejected far more claims in this vein than they accepted, but they still certified well over a hundred new states, with their proposed rulers and forms of government, between 1945 and 1990. In this extreme case, the world’s great powers created an international bureaucracy that radically standardized claim making in its arena. But similar processes operate less bureaucratically and at a smaller scale throughout the world of contentious politics. Every regime sorts forms of organization, publicly asserted identities, and forms of collective interaction along the continuum from prescribed to tolerated to forbidden. Indeed, a good deal of political struggle concerns which forms of organization, which identities, and which forms of collective interaction the regime in power should prescribe, tolerate, or forbid. Think about South Asia. What people loosely call Hindu nationalism in India centers on the demand for priority in these regards of Hinduism as defined by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a coordinating organization that originated in Nagpur in 1925. Since the RSS claims that Sikhs and Buddhists are actually Hindus, its program emphasizes state certification of the categorical pair Hindu/Muslim (Tambiah 1996: 244–245). It remains to be seen whether an RSS government in power would actually write its whole program into law. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka representatives of other religious categories struggle for legal priority. Regimes, including South Asian regimes, differ momentously in which kinds of organization, identity, and collective interaction they prescribe, tolerate, and forbid.



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But all of them create procedures for public screening of acceptability in these regards; those procedures crystallize as laws, registers, surveillance, police practice, subsidies, organizations of public space, and repressive policies. In South Asia and elsewhere, group certification as a valid interlocutor for a major religious category gives serious weight to an organization or a network of leaders. Certification and decertification, then, appear to work in similar fashions over an enormous variety of situations. They qualify as robust mechanisms. In the company of other mechanisms such as brokerage, category formation, and object shift, furthermore, they concatenate into fairly robust, wide-ranging processes of identity formation and change. Theorists of nationalism, genocide, ethnic mobilization, state formation, social movements, revolution, coups d’état, and a variety of other historically grounded political processes have much to learn from close attention to certification and decertification.

Puzzling Features of Particular Episodes A second version of the mechanism-based analytical program identifies puzzling features of a given episode, then uses systematic comparison with other episodes to locate robust mechanisms and processes producing those puzzling features. Instead of resorting to historical particularism or searching for covering laws to subsume the entire episode, it focuses on causes of the puzzling features. The Soviet Union’s disintegration poses just such puzzles: 1. How did a political economy that seemed so solid, centralized, authoritarian, and resourceful disintegrate visibly in five or six years? 2. Why did so much of the contentious claim making take the form of ethnic and national self-assertion? 3. How then did so many old-regime power holders reappear in positions of power after the great transformation? Partial answers lie in the intersection of four robust mechanisms: opportunity spirals, identity shift, competition, and brokerage. Opportunity spirals involve shifting and expanding likely consequences of available claim-making actions. Identity shift (often coupled with certification or decertification) realigns prevailing collective, public answers to the questions “Who are you?” “Who are we?” and “Who are they?” Competition consists of striving among several actors within a rewardallocating arena. Brokerage, finally, consists of establishing, severing, or realigning connections among social sites. These familiar mechanisms intersected with weighty consequences in the Soviet Union and its successor states after the mid-1980s. My short sketch of Soviet history will concentrate on placing the four crucial mechanisms in historical context, without spelling out comparisons to other instances of imperial disintegration on which my

144  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis analysis implicitly relies (Barkey and von Hagen 1997). It will not, furthermore, make crucial regional distinctions—for example, the Baltics versus the Caucasus—that a more detailed analysis would require. The Soviet Union formed in the ruins of war and revolution. Its imperial predecessor took heavy losses from its battering by Germany and Austria in World War I, losing control of Russian Poland and the Baltic provinces in the process. Workers’ strikes and soldiers’ mutinies in 1917 coupled with resistance of the Duma (national assembly) in driving the tsar to abdicate and a conservative-liberal provisional government to take power. Soon insurrectionary counter-governments of workers and soldiers were forming at the local and regional level, as Bolshevik leaders such as Lenin and Trotsky returned from exile. Struggle swirled around multiple factions and issues, but by November 1917 the Bolsheviks had gained enough ground to seize power from the provisional government. Between 1917 and 1921, the Bolsheviks had their hands full simply keeping together what remained of the Russian empire. Through civil war and peace settlements Russia lost Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland, and Poland. The new state only regained control of the Caucasus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Ukraine, and Moldavia through military conquest by a hastily assembled Red Army that enrolled five million men at its peak. With great effort Lenin, Trotsky, and their collaborators returned the country to civilian control by locating a tightly disciplined Communist party (itself recruited in part from former or present military men) within a large centralized bureaucracy. With Stalin’s takeover (and expulsion of Trotsky) in 1927, the Soviet Union moved into a phase of forced-draft industrialization, agricultural collectivization, bureaucratic expansion, and increasingly authoritarian deployment of the Communist party as an instrument of central power. Broadly speaking, Stalin’s regime imposed direct centralized rule on Russia, but relied on a distinctive version of indirect rule elsewhere in the Union. In nominally autonomous political units of the Soviet Union outside of Russia, the Kremlin typically assigned one ethnic identity (e.g., Uzbek, Armenian) priority, and appointed party bosses of those ethnicities who had proven their loyalty to the central party. Such regional leaders enjoyed great autonomy and priority within their regions so long as their constituencies delivered compliance, goods, and services to the center. In public life, the titular national language and culture enjoyed equal standing with Russian language and culture, at the expense of the many other cultural forms that ordinarily coexisted in any region. The late 1930s and the 1940s brought momentous changes to the Soviet Union’s national scope. Its leaders began one of history’s most massive military mobilizations. Allied temporarily with Nazi Germany, the Soviets occupied half of Poland, reduced Finland to little more than a satellite state, and absorbed Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia directly into the Union. As a devastating war ended, the peace settlement awarded a battered Soviet Union hegemony over former Axis allies Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, not to mention Axis conquests Czechoslovakia and Poland. Although Russian rule remained somewhat more indirect in its Central European



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satellites than within the Soviet Union’s internationally recognized boundaries, the system of Communist party control, Russian presence, and heavy circulation between Moscow and peripheral capitals prevailed throughout what in 1955 became the Warsaw Pact. Even more so than before World War II, the postwar Soviet economy and polity depended on the combination of three elements: 1) maintenance of formidable military might, 2) large-scale coordination and division of labor in the production and distribution of subsistence goods, and 3) close surveillance and control of all political expression. The three elements in their turn produced paradoxical results:





• subordination of production for consumers to heavy industrial development • movement of military and party authorities toward a modus vivendi after the chilly relations that had characterized them before the war • enormous strength in the mathematics, physics, and engineering fields on which military development in competition with the United States increasingly relied, a strength whose by-products were flows of mathematically trained intellectuals into adjacent fields and the creation of protected sites for quiet political dissent • pockets of privilege for party officials, senior military officers, regional leaders, and key professionals—privilege all the more visible for its contrast with the physical hardships and incessant shortages of Soviet life experienced by most of the population • immense underground networks of mutual assistance, information, evasion, and supply, almost all of them technically illegal, but most of them actually indispensable to the everyday survival of Soviet citizens and enterprises (see Feige 1998, Ledeneva 1998, Solnick 1998)

All of these processes became more visible—and fateful—in the Soviet Union’s disintegration. How did it happen? At the time, Soviet assistance in Afghanistan’s left-leaning military coup of 1979 seemed like just one more Cold War contretemps, but it proved crucial. As the United States poured in support for a variety of Afghan rebels, the Soviet military suffered a frustrating and humiliating stalemate. Before Mikhail Gorbachev cut Soviet losses by ratifying a precarious peace in 1988, the Soviet Union was maintaining between 100,000 and 120,000 of its own troops in Afghanistan as well as subsidizing unreliable Afghan forces without advancing against the enemies of its puppet regime. Within the Soviet Union, the Afghan nightmare, a general economic slowdown, and rising international publicity for Soviet dissidents strengthened the case of wouldbe reformers in the party hierarchy. In 1985, the liberalizer Gorbachev arrived at the party’s head with a program of opening up public life—releasing political prisoners, accelerating exit visas for Jews, shrinking the military, reducing external military involvement, and ending violent repression of demands for political, ethnic, and

146  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis religious autonomy. By 1987, he was promoting perestroika, a shift of the economy from military to civilian production, toward better and more abundant consumer goods, and in the direction of much higher productivity. In parallel, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would no longer provide military support to Central European satellite regimes that came under attack from their own citizens. Reduction of central controls over production and distribution promoted:

• proliferation of small enterprises • widespread attempts to set up joint ventures with foreign capitalists • more open operation of the black markets, gray markets, and mutual-aid networks that had long linked individuals, households, and firms • massive slowdowns of payments and goods deliveries to central organizations • substitution of private media and systems of exchange for public means • extensive diversion of government-owned stocks and facilities into profit-making or monopoly-maintaining private distribution networks to the benefit of existing managers, quick-thinking entrepreneurs, and members of organizations already enjoying preferential access to desirable goods, facilities, or foreign currencies

All this happened as the government was attempting, on the contrary, to generalize and liberate national markets. As a consequence, the capacity of the central state to deliver rewards to its followers declined visibly from one month to the next. In response, officials and managers engaged in what Steven Solnick calls a run on the bank: wherever they could divert fungible assets to their own advantage, they increasingly did so. They set about “stealing the state” (Solnick 1998). On the political front, a parallel and interdependent collapse of central authority occurred. As the results of Gorbachev’s economic program alienated, not only producers who had previously benefited from emphasis on military enterprise, but also consumers who did not have ready access to one of the new distribution networks and officials whose previous powers were now under attack, his political program opened up space for critics and rivals such as Boris Yeltsin. From a Moscow base, Yeltsin rose to control the Russian federation. Gorbachev’s own effort to check the threatened but still intact military and intelligence establishments through conciliation, caution, and equivocation encouraged defections of reformers without gaining him solid conservative support. Simultaneously, furthermore, he sought to acquire emergency powers that would free him to forward economic transformation. That brought him into conflict with rival reformers, political libertarians, and defenders of the old regime alike. Although demands for guarantees of religious and political liberties arose almost immediately in 1986 and 1987, nevertheless, the rush of nationalities to assure their positions in relation to the emerging new political system destroyed the old regime. Russia’s Communists had, after all, dealt with non-Russian regions by co-opting regional leaders who were loyal to their cause; integrating them into the Communist party; recruiting their successors among the most promising members of designated



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nationalities but training them in Russia; dispatching many Russians to staff new industries, professions, and administrations; promoting Russian language and culture as media of administration and interregional communication; granting regional powerholders substantial autonomy and military support within their own territories just so long as they assured supplies of state revenue, goods, and conscripts; and striking immediately against any individual or group that called for liberties outside of this system. Such a system could operate effectively so long as regional leaders received powerful support from the center and their local rivals had no means or hope of appealing for popular backing. The system’s strength also proved to be its downfall. Gorbachev and his collaborators simultaneously promoted opening of political discussion, reduced military involvement in political control, tolerated alternatives to the Communist connecting structure, made gestures toward truly contested elections, and acknowledged diminished capacity to reward faithful followers. As that happened, both regional powerholders and their rivals suddenly acquired strong incentives to distance themselves from the center, to recruit popular support, to establish their credentials as authentic representatives of the local people, to urge priority of their own nationalities within territorial subdivisions of the U.S.S.R. they happened to occupy, and to press for new forms of autonomy. In the Baltic republics and those along the U.S.S.R.’s western or southern tiers, furthermore, the possibility of special relations with kindred states and authorities outside the Soviet Union—Sweden, Finland, Turkey, Iran, the European Community, and NATO—offered political leverage and economic opportunity the Union itself was decreasingly capable of providing. In political subdivisions containing more than one well-organized national population, threats mounted rapidly to those who lost the competition for certification as authentic regional citizens. Those who moved first could gain more. Escalation began, with each concession by the central government giving new incentives and precedents for further demands by other nationalities, increasingly threatening any connected population that shared a distinct identity but failed to mobilize effectively. As early as 1986, demands for autonomy and protection arose not only from Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, but also from Kazakhs, Crimean Tatars, Armenians, Moldavians, Uzbeks, and Russians themselves. Within such heterogeneous regions as Nagorno-Karabakh, a primarily Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, militants of neighboring ethnicities battled for priority, and did not scruple to kill. In addition to Azerbaijan, Moldavia, Georgia, and Tadjikistan grew mean with intergroup conflict. Between January 1988 and August 1989, ethnic clashes claimed 292 lives, leaving 5,520 people injured and 360,000 homeless (Nahaylo and Swoboda 1990: 336). The situation recalled the Empire’s disaggregation in 1918. Time horizons altered rapidly. On the large scale and the small, people could no longer count on payoffs from long-term investment in the existing system; they reoriented to short-term gains and exit strategies. Gorbachev’s 1990 proposal of a new union treaty, with greater scope for the fifteen republics but preservation of the federal government’s military, diplomatic, and economic priority, simply accelerated

148  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis the efforts of each potential national actor to assure its own position within (or, for that matter, just outside) the new system. When Gorbachev sought validation of his plans in a referendum of March 1991, leaders of six republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Moldavia, Armenia, and Georgia, all of which had started the process of declaring themselves independent) boycotted the proceedings, as results for the rest confirmed the division between Russia and the non-Russian portions of the tottering federation. From outside, venture capitalists, development economists, world financial institutions, and great powers such as the United States, Turkey, Iran, and the European Union all strove for their pieces of the action and/or for containment of ugly spillover from Soviet turmoil. In the face of ethnic disaggregation, economic collapse, and undermining of the old regime’s powers, many observers and participants on the Soviet scene feared a bid by the military, intelligence, and Party establishment to reverse the flow of events. History realized their fears. The critical moment arrived in August 1991, when a junta backed by just those elements sequestered Gorbachev at his Crimean holiday retreat on the eve of his signing yet another union treaty for the nine republics that were still collaborating with the central state. Drawn especially from the military, intelligence, and police administrations, plotters declared the seizure of power by a shadowy Emergency Committee; its control of the state, such as it was, lasted only three days. President Boris Yeltsin of the Russian federation had already been playing the nationalist card against central authority on behalf of Russia. During the abortive coup, Yeltsin braved the army’s tanks and spoke to crowds in Moscow, calling for a general strike against the Emergency Committee. Several military units defected to Yeltsin’s side, setting up a defensive line around the Russian republic’s Moscow headquarters. The defection and defense shattered the junta’s resolve. The attempted coup broke up without armed combat. Gorbachev’s captors released him. On his return, Gorbachev faced a wave of demands for accelerated reform, renewed efforts of organized nationalities to depart from the Union, intensified rivalries from Yeltsin and his counterparts in other republics, and utter collapse of the Kremlin’s authority. Resigning as Party head, Gorbachev suspended Party activities throughout the U.S.S.R. Over the next four months Yeltsin sought to succeed Gorbachev, not as Party secretary but as chief of a confederation maintaining a measure of economic, military, and diplomatic authority. Even that effort ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union into an ill-defined and disputatious Commonwealth from which the Baltic states absented themselves entirely, while others began rushing toward exits. Once the Soviet regime collapsed, Russian nationalists (including the opportunistic nationalist Yeltsin) faced a fierce dilemma: on the one hand, they claimed the right of Russians to rule the Russian federation, which actually included millions of people from non-Russian minorities. This claim supported the principle that titular nationalities should prevail. On the other hand, they vigorously criticized the treatment of Russians outside the Russian federation—for example, the large numbers of self-identified Russians in Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan—as



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second-class minorities facing a choice among assimilation to the titular nationality, lesser forms of citizenship, and emigration (Barrington 1995). Unsurprisingly, newly independent neighbors often accused the Russian federation’s authorities of imperialism. Mark Beissinger’s catalog of protest events from 1987 through 1992 throughout the Soviet Union’s space identifies a crucial shift in popular participation. Protest demonstrations increased rapidly in numbers from 1987 to 1989, then reached their peak in 1990, only to swing wildly, but in a generally downward direction, thereafter. Mass violent events, in contrast, reached a minor peak in mid-1989, but began a powerful upward surge in 1991, remaining frequent through 1992; by 1992, the dominant issue of protest events had become the drawing of borders among republics (Beissinger 1998: 294–305). The shift corresponded to a switch from relatively peaceful, if massive, demands for reform and national representation to bitterly fought struggles over national rights. State-seeking nationalism (on the part of republics seeking exit from the Union) and state-led nationalism (on the part of republic leaders seeking to establish hegemony within their own territories) interacted powerfully. As it happens, Beissinger explicitly interprets his events as a cycle of contention, with violence characteristically increasing in the cycle’s later stages. Indeed, all four of our mechanisms—opportunity spirals, identity shift, competition, and brokerage—operated with a vengeance in Soviet disintegration. In the Soviet case, several spirals succeeded each other: first bids for external support of profit-making and rent-seeking enterprises under declining central controls, then outright assertions of rights to national autonomy on the parts of existing regional leaders and their local rivals, and finally seizure of fungible state resources by whoever could make off with them. Considering previous images of the Communist system as an unshakable block, identity shift occurred with startling rapidity, with longtime beneficiaries of Communist control backing off from identification with the Party and its legacy in favor of a series of improvised alternatives among which ethnic labels (including Russian) assumed ever-increasing scope. Competition operated on two fronts: in attempts to gain external economic and political support, and in related attempts to seize organizations and assets previously firmly under state control. Brokerage may be less obvious, but it made a big difference in two regards. First, it helps account for the remarkable continuity of rulers through apparently revolutionary turmoil. Although gangsters and tycoons have appeared from the shadows of Soviet society, for the most part the people who run things in the former Soviet Union are the same sorts of people—and in many cases the very same people—who ran things during the 1980s. That is because, as connectors in a vast centralized system, they had privileged access to information, resources, and other centers of power; it was extremely difficult for anyone to match the advantages afforded them by their institutional positions. The second regard is the converse of the first: once regional leaders, entrepreneurs, work groups, and ordinary citizens started to resist yielding goods and services to

150  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis central authorities, those authorities lost power as brokers; they could no longer redistribute resources to sustain their own positions, their allies, and the activities to which they were most committed. Thus opportunity spirals, identity shifts, competition, and brokerage interacted powerfully. Notice the crucial importance of history in the actual operation of these mechanisms. Two examples only: First, given the U.S.S.R.’s vast, powerful military establishment, one might have expected the Soviet military to play a pivotal independent role in the transition from socialism. Despite the involvement of military, intelligence, and police officers in the 1991 coup, the military establishment figured only secondarily in the events we have reviewed. The historical creation of a massive governing party out of a fusion of revolutionary activism with military mobilization left the Soviet Union’s military impressively subordinated to civilian power holders. (In fact, the military probably wield more autonomous political power in post-socialist Russia and other fragments of the Union than they did during the 1980s.) Brokerage operated within limits set by previously established organizational relations. Second, the Stalinist system of rule through titular nationalities had a double effect. In previously independent countries that the U.S.S.R. had incorporated wholesale—notably the Baltic states—even the massive diffusion of Russian-­language communication and the substantial migration of ethnic Russian technicians and administrators did not destroy recognized non-Russian political identities. In multicultural, multilingual regions, the establishment of titular nationalities created recognized, dominant political identities where none had previously prevailed. As a consequence, political identities the regime had nurtured (rather than age-old solidarities and hatreds) became the bases of mobilization, opposition, and political reconstitution as the Soviet Union disintegrated. Opportunity spirals, identity shifts, and competition worked in the U.S.S.R. as they do elsewhere, but as they incorporated and articulated with distinctive historical accumulations they led to rather different outcomes than, say, in the disbanding of the tsarist, Ottoman, or British empires. In this sense, time and place made a huge difference to the operation of very general political processes.

Puzzling Features in Classes of Episodes Our third strategy is to identify puzzling features for a whole class of similar episodes, then use systematic comparison with other classes of episodes to locate robust mechanisms and processes producing those puzzling features. Social movements offer an excellent illustration. Whatever else happens in social movements, they center on projection of collective identities. For clarity and compactness, my discussion will concentrate on identity mechanisms and processes within social movements, neglecting their connections with social change, organizational bases, responses to threat and opportunity, forms of action, and strategic interactions (see Tarrow 1998



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for extensive discussions of these matters). It will also interweave comparisons with other classes of episodes instead of setting out those comparisons separately. Although some analysts use the term “social movement” loosely for any sort of collective popular claim making, both the term and the phenomenon crystallized during the nineteenth century. The social movement consists of sustained interaction between powerholders and activists who speak on the behalf of a wronged population through collective public displays of determination and capacity coupled with explicit support for programs of action. At least as concretized in associations, public meetings, demonstrations, marches, petitions, slogans, writings, and statements to the media, no social movements occurred anywhere in the world before the late eighteenth century. Yet by 1850 social movement activity had become a well-established mode of political action in Western Europe and North America. By the end of the twentieth century, the social movement had become a standard form of politics throughout the democratic world. Oddly, no one has yet written a comprehensive history of this significant political innovation. From more fragmentary studies, nevertheless, some features of the social movement’s history emerge: significant coincidence with the expansion of popular elections and parliamentary power; reliance on freedom of association and speech; early salience of labor and religious organizations, followed by proliferation of other special interests; overlap with the growth of interest-group politics; displacement of relatively direct, and frequently violent, forms of claim making, by predominantly nonviolent shows of strength; interdependence with the formation of police forces specialized in control of public spaces; significant cross-national transfers of practices and personnel; and internal historical development in prevailing idioms, practices, and organizational structures. Like election campaigns and strikes, social movements have a well-defined political history. They also present a puzzling feature that has generated plenty of debate but no resolution: Why do social movement participants spend so much of their shared time and organizing effort on public displays of solidarity when they could be engaging in interactions that in the short run are more likely to advance the programs they advocate? Opponents of particular social movements have often asked the question in a hostile mood, wondering out loud why young people waste their effort in disruptive marching and shouting when their elders are quietly doing their best to solve the problems about which the youngsters are complaining. Activists themselves have often split over the choice between concrete ameliorative efforts and contentious public displays of solidarity. Even generally enthusiastic participants ask themselves now and then whether meeting, demonstrating, and chanting slogans have any impact on the evils they seek to combat. Many observers have thought that solidarity and shared identity bring intrinsic satisfaction, but that explanation ignores both a) the many occasions on which identity displays offer little more than suffering to the participants and b) the effort that leaders invest in coordinating correct public performances in support of claimed identities. Some professional students of social movements have replied to the dilemma

152  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis by ­rejecting instrumental accounts, at least for the new social movements of environmentalism, feminism, peace, and sexual preference. Social movements, they say, organize not around practical politics but around the production of new identities. That critique almost gets things right, yet it locates the identities in question wrongly. Political identities always erect boundaries between political actors, define relations across the boundaries, and organize relations on either side of the boundaries as well. The crucial mechanisms include those that the Soviet experience has already brought to our attention: opportunity spirals, identity shift, competition, and brokerage. But they also include category formation and object shift. Category formation creates identities. A social category consists of a set of sites that share a boundary distinguishing all of them from, and relating all of them to at least one set of sites visibly excluded by the boundary. Category formation occurs by means of three different submechanisms, through invention, borrowing, and encounter. Invention involves authoritative drawing of a boundary and prescription of relations across that boundary, as when Bosnian Serb leaders decree who in Bosnia is a Serb and who not, then regulate how Serbs interact with non-Serbs. Borrowing involves importation of a boundary-cum-relations package already existing elsewhere and its installation in the local setting, as when rural French Revolutionaries divided along the lines of patriot/aristocrat that had already split Paris and other major French cities. Encounter involves initial contact between previously separate (but internally wellconnected) networks in the course of which members of one network begin competing for resources with members of the other, interactively generating definitions of the boundary and relations across it. In social movements, invention, borrowing, and encounter all occur, but social movements specialize in combinations of invention and borrowing: creation of the Coalition of Xs, United Citizens of Y, Front Against Z, each of them paired with some set of authorities. Object shift significantly affects contentious repertoires. Object shift means alteration in relations between claimants and objects of claims. Object shift often occurs in the short run, during the strategic interaction of contention: battling gangs unite against the police, the intervention of an official in a market conflict diverts customers’ attacks to him, a besieged tax clerk calls in the mayor. Of course such shifts commonly alter the actors and the paired identities they deploy, but they likewise affect the forms of collective claim making that are available, appropriate, and likely to be effective. Object shift also occurs over the longer run and outside of contentious interaction. Social movements often involve object shift, as activists move among claims on local authorities, claims on national authorities, competition with rivals, and provision of services to their constituencies. As we saw in the earlier discussion of certification and decertification, over a wide variety of polities recognition as a valid political actor provides collective benefits distinct from the accomplishment of the particular programs around which people rally. Because certification matters, important elements of contentious politics that a strict means-end calculus renders mysterious actually make sense. To make a successful claim of collective worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment brings



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recognition as a credible political player with the capacity to make a difference in the next political struggle. To be sure, individual commitment and interpersonal bonds matter crucially to the collective life of any social movement. What is more, some people do experience intensive satisfaction and establish lifelong ties in social movement activism. Social movement involvement often alters people’s own relations to others as well as their sense of who they are. But identity has a public, collective side that does not depend heavily on person-by-person transformation. On the public side of social movement activity, what are the stakes? Recognition as a valid political actor makes those who represent the collective identity available as allies, carries the implicit threat of independent or disruptive action, and solidifies communication lines both within and across boundaries. In fact, those benefits are sufficiently substantial that—as Robert Michels noted long ago—leaders of recognized political actors often shift into advancing their own interests by means of the organizations and connections they control. A social movement is a kind of campaign, parallel in many respects to an electoral campaign. This sort of campaign, however, demands righting of a wrong, most often a wrong suffered by a well-specified population. It constructs that population as a category, often as a categorical candidate for polity membership. The population in question can range from a single individual to all humans, or even all living creatures. Whereas an electoral campaign pays off chiefly in the votes that finally result from it, a social movement pays off in effective transmission of the message that its program’s supporters are WUNC: 1) Worthy, 2) Unified, 3) Numerous, and 4) Committed. The four elements compensate one another to some degree, for example with a high value on worthiness making up for small numbers. Yet a visibly low value on any one of them (a public demonstration of unworthiness, division, dwindling numbers, and/or outright defection) discredits the whole movement. Social-movement campaigning involves a familiar bundle of performances: creation of associations and coalitions, marches, demonstrations, petitions, public meetings, slogan-shouting, badge-wearing, pamphlet-writing, and more. Seen as means-end action, such a campaign has a peculiar diffuseness; as compared with striking, voting, smashing the loom of a nonstriking weaver, or running a miscreant out of town, its actions remain essentially symbolic, cumulative, and indirect, with almost no chance that any single event will achieve its stated objective of ending an injustice or persuading authorities to enact a needed law. Social-movement mobilization gains its strength from an implicit threat to act in adjacent arenas: to withdraw support from public authorities, to provide sustenance to a regime’s enemies, to ally with splinter parties, to move toward direct action or even rebellion. Skilled social movement organizers draw tacitly on such threats to bargain with the objects of their demands. Social movements take place as conversations—not as solo performances but as interactions among parties. The most elementary set of parties consists of a claimmaking actor, an object of the actor’s claims, and an audience having a stake in the

154  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis fate of at least one of them. Whatever else they do, movements dramatize categorical differences between claimants and objects of claims. But allies, competitors, enemies, authorities, and multiple audiences also frequently play parts in movement interactions. Therein lies the complexity of social movement organizing, not to mention of responses by authorities and objects of claims; third parties always complicate the interaction. Examined from the viewpoint of challengers, social movement success depends in part on two varieties of mystification. First, as they increase, worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment almost necessarily contradict each other; to gain numbers, for example, generally requires compromise on worthiness, unity, and/or commitment. The actual work of organizers consists recurrently of patching together provisional coalitions, suppressing risky tactics, negotiating which of the multiple agendas participants bring with them will find public voice in their collective action, and above all hiding backstage struggle from public view. They almost always exaggerate their coalition’s worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. Second, movement activists seek to present themselves and (if different) the objects of their solicitude as a solidary group, preferably as a group with a long history and with a coherent existence outside the world of public claim making. In that regard, they resemble state-seeking nationalists with their constructions of long, coherent, distinctive cultural histories for their nations. Thus feminists identify themselves with women’s age-old struggles for rights in the streets and in everyday existence, civil rights leaders minimize class and religious differences within their racial category, and environmentalists present most of humankind as their eternal community. The two varieties of mystification address several different audiences. They encourage activists and supporters to make high estimates of the probability that fellow adherents will take risks and incur costs for the cause, hence that their own contributions will bear fruit. They warn authorities, objects of claims, opponents, rivals, and bystanders to take the movement seriously as a force that can affect their fates. Movements differ significantly in the relative attention they give to these various audiences, from self-absorbed tests of daring organized by small clusters of terrorists to the signature of petitions by transient participants who wish some authority to know their opinion. These orientations frequently vary in the course of a given social movement, for example in transitions from x) internal building to y) ostentatious action to z) fighting off competitors and enemies. Mystification does not mean utter falsehood. Activists and constituents of social movements vary considerably in the extent to which they actually embody worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment, in the degree to which they spring from a single solidary group with collective life outside the world of public politics. To the extent that the two varieties of mystification contain elements of truth, furthermore, social movements generally mobilize more effectively. A segregated ethnic community threatened by outside attack, on the average, mobilizes more readily than does the entire category consisting of all those who suffer from diverse attacks on civil liberties.



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The process whereby social movement activists achieve recognition as valid interlocutors for unjustly deprived populations does not resemble the fact-finding inquiries of novelists, social scientists, or investigative reporters. It resembles a court proceeding, in which those who make such claims, however self-evident to them, must establish themselves in the eyes of others—authorities, competitors, enemies, and relevant audiences—as voices that require attention, and must commonly establish themselves in the face of vigorous opposition. They must prove that they qualify. Almost all such proofs entail suppression of some evidence and exaggeration of other evidence concerning the claimants’ worthiness, unity, numbers, commitment, and grounding in a durable, coherent, solidary, deprived population. Again resemblances to state-seeking nationalism immediately strike the mind’s eye. Analysts of collective action, especially those who entertain sympathy for the actions they are studying, often insist on these mystified elements as intrinsic to social movements: the presence of solidarity, the construction of shared identities, the sense of grievance, the creation of sustaining organizations, and more; without such features, analysts say, we have nothing but ordinary politics. Sometimes the myths fulfill themselves, building up the lineaments of durable connection among core participants. But most social movements remain far more contingent and volatile than their mystifications allow; these other elements do not define the social movement as a distinctive political phenomenon. What does? Social movements involve collective claims on authorities. A social movement consists of a sustained challenge to powerholders in the name of a population living under the jurisdiction of those powerholders by means of repeated public displays of that population’s numbers, commitment, unity, and worthiness. We, the aggrieved, demand that you, perpetrators of evil or responsible authorities, act to alleviate a condition about which we are justly indignant. Although some of our actions may express support for proposals, programs, or persons that are already advancing our aims, most of our displays dramatize not only our own WUNC, but also the existence of conditions we oppose. As they developed in Great Britain and other Western European countries during the early nineteenth century, characteristic social-movement displays included creation of special-purpose associations, lobbying of officials, public meetings, demonstrations, marches, petitions, pamphlets, statements in mass media, posting or wearing of identifying signs, and deliberate adoption of distinctive slogans; while their relative weight varied considerably from movement to movement, these elements have coexisted since the early nineteenth century. Note the importance of invention. For all its contentiousness, most of human history has proceeded without social movements, without sustained challenges to powerholders in the names of populations living under the jurisdiction of those powerholders by means of repeated public displays of those populations’ numbers, commitment, unity, and worthiness. Rebellions, revolutions, avenging actions, rough justice, and many other forms of popular collective action have abounded, but not

156  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis the associating, meeting, marching, petitioning, propagandizing, sloganeering, and brandishing of symbols that mark social movements. With some eighteenth-century precedents, this complex of interactions emerges as a way of doing political business in Western Europe and North America during the nineteenth century; however we finally sort out the priorities, Britain shares credit for the invention. In Great Britain, the actual inventors were political entrepreneurs such as John Wilkes, Lord George Gordon, William Cobbett, and Francis Place. They, their collaborators, and their followers bargained out space for new forms of political action—bargained it out with local and national authorities, with rivals, with enemies, with objects of their claims. Social movements, then, center on construction of categorical identities. Identities in general are shared experiences of distinctive social relations and representations of those social relations. Workers become workers in relation to employers and other workers, women become women in relation to men and other women, Orthodox Jews become Orthodox Jews in relation to non-Jews, non-Orthodox Jews, and other Orthodox Jews. Like social movements, nationalism and religious qualifications for citizenship involve the construction and enforcement of unequal paired categories. Clearly the study of identities in social movements leads directly to comparisons with identity mechanisms and processes in quite different classes of episodes.

Analogies Among Ostensibly Dissimilar Episodes The fourth analytical strategy for historical treatment of political processes consists of identifying partial causal analogies among ostensibly dissimilar episodes and classes of episodes by locating the same mechanisms and processes within them. In fact, we have been pursuing that analytical strategy through the three previous examples. Reflect on the major causal mechanisms we have encountered along the way: certification, decertification, identity shift, object shift, opportunity spirals, competition, and brokerage. They constitute a small but widely applicable bundle of identity-shaping mechanisms. They certainly appear recurrently in episodes of nationalism, imperial disintegration, and social movements. They reappear, however, in unexpected places: in civil wars when each party claims to be the authentic embodiment of the rightful government, in revolutions when insurgents claim to speak for the oppressed, in state formation when one authority among many manages to eliminate or subordinate the rest, or in democratization when previously excluded political actors acquire voice. Across a wide range of political processes, certification, decertification, identity shift, object shift, opportunity spirals, competition, and brokerage operate in similar fashions, with vastly dissimilar overall consequences. Let me stress that conclusion. The mechanism-based program of inquiry into historical political processes does not return surreptitiously to the discovery of recurrent structures and processes on the large scale. It denies the possibility of general models and complete explanations for whole political episodes. It also negates the idea



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that war, revolution, social movements, nationalism, and democratization constitute phenomena sui generis, each springing in its own characteristic way from a distinctive set of causes. It concedes that, as political constructions, one war influences the next, one revolution influences the next, and so on. But that construction of politically meaningful forms and its consequences for political action become part of what historical analysts must explain. Sociologists who take this program of inquiry seriously will have to abandon ingrained practices: creating sui generis models of major political processes, choosing among covering-law, propensity, and system accounts of explanation, imagining history as a storage bin of raw materials for testing of contemporary political models, rejecting explanations because they neglect favorite variables, supposing that exhaustion of variance is the criterion of solid explanation. Those who dare have a world to gain.

References Azar, Edward, and Josph Ben-Dak, eds. (1973). Theory and Practice of Events Research. New York: Gordon and Breach. Barkey, Karen, and Mark von Hagen, eds. (1997). After Empire. Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building. Boulder, CO: Westview. Barrington, Lowell (1995). “The Domestic and International Consequences of Citizenship in the Soviet Successor States,” Europe-Asia Studies 47: 731–763. Bearman, Peter, Robert Faris, and James Moody (1999). “Blocking the Future: New Solutions for Old Problems in Historical Social Science,” Social Science History 23: 501–534. Beissinger, Mark (1998). “Event Analysis in Transitional Societies: Protest Mobilization in the Former Soviet Union,” in Dieter Rucht, Ruud Koopmans, and Friedhelm Neidhardt, eds., Acts of Dissent. New Developments in the Study of Protest. Berlin: Sigma. te Brake, Wayne (1998). Shaping History. Ordinary People in European Politics 1500–1700. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brockett, Charles D. (1992). “Measuring Political Violence and Land Inequality in Central America,” American Political Science Review 86: 169–176. Bunge, Mario (1997). “Mechanism and Explanation,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 27: 410–465. ——— (1998): Social Science Under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cioffi-Revilla, Claudio (1990). The Scientific Measurement of International Conflict. Handbook of Datasets on Crises and Wars, 1495–1988 A.D.. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Déloye, Yves (1996). Sociologie historique du politique. Paris: La Découverte. Diani, Mario, and Ron Eyerman, eds. (1992). Studying Collective Action. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Elster, Jon (1989). Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ertman, Thomas (1997). Birth of the Leviathan. Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

158  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis Favre, Pierre, Olivier Fillieule, and Nonna Mayer (1997). “La fin d’une étrange lacune de la sociologie des mobilisations. L’étude par sondage des manifestants. Fondements théoriques et solutions techniques,” Revue Française de Science Politique 47: 3–28. Feige, Edgar (1998). “Underground Activity and Institutional Change: Productive, Protective, and Predatory Behavior in Transition Economies,” in Joan M. Nelson, Charles Tilly, and Lee Walker, eds., Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Franzosi, Roberto (1998). “Narrative as Data: Linguistic and Statistical Tools for the Quantitative Study of Historical Events,” International Review of Social History 43, Supplement 6: New Methods for Social History, 81–104. Gerner, Deborah J., et al. (1994). “Machine Coding of Event Data Using Regional and International Sources,” International Studies Quarterly 38: 91–119. Gurr, Ted Robert, and Barbara Harff (1994). Ethnic Conflict in World Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview. Hanagan, Michael P., Leslie Page Moch, and Wayne te Brake, eds. (1998). Challenging Authority. The Historical Study of Contentious Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hedström, Peter, and Richard Swedberg, eds. (1998). Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ledeneva, Alena V. (1998). Russia’s Economy of Favours. Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Little, Daniel (1991). Varieties of Social Explanation. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science. Boulder, CO: Westview. ——— (1998). On the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Microfoundations, Method, and Causation. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Mann, Doug (1999). “The Limits of Instrumental Rationality in Social Explanation,” Critical Review 13: 165–189. Mann, Michael (1986, 1993). The Sources of Social Power I. A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760; II. The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Anthony W. (1998). Making Race and Nation. A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michels, Robert (1949). Political Parties. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. First published in 1915. Mueller, Carol (1997). “International Press Coverage of East German Protest Events, 1989,” American Sociological Review 62: 820–832. Nahaylo, Bohdan, and Victor Swoboda (1990). Soviet Disunion. A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR. New York: Free Press Oliver, Pamela E., and Daniel J. Myers (1999). “How Events Enter the Public Sphere: Conflict, Location, and Sponsorship in Local Newspaper Coverage of Public Events,” American Journal of Sociology 105: 38–87. Olzak, Susan (1989). “Analysis of Events in the Study of Collective Action,” Annual Review of Sociology 15: 119–141. Ringmar, Erik (1996). Identity, Interest and Action. A Cultural Explanation of Sweden’s Intervention in the Thirty Years War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rucht, Dieter, and Ruud Koopmans, eds. (1999). “Protest Event Analysis,” Mobilization 4, no. 2, entire issue.



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Rucht, Dieter, Ruud Koopmans, and Friedhelm Neidhardt, eds. (1998). Acts of Dissent. New Developments in the Study of Protest. Berlin: Sigma Rainer Bohn Verlag. Scott, James C. (1998). Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shapiro, Gilbert, and John Markoff (1998). Revolutionary Demands. A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sider, Gerald, and Gavin Smith, eds. (1997). Between History and Histories. The Making of Silences and Commemorations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Skocpol, Theda, ed. (1998). Democracy, Revolution, and History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Small, Melvin, and J. David Singer (1982). Resort to Arms. International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Solnick, Steven L. (1998). Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. (1991). “The Conditions of Fruitfulness of Theorizing About Mechanisms in Social Science,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21: 367–388. Sugimoto, Yoshio (1981). Popular Disturbance in Postwar Japan. Hong Kong: Asian Research Service. Tambiah, Stanley J. (1996). Leveling Crowds. Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tarrow, Sidney (1998). Power in Movement, revised edition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tilly, Charles, and James Rule (1965). Measuring Political Upheaval. Princeton, NJ: Center of International Studies, Princeton University. White, Robert W. (1993). “On Measuring Political Violence: Northern Ireland, 1969 to 1980,” American Sociological Review 58: 575–585. Wong, R. Bin (1997). China Transformed. Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Source Note “Historical Analysis of Political Processes,” in Jonathan H. Turner, ed., Handbook of Sociological Theory. New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 2004.

Chapter 13

What Good is Urban History? What good is urban history? Five sentences sum up my message: 1. In principle, urban historians have the opportunity to be our most important interpreters of the ways that global social processes articulate with small-scale social life. 2. In practice, they have turned unseeing eyes to the challenge. 3. They need not remain forever blind. 4. Although urban historians exhort a great deal, their work does not respond to exhortation; only concrete examples—preferably including dissertation-size chunks—will move them to new forms of investigation. 5. No use talking about it; someone will have to do it! My business here is to restate, elaborate, illustrate, qualify, and defend these five sentences. I hope to do so vividly, anabiotically (that is, in a way that will help resuscitate the dormant body of urban history), and without vituperation. I will argue that urban historians can move toward a central position in history as a whole by taking two large steps: first by boldly addressing history’s central questions rather than huddling, cramped, in the shelter of urban history’s conventional problems; second by adopting a reflective historicism. In order to minimize distracting errors of act and judgment, I will illustrate my sermon chiefly by reference to fields of urban history in which I have been working myself.1 No one should therefore draw the conclusion that my personal agenda should take priority over others that will have similar effects on the discipline. First, the move toward centrality. What opportunity do urban historians face? “The role of social history,” Olivier Zunz declares, “is to connect everyday experience to the large structures of historical analysis and major changes of the past. We believe that history should illuminate the complex interplay between large structural changes and alterations in the character of the dynamics of populations, social hierarchies, and routine social life.”2 Since Zunz and I thrashed out that conception of social history’s 160



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mission together, you will not be surprised to learn that I agree with it. I only want to add that urban history plays a starring role in the drama. To treat urban history as quintessential social history gives us the means of addressing central historical questions such as:

• How, if at all, do the ways that ordinary people cope with daily life impinge on power and policy at a national or international scale? • What actual difference does it make to the quality of life what sort of political system people live under? • Do rising technological and organizational complexity rob life of its spontaneity and wonder? • How and why did capitalism come to be the dominant form of economic organization in Western countries? • How and why did relatively large, centralized, and unified national states displace the city-states, city-empires, dynastic empires, and federations that once predominated among the world’s states?

Those who don’t care for such suprahistorical questions can use urban history to address grand problems at a national scale. In American history, for example, urban historians can reasonably ask:

• To what extent did widespread demands for popular sovereignty inform American struggles of the 1760s and 1770s? • Did the Civil War pit fundamentally incompatible ways of life against each other? • Did a new alliance of big capital and the state crush working-class radicalism in the 1870s and 1880s, thus producing what analysts now describe as American exceptionalism? • To what degree, and why, did the range of trades open to urban blacks narrow after 1890? • Did militant feminism and other political mobilizations of women reinforce each other, contradict each other, or proceed in relative independence of each other?

In all these cases, and many more, cities offer privileged sites for study of the interaction between large social processes and routines of local life. Urban historians not only have superior access to the sites, but also know more—or should know more—than other historians about the bases of variation in these regards from one time and place to another. Let me return to the study of variation later. For now there are three crucial things to understand: 1) such pressing questions fall clearly within the purview of urban history; 2) in the past, when urban historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Oscar Handlin, Stephan Thernstrom, or Gary Nash have asked such questions effectively, nonspecialists have taken notice; 3) most of today’s urban historians are not articulating such grand questions forcefully; they are

162  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis playing a cautious, constricted game. Urban historians should move to the boldest edge of social history. Not all of urban history, as actually practiced, falls into social history. Histories of architecture, of urban form, of urban government, of writing about cities, contribute significantly to urban history, but stand adjacent to social history rather than inside it. Let me salute those forms of urban history, which I frequently enjoy and use, then turn to the resuscitation of their neighbors that overlap with social history. Much of urban history deals directly with connections between global social processes—not only urbanization, but also trade, circulation of ideas, epidemics, commercialization, population growth or decline, proletarianization and capital accumulation, state formation and transformation, growth or decline of world religions, and so on—and the lives of individuals, households, shops, and neighborhoods. Urban history inevitably deals with such processes because cities constitute major sites and junctions for them even when and where most people live in the countryside. Behold a salient example: the study of protoindustrialization—expansion of manufacturing through the multiplication of small producing units—deals extensively with villages and farmsteads, yet no one will understand it without seeing its tight connections with urban markets and merchants.3 Much of urban history’s agenda, furthermore, deals implicitly or explicitly with the impact of global processes on small-scale social life or (more rarely) the impact of small-scale social life on global processes. Every study of an urban real estate market touches the changing ways in which capitalists and political authorities interact to manage space. Each examination of work and family in cities enters a site buffeted by the great winds of economic and demographic transformation. All analyses of migration, race, religion, class, and ethnicity in cities treat, at least implicitly, influences that operate on a regional, national, or even international scale. We read Olivier Zunz’s superb history of Detroit between 1880 and 1920, not only to learn about that beleaguered city, but also to understand how the growth of factory-based industry reshaped American social life as a whole.4 While disagreeing sharply with many of Mumford’s ideas, Zunz takes up the challenge set by Lewis Mumford: to trace relations among large shifts in economic organization, alterations of urban geography, and changes in the quality of social life. Dare I praise Mumford? Eric Monkkonen scores Mumford as a snobbish sentimentalist who neglected the details and realities of urban history.5 One need not share Mumford’s sometimes arrogant and inconsistent tastes, however, to recognize the power of two features that set him off as a great urban historian: first, his insistence on the close connection between internal lives of cities and the particular configurations of power and production within which they lay; second, his fashioning of a theory in which the relative concentrations of state power and of commercial-productive activity stamped the character of urban life, including the degree to which it was tolerable at all.6 Mumford’s Baroque City and his Coketown differed chiefly in their relative emphasis on royal power and industrial production. Whatever we think of Mumford’s



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analysis, it demonstrates the feasibility of fashioning theories that cross city boundaries to provide coherent accounts of life on the small scale and the large. Monkkonen also argues that the short-lived “new urban history” collapsed because its practitioners failed to develop a more effective way of summarizing its results, avoided reflection on the more general significance of its main findings, and turned away from the enterprise rather than countering the widespread criticism it generated.7 I remember the checkered history well, as Stephan Thernstrom’s co-editor of a series in which appeared major studies concerning urban social mobility, and as teacher of many students who undertook urban history as collective biography. I recognize that what looked like a wave of the future in the late 1960s began to resemble spent foam on a littered beach only a decade later. Although they continue to thrive in European historical demography, massive urban collective biographies have almost disappeared from American urban history. Monkkonen’s factors played their part. But Monkkonen misses the decline’s more general causes. The turn from urban history as collective biography corresponded to a wider disillusionment with formalization broadcast by such former social scientific stalwarts as Lawrence Stone.8 The various populisms of the 1960s, which had borne with them great hopes for systematic history from below, gave way to more cynical, discouraged, and elitist interpretations of popular experience. In its own terms, the Thernstromian program suffered dramatically from diminishing returns, both because no one figured out how to get a firm grip on city-to-city and year-to-year variation and because its greatest impact arrived first, in the very idea of confronting American mobility myths with presumably hard evidence. When it began to appear that few sons had left their fathers far behind, urban historians searched elsewhere for keys to social change, and publishers lost interest in printing yet another study of Irish and Italian workers’ social mobility—or lack of it—in yet another middle-sized city. Urban collective biography has not entirely disappeared; it remains important, for example, in studies of immigration, ethnicity, occupational history, and political mobilization.9 A number of investigators are applying it effectively to the study of conflicts.10 It is a pity that no similar method, nicely fitted to a dissertation-size chunk of research that will be comparable to other dissertation-size chunks, has appeared to replace the local mobility study. But we should not regret the mobility study’s passing. I now believe (but, alas, did not see twenty-five years ago) that the conventional study of social mobility rests on a series of misconceptions: that occupations form neat hierarchies, that they determine their holders’ life chances, that explanations of lifetime and intergenerational movement from occupation to occupation rest chiefly on individual characteristics, and so on.11 It neglects three fundamental features of social inequality: 1. Few inequalities actually compound into uniform hierarchies; viewed over more than a single pair, most varieties of inequality are fragmentary and inconsistent. A web provides a more apt metaphor than a ladder.

164  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis 2. Inequalities between any two social units vary significantly from one setting to another as a function of resources available to each party in that setting and relations with third parties activated by presence in that setting. 3. Any particular actor’s power, influence, and control over resources generally decline with time and distance. One party is often very powerful, rich, or prestigious vis à vis another on his home territory, but weak elsewhere; a theorist of inequality might try to contend with this difficulty by calling the party that exercised superiority in a larger territory or long time period higher-ranking, but only at the risk of neglecting variability in the parties’ relative power, wealth, or prestige. More than anything else, prevailing conceptions of social mobility entirely neglected the exercise of power: power of ethnic groups, power of political authorities. That recognition leads to identification of the fundamental problem: treatment of each city as a sample case from a national frame blinds analysts to relations between processes generating or sustaining inequality in any particular city and regional, national, or international flows of capital, labor, and political power. Urban history connects with general history through just such interactions. The study of state formation provides an unexpected but compelling case in point. Everywhere that cities have grown, their ruling classes have gained privileged access to the trade and capital of large regions. States have always expanded through the amassing of armed force. At times the distinction between cities and states has virtually dissolved; historically, city-states and city-empires in which state authorities and urban ruling classes overlapped have constituted one of the most common forms of government at the larger scale. Where urban elites and state authorities formed partly distinct categories, they sometimes warred and always bargained; they could find common ground to the extent that states acted to protect trade and capital, to the extent that merchants and capitalists helped finance armed force. The relative strength of coercion-wielders and capital-wielders, however, has varied tremendously from region to region and time to time; in Europe over the last millennium, for example, merchants have generally been freer to act in the commercial belt from northern Italy to Flanders and southern England than elsewhere. That variation wrote itself out in both directions: in the form of states whose bourgeois held significant power and whose armies benefited from relatively effective state financing, and in the form of cities within which commerce left its imprint everywhere. State and municipal politics varied accordingly; in the quintessentially capitalist Dutch Republic of the eighteenth century, for instance, both war making and revolution were indistinguishable from the politics of Amsterdam and other cities.12 In Poland, on the other hand, great nobles not only repeatedly strangled royal power, but also kept merchants from gaining any significant autonomy, much less political power; urban form reflected the dominance of a landed nobility.13



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American urban history offers plenty of opportunities for similar two-sided analyses, if only historians will remove their blinders. It also provides a splendid arena for renewal of historicism. In the social sciences and history, the most prominent current of the last decade has no doubt been the drive toward the treatment of social life as discourse, and away from belief in reliable knowledge based on observation or external reconstruction.14 Among the dwindling number who still believe that social life follows knowable, orderly principles, however, sociologists and other social scientists have recently given increased credence to thoughtful historicism. That sociological historicism examines how the residues of action at a given time constrain subsequent action. It goes at least a step beyond Robert Merton’s old, important analysis of purposive social action’s unanticipated consequences by showing how the embedding of social action in time and place affects the possibility of social action in subsequent times and places; whole chains of causation, unique yet profoundly regular, result.15 For Merton accomplished only half the job: he enumerated good reasons why purposive action so regularly produces unexpected outcomes, thus raising doubts about all rational-action accounts of social behavior. But he left untouched the other half: how purposive social action nonetheless produces systematic, durable social structure. The answer, it seems to me, lies in four principles: 1) all social interaction consists of incessant errors, constantly corrected, 2) people draw their correction mechanisms from historically accumulated shared understandings, from culture, 3) interaction occurs within constraining webs of previously established social relations which it alters incrementally, and 4) both culture and social relations change systematically, and lay down durable social structure. That is why historicism matters. In his discussion of the way that craft organizations persisted within some industries well into the era of mass production, Arthur Stinchcombe has long since provided an important example of that sort of historicizing analysis.16 Allan Pred has similarly shown how existing connections among cities in eighteenth-century North America constrained subsequent growth of the North American urban system.17 In a phrase faintly echoing Karl Marx, Pred has preached that “People do not produce history and places under conditions of their own choosing, but in the context of already existing, directly encountered social and spatial structures.”18 Such reasoning contrasts sharply with unhistoricist or antihistoricist explanations of social life, including the life of cities, as the immediate effect of market forces, or prevailing national attitudes, or other causes that act instantaneously, generally, and heedless of prior events. Antihistoricist thought often appears in historical analysis, for example in great swaths of economic history. A fine example of antihistoricist thinking in urban history comes, indeed, from Lewis Mumford. In Mumford’s City in History, the prevailing conjunction of political and economic power largely determines the activity and form of cities, regardless of the paths by which they have arrived at their present condition. A historicist alternative could, in principle, fly as bold and sweeping as Mumford’s analysis; so far, however, in Mumford’s domain the chief large-scale historicist enterprises consist of archeologi-

166  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis cal, town-planning, and architectural compendia; such studies sometimes cover large spans of time and space, but in those cases always lack synthetic power. A truly historicist synthesis to compete with Mumford’s stands high on the agenda of an anabiotic urban history. Allan Pred grounds his sophisticated analysis in two elementary postulates: 1) a person can only be in one place at a time, and 2) each combination of location and time, and its residues, affects the possibilities for action at subsequent locations and times. In a provocative book, Pred calls for a “merging of historical study, humangeographical inquiry, social analysis, and the (re)formulation of social theory.”19 He proposes taking seriously the process that Anthony Giddens calls structuration: historical formation of situations delimited by time and space whose enduring social arrangements people take for granted and allow to shape their actions. Cities constitute prime examples of such constraining situations, with their recognizable street plans, distributions of stores, transport lines, labeled and segregated neighborhoods, configurations of political power, patterns of policing, and much more to take for granted. Examining the creation and influence of such situations, including cities, entails a difficult set of tasks. It entails accounting for the creation of the setting’s constraining features through interaction of local social relations and those that cut boldly across time and space. It entails tracing ways the constraints shape those local activities people pursue more or less deliberately. It entails following processes—job-finding, courting, spending money, more—in which where and when they happen strongly affects how they happen. Common sense, you say? Yes, profoundly. But much of social science, and some historical analysis, counters this brand of common sense. It proceeds as if concrete time and space hardly affected the operation of social mobility, job performance, child care, homicide, or saving for a rainy day; societywide mentalities, the state, prevailing discourse, social control, class, gender, the market (all, in common analyses, timeless, spaceless entities) caused social mobility, job performance, child care, homicide, and saving for a rainy day in essentially the same way from one time-space setting to the next. Even urban historians, who should know better, ordinarily oscillate between the time-space particularism of local history and grand timeless, spaceless processes, causes, and effects. Either they take cities as undifferentiated points within interurban processes such as urbanization and migration, or they take city limits as boundaries for the analysis of ostensibly self-contained urban processes. The historicist line of thought gains power from its easy junction with the theory and research that Harrison White, Ronald Burt, Barry Wellman, and others call “structural sociology”; it begins with the idea that the fundamental units of social organization are neither individuals nor societies, but social relations.20 Social relations between pairs of individuals compound into networks whose form varies significantly, for example from the long chains of relationship created by migration between a Jamaican village and Toronto to hierarchical connections among mobile engineers or surgeons. The analysis of network structure makes it easier to see ­constraints placed



Chapter 13: What Good Is Urban History?  167

by a given configuration of social relations on succeeding sets of social relations among the same actors. The linking idea is simple and powerful: past social relations and their residues—material, ideological, and otherwise—constrain present social relations, and consequently constrain their products as well. Once an employer has established ties with a particular source of labor, those ties affect her subsequent recruitment of labor, and may well reproduce themselves. Once developers have laid down a certain urban structure, that structure defines opportunities for further development. Once people adopt a certain national language, that language circumscribes the other people with whom they can easily communicate. Such processes produce connectedness within time and space that goes beyond simple temporal and spatial autocorrelation; every existing structure takes the place of many theoretically possible alternative structures, and its very existence affects the probabilities that the alternatives will ever come into being. In short, social processes are path-dependent. Their explanation, furthermore, always requires specification of counterfactuals: possible outcomes that did not occur in these times and places. That is, to repeat, why history matters. Consider some examples. Proletarianization of one generation of workers strongly affects opportunities of the next generation of workers to become capitalists, artisans, or peasants. Efforts of great powers to build up the military capacities of friendly Third World states shape the likelihoods that national armed forces will take over those states. Creation of collective-action repertoires through struggles between powerholders and their challengers limits possibilities of action for all parties in the next round of struggle. Intergroup conflicts over jobs, land, or political power create new social actors: active social classes, occupational guilds, political communities, ethnic groups, parties, and so on. The presence of those organized actors then alters the character and outcome of conflict. The social organization of migration affects the subsequent welfare of migrants and their descendants, because, among other reasons, some forms of migration build means of capital accumulation within families and ethnic groups, while others individualize whatever accumulation occurs. In all these processes, time and place matter fundamentally; when and where they occur affects how they occur. They therefore fall into history’s domain. Social historians and urban historians have found this ostensibly straightforward lesson difficult to learn. The difficulty shows up clearly in studies of immigration to American cities, where abstract models of adaptation and assimilation uneasily encompass the concrete, swirling contingency of social life. For many years American analysts of immigration saw it chiefly as an abrasive confrontation between pre­ industrial cultures and the hard, rational, prosperous ways of American life in which immigrants painfully shed old ways and adapted, with varying success depending on their origins, to demands of urban industrial organization. How many days urban historians have wasted trying to deduce or verify or falsify “assimilation” by constructing tables comparing people who have lived in a city varying lengths of time! Ideas

168  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis of human capital have compounded the difficulty by portraying immigration as a sort of footrace in which the previous training, current fitness, familiarity with the course, will to win, and inbuilt cunning of different runners determines the order of their arrival at a common finish line. Fortunately, however, the situation is changing. In recent years’ rethinking, as John Bodnar sums it up: what emerges is a clearer portrait of the process of social change stimulated almost incessantly by the changing imperatives of the marketplace and the diverse responses of human beings themselves. Their response, conditioned by their social situation, familial status, and ideological orientation, becomes a variable itself helping to structure not only their own life path but even somewhat the all embracing economic system. Ordinary individuals are rescued from the status of victims; they are not simply manipulated by leaders, their class standing, or their culture, but are active participants in an historical drama whose outcome is anything but predictable.21

Restoring agency to ordinary immigrants, the new sociology and social history of immigration has also restored history to immigration; instead of timeless recurrence of social mobility, we have contingent actions of individuals and groups set firmly in time and space, with durable but likewise historically contingent consequences. Do not get me wrong; I am not for a moment advocating a return to descriptive particularism on the ground that human life is complicated, variable, and unpredictable. On the contrary, I am claiming that human life conforms to a deep order. That order does not lie, however, where urban historians ordinarily look for it: in uniform behavior of large categories of people or standard sequences of multiple lives. It lies instead in the combinatorics of multiple causes. Relations among circular migration, chain migration, and ethnic solidarity illustrate what I have in mind. Contrary to the logics of minimizing distances and multiplying opportunities, over and over again people have established regular migrations between two widely separated locations, then concentrated their migration within that bipolar system rather than continuing their search for opportunities outside of it. Instead of maximizing, they have satisficed. Chain migration is, of course, the arrangement in which social ties persist between people at a particular origin of migration and a particular destination of migration, with people at the destination sending back information about new opportunities, recruiting new immigrants, and helping them make the move; every student of immigration has fantastic but perfectly familiar tales to tell about sustained flows between small villages and urban neighborhoods that lie thousands of miles apart. Migration chains often—I think almost always—originate in circular migration, in circuits whose members stay tied to the same base, but periodically move away to earn money by peddling, digging, harvesting, building, working in factories, or other easily transportable activities. In such circuits, earners typically restrict their expenses and repatriate a significant share of their income, investing it in land, consumer durables, or social solidarities back home. Under some conditions, a few members



Chapter 13: What Good Is Urban History?  169

of such circuits prolong their stays at one of the destinations. Those conditions are regular and comprehensible, but we do not yet have a satisfactory general model of their operation; here is another worthy challenge for urban historians. Frequently, but not always, such exiles originate migration chains. Chains often continue to work in conjunction with circular migration; many workers spend some time at the destination only to return home with their earnings and learnings. Which ones stay, and which ones return, depends only distantly on their original intentions and qualifications. Instead, it depends closely on broad comparisons of opportunities at origin and destination. Many chains, nevertheless, produce large net movements between remarkably distant origins and destinations. Ethnic identities and institutions take on greater salience where 1) emigrants and their descendants find themselves competing for jobs, housing, political power, and neighborhood space with members of other groups defined by origin, and 2) success in those competitions depends on mutual aid within each population. The character of an ethnic community in a big city therefore results from the history and current organization of its migration system, the relative attractiveness of origin and destination, and its competitive position within local markets for jobs, housing, power, and space. Urban historians should find almost everything I have said obvious; I have simply called attention to a standard feature of urban experience. Here, then, is my claim: chain migration is contingent and particular, on the one hand, yet exceptionally orderly, on the other. The order consists not in the repetition of the same sequence over and over (although my simplified account may have fostered that illusion) but in the recurrence of critical choices: stops on a migration circuit; settling of exiles; maintenance of communication; remittance of income; availability of opportunities for work, housing, protection, and sociability at destinations; and so on. Those choices themselves follow historicist logic, depending heavily on what has happened previously in particular times and places. The combinatorics of those choices produce the diverse histories of particular migration chains—and, for that matter, of circuits that never produce chains. I do not claim we know the combinatorics well. I claim that we are dealing with highly coherent urban processes that historicist thinking illuminates. A historicist view does not merely clarify how people move from one distant place to another; it helps make sense of connections between migration and durable forms of inequality, including those forms people organize as ethnicity—as structured differences according to imputed national or racial origin. The social organization of mass migration surely contributed powerfully to the creation of durable inequalities in American cities and the United States as a whole. If urban historians want subjects to bring them fame outside their own bailiwick, the explanation of durable ethnic and racial inequality, as well as of differential cohesion within ethnic and racial categories, certainly qualifies. The analysis of migration, however, simply illustrates the great opportunity urban history faces, and has not so far taken full advantage of. Cities constitute our best laboratories for investigation of historical contingency—the way that social action in a given time and place constrains what will happen next there

170  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis and in adjacent places, what will happen after that, and so on through long strings of path-dependent processes. With all these references to “path-dependence,” “historicism,” “contingency,” and similarly abstract notions, readers may fear that I am recruiting players for a strange game on an alien field—economics, sociology, or philosophy, perhaps, but not urban history. Certainly I am claiming that urban historians could participate more centrally in epistemological and ontological debates that now range across history and the social sciences. But I also claim that urban historians who follow my advice will command more attention from fellow terre à terre historians as well as from general readers. For to unravel the causes and effects of durable inequality, of violent xenophobia, of stable democracy—all clearly subjects within the purview of urban history—is to enlighten and even to improve the world at large. Yet my jeremiad is almost by definition a waste of time. I expect no one to jettison current urban research and rush out to follow my demanding agenda. Urban historians, for the most part, love particulars and fear grand schemes. If one thing is clear about them, furthermore, it is that for all their love of hectoring each other they respond almost exclusively to concrete, imitable examples of good work that helps answer questions they regard as worth addressing. They look for practical demonstrations of feasibility and profitability of new approaches rather than the cleverness of appeals that people make for those approaches. If practical examples come in modules that conform nicely to the requirements of doctoral dissertations, so much the better; urban history demands so much devotion that most practitioners have only one sustained monograph in them: their doctoral dissertation and its revisions. The rapidity and enthusiasm with which urban historians adopted Stephan Thernstrom’s technology thirty years ago proves that they are not simply stodgy, but properly skeptical of unsubstantiated promises. Clearly, for the program I have sketched to have any impact on the practice of urban history, some of us will have to go out and roll up our sleeves, take risks, show results, and demonstrate the superiority of an urban history that attacks big questions, links large processes with local life, and takes the effect of time and place seriously. The most I can hope for now is a ricochet: I wish that some of the shells I have propelled against the rocks of this vast canyon would rebound to precisely the spots where teachers and students are searching for tinder, in hope of lighting fires that people will see outside the canyon. If sparks from my clumsily loaded, awkwardly fired, and excessively loud blunderbuss reach some dried and yearning wood, perhaps we can again see great bonfires in urban history, whence sleepy smoke so long has risen.

Notes 1. E.g., Charles Tilly, “Transplanted Networks,” in Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered. History, Sociology, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); “Police, État, contestation,” Cahiers de la sécurité intérieure 7 (1991), 13–18; “Cities,



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Bourgeois, and Revolution in France,” in M’hammed Sabour, ed., Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Bicentenaire de la Grande Révolution Française (Joensuu, Finland: Joensuun Yliopisto, 1992. University of Joensuu Publications in Social Sciences, 14); Coercion, Capital, and European States (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993; revised edn.), “Entanglements of European Cities and States,” in Charles Tilly and Wim Blockmans, eds., Cities and the Rise of States in Europe, AD 1000–1800 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); (with Eiko Ikegami) “State Formation and Contention in Japan and France,” in James L. McClain, John M. Merriman and Ugawa Kaoru, eds., Edo and Paris. Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 2. Olivier Zunz, “Introduction” to Olivier Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past. The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 5–6. For reviews of social history, see Joseba Agirreazkuenaga and Mikel Urquijo, eds., Storia Locale e Microstoria: Due Visione in Confronto (Bilbao: Servicio Editorial, Universidad del País Vasco, 1993); Lenard R. Berlanstein, (ed.), Rethinking Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) and The Art of Conversation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Julián Casanova, La Historia Social y los Historiadores (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1991); Arlette Farge, “L’histoire sociale,” in François Bédarida, ed., L’ histoire et le métier d’ historien en France 1945–1995 (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1995); Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, “The Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographic Marketplace,” in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Michael P. Hanagan, “New Perspectives on Class Formation: Culture, Reproduction, and Agency,” Social Science History 18 (1994), 77–94; Don Kalb, “Frameworks of Culture and Class in Historical Research,” Theory and Society 22 (1993), 513–537; Carola Lipp, “Histoire sociale et Alltagsgeschichte,” Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 106–107 (1995), 53–66; Christopher Lloyd, The Structures of History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); Erik Monkkonen, “Lessons of Social Science History,” Social Science History 18 (1994), 161–168; Germán Rueda Hernanz, ed., Doce Estudios de Historiografía Contemporánea (Santander, Spain: Universidad de Cantabria, 1991); Dennis Smith, The Rise of Historical Sociology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 3. Alain Dewerpe, L’Industrie aux champs. Essai sur la proto-industrialisation en Italie du Nord (1800–1880) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1985); Myron P. Gutmann, Toward the Modern Economy. Early Industry in Europe, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1988); Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, “Sozialgeschichte in der Erweiterung—Proto-industrialisierung in der Verengung? Demographie, Sozialstrukture, moderne Hausindustrie: ein Zwischenbilanz der Proto-Industrialisierungs-Forschung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 18 (1992), 70–87, 231–255. 4. Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality. Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 5. Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban. The Development of U.S. Cities & Towns, 1780–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 6. Lewis Mumford, The City in History. Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1961). 7. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban, p. 28. 8. Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past & Present 86 (1979), 3–24.

172  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis 9. E.g., Ronald Aminzade, Ballots and Barricades. Class Formation and Republican Politics in France, 1830–1871. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Florence Baptiste, “Paterson et ses Français. Une étape américaine sur la route de la soie,” Le monde alpin et rhodanien 1989: 33–45; Raymond Breton, Wsevolod W. Isajiw, Warren E. Kalbach, and Jeffrey G. Reitz, Ethnic Identity and Equality: Varieties of Experience in a Canadian City (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Donna Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants. Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Michael Hanagan, Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post-Revolutionary France (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Walter D. Kamphoefner, The Westfalians. From Germany to Missouri (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Ted Margadant, Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Suzanne Model, “Work and Family: Blacks and Immigrants from South and East Europe,” in Virginia YansMcLaughlin, ed., Immigration Reconsidered. History, Sociology, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Ewa Morawska, Insecure Prosperity. Small-Town Jews in Industrial America, 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming); Louise A. Tilly, Politics and Class in Milan 1881–1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 10. For reviews, see Mario Diani and Ron Eyerman, eds., Studying Collective Action (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992); Deborah Gerner et al., “Machine Coding of Event Data Using Regional and International Sources,” International Studies Quarterly 38 (1994), 91–119; and Susan Olzak, “Analysis of Events in the Study of Collective Action,” Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989), 119–141. For examples, see Olzak, The Dynamics of Ethnic Competition and Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Social Conflict, Political Protest and Democracy in Italy, 1965–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 11. Mark Granovetter and Charles Tilly, “Inequality and Labor Processes,” in Neil J. Smelser, ed., Handbook of Sociology (Newbury Park, CA.: Sage, 1988); Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, “Capitalist Work and Labor Markets,” in Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, eds., Handbook of Economic Sociology (New York and Princeton, NJ: Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, 1994); Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, “Transactional Analyses of Work and Labor Markets,” Working Paper 187, Center for Studies of Social Change, New School for Social Research, 1994; Charles Tilly, “Stratification and Inequality,” in Peter N. Stearns, ed., Encyclopedia of Social History. New York: Garland, 1994). For a demonstration that, within firms at least, it is quite feasible to investigate mobility patterns—and even to identify hierarchies, where they exist, empirically—without a priori specification of hierarchies, see George Baker, Michael Gibbs and Bengt Holmstrom, “The Internal Economics of the Firm: Evidence from Personnel Data,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 109 (1994), 881–919. 12. Wim P. Blockmans, “Princes conquérants et bourgeois calculateurs. Le poids des réseaux urbains dans la formation des états,” in Neithard Bulst and Jean-Philippe Genet, eds., La ville, la bourgeoisie et la genèse de l’ état moderne (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1988); Willem Frijhoff and Joost Rosendaal, “La Révolution régénérée: nouvelles approches et nouvelles images de la Révolution Néerlandaise,” in Michel Vovelle, ed., L’Image de la Révolution française. Communications présentées lors du Congrès Mondial pour le Bicentenaire de la Révolution. Sorbonne, Paris, 6–12 juillet 1989 (Paris: Pergamon, 1989), vol. I; Marjolein ‘t Hart, The Making of a Bourgeois State. War, Politics and Finance during the Dutch Revolt (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993); Maarten Prak, “Civil Disturbances and Urban Middle Class in the Dutch Republic,” Tijdschrift voor sociale geschie-



Chapter 13: What Good Is Urban History?  173

denis 15 (1989), 165–173 and “Citizen Radicalism and Democracy in the Dutch Republic. The Patriot Movement of the 1780s,” Theory and Society 20 (1991), 73–102; Wayne Te Brake, Regents and Rebels: The Revolutionary World of an Eighteenth-Century Dutch City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 13. Maria Bogucka, “Polish Towns Between the Sixteenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in J.K. Fedorowicz, ed., A Republic of Nobles. Studies in Polish History to 1864 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), chapter 6; Andrzej Wyrobisz, “Power and Towns in the Polish Gentry Commonwealth: The Polish-Lithuanian State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Theory and Society 18 (1989), 611–630. 14. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: Norton, 1994); Malcolm Ashmore, Robin Wooffitt, and Stella Harding, eds., “Humans and Others. The Concept of ‘Agency’ and Its Attribution,” special issue of American Behavioral Scientist vol. 37 (1994); Jonathan Boyarin, “Space, Time, and the Politics of Memory,” in Jonathan Boyarin, ed., Remapping Memory. The Politics of TimeSpace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Tom Brass, “Moral Economists, Subalterns, New Social Movements, and the (Re-)Emergence of a (Post-)Modernized (Middle) Peasant,” Journal of Peasant Studies 18 (1991), 173–205; David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds. Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Patrick Joyce, “The End of Social History?” Social History 20 (1995), 73–92; Ewa Morawska and Willfried Spohn, “‘Cultural Pluralism’ in Historical Sociology: Recent Theoretical Directions,” in Diana Crane, ed., The Sociology of Culture. Emerging Theoretical Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse. The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990) and “Critical Theory, Historical Materialism, and the Ostensible End of Marxism: The Poverty of Theory Revisited,” International Review of Social History 38, part 2 (1993), 133–162; Jacques Rancière, Les mots de l’ histoire. Essai de poétique du savoir (Paris: Seuil, 1992); Marc Steinberg, “New Canons or Loose Cannons? The Post-Marxist Challenge to Neo-Marxism as Represented in the Work of Calhoun and Reddy,” Political Power and Social Theory 8 (1993), 221–270; Charles Tilly, “Softcore Solipsism,” Labour/Le Travail 34 (1994), 259–268. 15. Robert K. Merton, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” American Sociological Review 1 (1936), 894–904. For varied specimens of historicist thinking, see Richard Nelson, “Recent Evolutionary Theorizing About Economic Change,” Journal of Economic Literature 33 (1995), 48–90; William H. Sewell, Jr. “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992), 1–29; Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Theoretical Methods in Social History (New York: Academic Press, 1978); Charles Tilly, “History and Sociological Imagining,” Tocqueville Review 15 (1994), 57–74 and “To Explain Political Processes,” American Journal of Sociology 100 (1995), 1594–1610. 16. Arthur L. Stinchcombe, “Bureaucratic and Craft Administration of Production,” Administrative Science Quarterly 4 (1959), 168–187. 17. Allan Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. 18. Allan Pred, “Structuration, Biography Formation and Knowledge. Observations on Port Growth During the Late Mercantile Period,” Society and Space 2 (1984), p. 251. 19. Allan Pred, Making Histories and Constructing Human Geographies. The Local Transformation of Practice, Power Relations, and Consciousness (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990).

174  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis 20. Peter S. Bearman, Relations into Rhetorics. Local Elite Social Structure in Norfolk, England, 1540–1640. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993); Ronald Burt, Toward a Structural Theory of Action. Network Models of Social Structure, Perception, and Action (New York: Academic Press, 1982); Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, “Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency,” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1994), 1411–1454; Thomas Ohlemacher, Brücken der Mobilisierung. Soziale Relais und persönliche Netzwerke in Bürgerinitiativen gegen militärischen Tiefflug (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts Verlag, 1993); John F. Padgett and Christopher K. Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993), 1259–1319; Jonathan H. Turner, A Theory of Social Interaction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Barry Wellman and Steven Berkowitz, eds., Social Structures: A Network Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Harrison White, Identity and Control. A Structural Theory of Social Action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) and “Where Do Languages Come From?—Switching Talk,” Working Paper 202, Center for the Social Sciences, Columbia University, 1995. 21. John Bodnar, The Transplanted. A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). In addition to items cited earlier, examples of recent historicist work on immigration include Douglas S. Massey et al., “An Evaluation of International Migration Theory: The North American Case,” Population and Development Review 20 (1994), 699–752; Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans. Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Victor Nee, Jimy M. Sanders, and Scott Sernau, “Job Transitions in an Immigrant Metropolis: Ethnic Boundaries and the Mixed Economy,” American Sociological Review 59 (1994), 849–872; Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America. A Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Alejandro Portes and Julia Sensenbrenner, “Embeddedness and Immigration: Notes on the Social Determinants of Economic Action,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (1993), 1320–1350; Leslie Salzinger, “A Maid by Any Other Name: The Transformation of ‘Dirty Work’ by Central American Immigrants,” in Michael Burawoy et al., Ethnography Unbound. Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Lillian Trager, The City Connection. Migration and Family Interdependence in the Philippines (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988); Roger D. Waldinger, “The Making of an Immigrant Niche,” International Migration Review 28 (1994), 3–30; Susan Cotts Watkins, ed., After Ellis Island. Newcomers and Natives in the 1910 Census (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994).

Source Note “What Good is Urban History?” Journal of Urban History 22 (1996), 702–719; Czech translation of an earlier version published as “K cemu je dobra historie mesta?” Sociologicky casopis (Prague) 28 (1992), 437–450.

Chapter 14

Anglo-American Social History since 1945 Social history examines changes in major institutions and structures or consequences of those changes. It ranges across families, kinship systems, communities, religions, markets, firms, industries, populations, governments, and much more. Some social historians concentrate on reconstructing experiences of living in particular times and places, for example Imperial Constantinople, Renaissance Florence, Nazi Berlin, or the American West during the nineteenth century. Others trace broad social patterns such as migrant streams and geographic distributions of cities. But most of social history deals with large changes in social life and their consequences for individuals, households, or small-scale interpersonal relations. It vivifies social change. In general, social history differs from the overlapping fields of intellectual and cultural history by its assignment of considerable causal efficacy to social structures, processes, and changes. It differs from political history, on the average, by its insistence on embedding politics in social environments. It differs from the closely connected field of economic history by examining two-way interactions between economic processes and social experiences. Its mission centers on individual and collective involvements in social change. Such a mission inclines social historians to perpetual oscillation and struggle between different varieties of idealism and realism. As Robert Descimon sees it from a French perspective: The so-called return to events often comes down to a reaction against Fernand Braudel’s Total History. It encourages two different explanatory strategies: a reduced model of rational human action in terms of expected costs and benefits or the lawless creativity of “virtual history” . . . We thus face a dilemma, a choice between reductionism based on economic reasoning and postmodern interpretation leading to recognition of intellectual impotence. Only empirical analysis (events do matter!) will provide an exit from

175

176  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis the impasse to which the false opposition between social history and event-oriented history has led us. (Descimon 1999: 319)

Descimon is describing the latest version of a very old dilemma for social historians. Anglo-American social history after 1945 abundantly displays intellectual oscillation and struggle between the two viewpoints. Like social history in France and elsewhere, professional social history in the British Isles and North America began with a triple effort:

• to reduce general historians’ fixation on political leaders, events, and institutions as seen from heights of power • to investigate the social and economic bases of public politics • to constitute ordinary people and routine social life as objects of serious historical study

Those features marked the agenda of Anglo-American social history from early in the twentieth century. Taken as the historical study of social change, Anglo-American social history contributed to history at large in several different ways. It lifted the local community study from a minor antiquarian pursuit to a major mode of historical investigation. It shifted social processes such as migration, population growth, industrialization, and urbanization from influences vaguely invoked before undertaking the histories of elites, ideas, and national politics to objects of detailed historical inquiry and potential causes of national events. It incorporated social scientific procedures and findings into the corpus of historical practice, evidence, and argument. It accustomed most general historians of the British Isles and North America to specify and differentiate when they used such abstractions as “the people,” “masses,” or even “workers.” It made shifting relations between powerholders and different categories of ordinary people matter for explanations of historical change. After 1945, three connected innovations in historical practice—history from the bottom up, combing of organizational records, and collective biography—promoted social history’s influence on history at large. The term “history from the bottom up” appears to have originated with Frederick Jackson Turner, historian of the American frontier (Novick 1988: 442). British historians more often called the same approach “history from below.” Either term conveys an attitude: insistence that relatively powerless people have viewpoints of their own, that those viewpoints deserve historical attention, that collectively and incrementally ordinary people make history. History from below also designates the practice of assembling evidence on how ordinary people actually experienced large social changes and conflicts. Leftist historians such as J.L. and Barbara Hammond (e.g., Hammond and Hammond 1917), to be sure, had concentrated on ordinary people’s experience long before World War II. After 1945, it became a major preoccupation throughout social history.



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Evidence and Its Uses Populist social historians faced a problem, however. Unlike rich, powerful, and intellectually prominent people, their subjects left few letters, diaries, autobiographies, or public declarations. How could historians reconstruct their experiences? Combing of organizational records provided much of the evidence. Antiquarians, local historians, and genealogists had long sought traces of people who left no narratives of their lives in the nooks and crannies of organizational records. Registers of births, deaths, and marriages; notarial archives; petitions; trial transcripts; employment rosters; census questionnaires; police reports; school enrollment books; and similar organizational residues record the passage of ordinary people through different phases of their lives. After World War II, Anglo-American social historians joined their counterparts elsewhere in ransacking such records for information about how forgotten people experienced migration, industrialization, urbanization, and other sweeping social changes. Collective biography made such investigations feasible for more than small numbers of people. Collective biography consists of assembling uniform information about multiple social units—individuals, households, neighborhoods, firms, associations, and so on—for aggregation and comparison. It becomes a powerful procedure when investigators combine observations concerning the same social units from different sources, for example by following individuals from one census to the next or from firms’ pay lists to marriage registers. This movement from source to source (often called nominal record linkage) accretes partial life histories or group descriptions despite the sparseness of individual information in any particular document. Collective biography extends easily from individuals to organizations, localities, and events. In Anglo-American social history, two kinds of events—vital and contentious—have attracted the greatest effort. Strictly speaking, vital events include births, illnesses, and deaths. By extension, they also encompass changes of social location such as marriage, divorce, migration, and job loss. Records of vital events often include social descriptions of the parties as well as of witnesses, which means that they provide information about social connections. One can of course assemble reports of such events into life histories for individuals, families, or households. But one can also examine them as aggregates, for example by calculating fluctuations in birthrates before relating those fluctuations either to variations in other vital events or to alterations in nondemographic conditions (Charles Tilly 1978, Willigan and Lynch 1982). Similarly, incidents of contentious politics lend themselves to collective biography, assembled either a) as the equivalent of life histories for particular localities, groups, or issues or b) abstracted for analysis of their general patterns (Olzak 1989, Rucht, Koopmans, and Neidhardt 1998). British and North American governments, for example, began producing official catalogs of strikes and lockouts toward 1900; with effort, those catalogs convert to collective biographies of strike activity in either

178  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis mode. Other contentious events such as demonstrations, violent confrontations, protest meetings, and lynchings generally require an investigator’s own compilation of uniform series from periodicals, police reports, administrative correspondence, and like sources. Social historians have done some of their most ambitious work on conflict employing these forms of collective biography. After 1945, war-driven technical innovations served social history well. Cheap photographic reproduction of sources and increasing availability of electronic computers greatly facilitated the combing of organizational records and the adoption of collective biography as major procedures for social historians. Social incentives redoubled the attractiveness of those technical innovations. The great postwar expansion of higher education in the British Isles and, especially, North America both increased the sheer number of historians and broadened the class origins from which professional historians came. Many newly trained historians adopted the technical innovations to study how large social changes had involved people outside ruling classes—often people like their own ancestors. Despite enormous variations in terminology and emphasis, most Anglo-American social historians who deal with the period since 1500 have long thought of the relevant changes as forming two big, interacting clusters: the development of industrial capitalism and the creation of powerful national governments. Thus social historians of families have repeatedly asked how industrialization interacted with changes in household structure and how relations of authorities with poor families altered with the growth of central bureaucracies and welfare states. Students of local politics have sometimes attended to the same questions, but have more often asked to what degree and how the expansion of wage labor and the shift of power away from local patrons transformed the public struggles of ordinary people. Since different parts of the British Isles and North America experienced the development of industrial capitalism and the creation of powerful national governments in contrasting ways on distinct timetables, both the relative weight and the precise treatment of these changes varies from one period and place to another. Various national groups of historians among the Anglo-Americans—notably Canadian, U.S., British, and Irish—therefore pursued somewhat different agendas tied to their own country’s situation. U.S. scholars worried a great deal about immigration and industrialization, British historians about the past and present of public welfare. Canadians spent more effort than their neighbors on major cultural divisions, and indeed produced rather separate historiographies in French and English. Themes of backwardness, oppression, liberation, and emigration sound much louder in Irish than in English historiography. Only a minority of Anglo-American social historians studied histories of other regions than the British Isles and North America, while a small number of outsiders specialized in Anglo-American social history. Members of both groups frequently found themselves mediating or alternating between prevailing agendas at origin and destination. Some common concerns nevertheless promoted convergence among AngloAmerican social historians. At the end of World War II, practitioners of social



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history in the British Isles and North America found themselves in broadly similar political situations. Their countries had emerged relatively intact from a great war. The Depression and the war itself had greatly expanded the state’s presence in social life and fortified the state’s position as a guarantor or provider of social rights. With their compatriots, social historians had witnessed the rise and demise of formidable fascist regimes. A powerful Soviet bloc had formed around political systems quite different from those of the Anglo-Americans, as a Cold War between the blocs was beginning. These circumstances placed on the general historical agenda questions about the origins and impacts of authoritarianism, socialism, and democracy, about the bases of mass action, about citizenship, and about the viability of competing programs for human liberation. History promised to identify links among past, present, and future in all these regards.

Marxism, Modernization, and Other Theories Influenced by the general historical agenda, most Anglo-American social historians of the immediate postwar period arrayed themselves somewhere between two poles: modernization and Marxism. Modernization pivoted on a deceptively simple question: when rapid economic expansion occurs, what else happens, and why? (The question is deceptive because the “what else” could be cause, effect, or mere correlate of economic expansion; both the “what else” and economic expansion could also result from some other deep transformation.) Ideas of modernization concerned the consequences of large-scale social change, variously defined as economic growth, industrialization, urbanization, or the spread of new cultural forms. They commonly rested on the premise that industrialization would eventually produce worldwide convergence on something like Western European or North American social structure. Modernization­-inspired social history concentrated on how ordinary people experienced, reacted to, or even caused such large social changes. Marxism, in contrast, centered its inquiries on causes, consequences, and concomitants of capitalism. During the postwar years, the visible existence of major socialist powers fortified the Marxist premise that capitalism was simply one of several possible historical paths, and not necessarily the final historical stage. Ideas of Marxism concerned development of capitalist institutions, transformations of life experience by economic change, and conditions for liberation of the working population. Marxistinspired social history concentrated on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, on the growth of capital-concentrated industry, and on the consequences of both changes for popular collective action. Modernization and Marxism overlapped in treating public politics as an arena strongly affected by nonpolitical processes and in insisting on the importance of investigating how the bulk of the population experienced great social changes. As they visibly invigorated older antiquarian and reformist approaches to social history, postwar practitioners strongly influenced the writing of history in general.

180  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis By the 1990s, terms of disagreement and agreement had altered fundamentally. Although some thoroughgoing Marxists and modernization analysts survived, by and large the dominant choices for Anglo-American social historians ranged from cultural or discursive reductionism to competing varieties of realism. At the culturaldiscursive extreme, a number of social historians treated the enterprise as largely a rhetorical struggle to which no external standards of validity could apply: persuasive interpretations of past social experience, in this view, served contemporary political ends, including general enlightenment concerning the human condition. At the realist extreme, segmentation prevailed: specialists in economic history, demographic history, urban history, agricultural history, family history, material culture, and popular politics all drew some inspiration from earlier social history, but pursued their inquiries in substantial isolation from each other. They shared, however, a general assumption that social structure exists, is knowable, and lends itself to systematic historical reconstruction. In between, synthesizers and a few hardy general social historians sought to take questions of culture and discourse seriously while continuing to look for valid ways to establish how ordinary people experienced large-scale social change. The shift away from modernization and Marxism implied changes in method, argument, and presentation. Combing of organizational records, collective biography, and even history from the bottom up lost some of their luster for social historians. Critics attacked the sorting of people into class categories and the attribution of collective properties to those categories as unjustified reification. Many social historians began to reject what they increasingly regarded as reductionist explanations—especially, but not exclusively, those based on class categories—in favor of interpretations focused on motives, beliefs, and experiences. They also started to abandon the documentand-explain style of social history in favor of narrative. A crucial marker arrived with Lawrence Stone’s 1979 call for a return to narrative. Stone’s intervention wielded the greater weight because Stone had been a major advocate and practitioner of collective biography (or, as he called it, prosopography). Instead of analytic sociology, interpretive ethnography became a favored model for many social historians. This schematic summary understates the centrality of populist Marxism—as analytical style and object of criticism—to Anglo-American social history. It runs, appropriately, like a red thread through the whole period from 1945 to 2000. In the postwar resurgence of social history, British Marxists such as Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé pioneered the study of crowds, local political activism, and consequences of capitalist development, eventually inspiring many students of North America as well (Hobsbawm 1964, Rudé 1964). Not long after, Hobsbawm began a series of masterly period-by-period syntheses of British and Western history, organized around Marxist perspectives and centering on social history; he continued to produce those syntheses through the 1990s (e.g., Hobsbawm 1975, 1994). During the 1960s, Barrington Moore, Jr., and E.P. Thompson (the former a historical materialist of some sort, but certainly not a strict Marxist, the latter an energetic participant in British Marxism) made class formation and transformation even more central to social history than it had been before. Moore’s Social Origins



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of ­Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) compared the social and political histories of England, France, the United States, China, Japan, and India (with frequent crossreferences to Germany and Russia) in a quest for the class foundations of various forms of national politics in the twentieth century. It provided a model for comparisons of long national political trajectories that encouraged some social historians to undertake their own big comparisons, and others to challenge, modify, or apply Moore’s framework in their own work on particular times and places. Within social history self-consciously defined, Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963) had an extraordinary impact. Thompson integrated an extraordinary range of literary, political, and cultural evidence with graphic descriptions of popular struggle as he analyzed transformations of English working-class consciousness between 1780 and 1832. A brilliant polemicist, he attacked both materialist reductionism on the part of his Marxist colleagues and disdain for popular politics on the part of non-Marxist and anti-Marxist historians. He also forwarded the idea of class not as a fixed attribute of persons situated at certain shared locations in social hierarchies or in the organization of production but as a dynamic, continuously negotiated relation between workers and their exploiters. Both Thompson’s methodological style and his line of argument shaped a whole generation of social historians in Great Britain and elsewhere. A wide range of investigators sought to apply Thompson’s analysis elsewhere, to pursue more detailed studies within its general assumptions, or to challenge one feature or another of the argument. The “making” of working classes or the making’s failure became standard themes of social history. Social class constituted a major organizing principle for research in social history throughout the period from 1945 to 2000. Five rather different positions, however, competed with each other: 1. Social class consists of position, individual or collective, in a hierarchy of prestige, wealth, and/or power, or is a special case of such hierarchical differentiation. 2. Social class describes a connection, individual or collective, to markets, which produces significant differences in quality of life. 3. Social class resides in mutual consciousness and/or shared culture among sets of persons who collectively regard themselves (however justly or unjustly) as superior or inferior to others. 4. Social class is, or depends on, collective location within a system of production. 5. Social class is an illusion, or at best a mistaken description of inequalities better characterized in other ways, for example as variable individual competence, ethnic culture, or occupational specialization. Social historians have often combined two of these positions, for example by arguing that position in a hierarchy (#1) generates mutual consciousness or shared

182  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis culture (#3), or that hierarchies exist (#1), but their crystallization into opposed social classes rarely or never occurs (#5). Marxists have offered the most ambitious syntheses of these positions, for instance by arguing that location within a system of production (#4) determines hierarchical position (#1), connection to markets (#2), and shared culture (#3). Nevertheless, many of social history’s most acrid disputes pit advocates of one position against advocates of another. In the aftermath of Thompson’s work, for example, a significant split opened between students of class who followed the discursive emphasis of his writings and those who pursued the equally Thompsonian study of class as a relation grounded in the organization of production. Many analysts of language and culture began to argue that class only existed insofar as people spoke in class terms, conceived of themselves in those terms, and formed a distinctive class-based culture. It followed that in European and North American history, where explicit class language was hard to find, class had rarely or never occurred. Their relational opponents countered that class exists in struggle wherever the parties occupy antagonistic positions in the organization of production, hence that class was an enduring feature of Euro-American history. Although some historical researchers (e.g., Steinberg 1999) have partially bridged the gap by integrating the study of discourse and culture into analyses of social networks and struggle, the debate continues. Not all Anglo-American social historians, to be sure, organized their inquiries—positively or negatively—around ideas of class. Three large alternatives vied for attention: 1) shifting mentalities as either the object of study or the cause of alterations in social life; 2) other categorical divisions, notably by gender, race, and ethnicity; and 3) change in major institutions and structures, including consequences of those changes. The first alternative fostered greater collaboration with intellectual historians and cultural anthropologists. Thus studies of consumption, material culture, and civic participation (despite their possible connections with social scientific investigations of the same phenomena) commonly emphasized shifts in mentalities, and often drew on anthropological models. The second alternative reproduced the ambivalence of social history as a whole, since it divided practitioners between those who emphasized continuities with contemporary social scientific studies of categorical inequalities and those who opted for cultural interpretation. Thus women’s history spanned the range from demographic and economic approaches to analyses of discourse. The third alternative pushed social historians toward specialization in one kind of institution or another, therefore toward collaboration with social scientists who were examining ostensibly similar institutions in the present. Thus urban history, demographic history, family history, and economic history all attracted some social historians to specialized engagement with adjacent social science fields. For social historians of the first inclination, mentalities play a role similar to that played by culture in anthropology; they figure as general causes whose own origins and dynamics rarely come under close scrutiny (Kuper 1999). In British history, for example, ideas of popular culture, consumer culture, and political culture often serve



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as explanations for ordinary people’s economic behavior or political action. John Brewer’s accounts of the theatrical street politics that swirled around John Wilkes during the 1760s (e.g., Brewer 1980) exemplify the best work in this vein. Brewer does not use the word “mentalities,” but he does declare that a proper explanation of eighteenth-century politics: will have to be, first of all, both instrumental and dynamic. It must, in other words, set out to show how, why and with what purposes in mind a particular view or argument was presented or expressed. Changes or developments in the argument can be explained as a sort of problem-solving process in the light of a set of norms and conventions as well as in the face of new difficulties or shifts in perspective. (Brewer 1976: 34)

Brewer explicitly applies this argument to popular politics as well as to the machinations of political leaders. “Legitimation and the expression of political belief,” he argues, “do not have to assume the form of the printed or even the spoken word. Ritualised conduct, the employment of symbols, or engagement in symbolic action can all be used to convey a political creed” (Brewer 1976: 22). Since available cultural idioms do shape how people deal with each other, a shrewd observer of prevailing ideas and conventions such as Brewer can provide fresh insight into the meanings of particular events. Difficulty arises, however, when the same historians step back to analyze long-term changes or interactions between mentalities and institutions. Then the causal status of mentalities becomes crucial. The difficulty is avoidable. Like many linguists and historians of science, some social historians (e.g., Zelizer 1994) recognize that culture is not an autonomous force behind social life but a constitutive element of social relations. Shared understandings and their representations in symbols, objects, and practices (a reasonable definition of culture) constrain social interaction, but they also alter as a consequence of social interaction. So far, however, investigation of that dynamic interplay between culture and social ties has not become a major program for social historians. Studies of other categorical divisions than class have typically followed just one kind of division, most frequently gender, ethnicity, race, religion, or sexual preference. With the exception of work on migration and urban politics, indeed, social historians in this line have commonly taken up just one category at a time: the history of women rather than the history of relations between women and men, the history of blacks rather than the history of racial divisions, and so on. As a result, Anglo-American social historians have established specialties in single-category analyses, each calling attention to the category’s distinctiveness, castigating general history for its neglect or misrepresentation of that category, and taking up, however indirectly, current political issues involving the category. Many such examinations of categorical divisions ally closely with the broad intellectual program called cultural studies: historical, literary, and political interpretations of ostensibly distinctive cultural experiences. Nevertheless, veterans of class analysis who have moved over to other categories (e.g., Louise Tilly et al. 1997) figure importantly in this line of thought; they more

184  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis frequently conceive of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual preference in terms of relations among adjacent or competing categories.

Social History and Social Science To study changes of institutions and structures is to join forces, at least implicitly, with adjacent social sciences. The degree of self-conscious collaboration with social scientists varies significantly, however, with the institutions and structures under scrutiny. Social historians who deal with population change, for example, almost always acquire familiarity with demographic ideas and methods. Studies of religious institutions, in contrast, often proceed with little or no reference to contemporary sociological, anthropological, or political analyses of religion. Here historiographical sequences matter. Where social scientists actively initiated the historical study of some institution or structure little examined by historians themselves, they often attracted followers among historians. In the case of demographic history, for example, demographers who wanted to explain recent changes in fertility, mortality, and nuptiality adapted their methods to historical populations as a means of treating long periods in well-documented places. Then historical demography turned out to yield large dividends for social historians as well (Gillis, Tilly, and Levine 1992, Hanagan 1989, Levine 1984, 1987, Charles Tilly 1978, Wrigley and Schofield 1981). Where social historians had long been considering a topic on their own terms, they accepted social scientific contributions much more reluctantly. Thus long-established historical studies of popular culture drew little on logically parallel developments in anthropology, linguistics, and sociology. Social historians’ analyses of popular politics, religious practice, sexuality, and associational life have likewise proved resistant to social scientific contributions. The big exception has been the openness of many social historians to something they called anthropology. On close inspection, however, that anthropology turns out not to involve such standard anthropological practices as ethnography, archeology, formal linguistic analysis, reconstruction of kinship systems, or inspection of material culture, but to mean sympathetic interpretation of social practices, symbols, and representations in the style of Clifford Geertz. The activity called social science history (Monkkonen 1994) established the strongest ties between history and adjacent disciplines. Into this basin flowed streams from demography, economics, sociology, geography, linguistics, and anthropology, each producing a partly separate set of whirlpools. Here boundaries between history and other disciplines blurred, as such specialties as demographic history, anthropometric history (studies of well-being through change and variation in height and weight), migration history, and the history of social mobility acquired partly autonomous scholarly communities. In these special fields research agendas often reflected priorities within the relevant social sciences as much as those in the national history under examination. Studies of social mobility, for example, contributed to the documentation of Canadian or U.S. history, but frequently organized around a distinctive pair



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of questions: First, to what extent does industrialization produce general changes in the pace and direction of movement from position to position? Second, do national institutions and cultures have a significant impact on the pace and direction of movement from position to position? Neither question predominates in Canadian or U.S. historiography as a whole. Nevertheless, the study of American social mobility illustrates how social history sometimes influences the writing of general history. For some time after World War II, a handful of American sociologists had been examining occupational mobility (comparing sons with fathers or following individuals’ occupational careers) by compiling dossiers on individuals from city directories. That work, oriented to sociologists’ questions about mobility and industrialization, attracted little attention from historians. But in 1964, Stephan Thernstrom published a book on nineteenthcentury Newburyport, Massachusetts, that used similar analyses of city directories for rather different ends. The selection of Newburyport was a stroke of genius, since the anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner had led an influential series of studies in Newburyport, renamed Yankee City for publication (see Warner et al. 1963). Warner had reconstructed Newburyport’s nineteenth-century history from written and oral recollections of residents, concluding that a very open opportunity structure had closed down during twentieth-century industrialization. Warner’s position coincided with that of many general historians of the United States, and articulated with one of American historiography’s dominant questions: was and is the United States the land of opportunity? Thernstrom’s analysis revealed relatively little interclass mobility during the nineteenth century, countered the idea of mobility’s decline, and identified significantly different modes of mobility (e.g., via investment in real estate or investment in education) for different ethnic categories. Thernstrom followed with an even more ambitious study of Boston, Massachusetts, which confirmed most conclusions of the Newburyport study (Thernstrom 1973). Within social histories, dozens of young scholars were soon emulating Thernstrom by undertaking parallel studies of other cities and ethnic categories as doctoral dissertations. They were also extending collective biography to manuscript census returns, vital records, and other sources. At the same time, general historians of the United States felt compelled to modify their claims about the place of social mobility and its decline in American life as a whole. Eventually, to be sure, the popularity of mobility studies for individual cities, sets of cities, and ethnic categories declined significantly. Within the specialized field, researchers encountered technical limits to their ability to trace geographically mobile populations, women, and ethnic categories. After the initial shock of Thernstrom’s findings, they never found an effective way to convey the significance of findings from mobility studies to larger historical audiences. Publishers tired of books detailing the mobility histories of ethnic groups in particular American cities. The overall shift of social historians from categorical analysis in a sociological style to interpretive narrative as retrospective ethnography reduced mobility analyses’ appeal to the discipline as a whole. Urban studies of inequality and mobility by no means

186  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis disappeared, but they came to constitute a specialized subfield allied with geography, sociology, and political science. Nevertheless, the temporary prominence of mobility studies carries lessons for social history in general. First, when social historians manage to connect a new source or method effectively to one of the big questions already on the general historical agenda, they influence the writing of history as a whole. Second, when that connection of source or method with significant questions identifies feasible new projects for single individuals, the doctoral dissertation becomes a crucial site for diffusion of a new variety of social history. Third, successful projects in social history have a tendency to attract general interest for a time, then to crystallize into specialized subfields allied with adjacent disciplines. Finally, and most importantly: Despite the creation of specialized methods, vocabularies, associations, journals, and careers, Anglo-American social history continues to participate in the great debates that agitate historians as a whole. Where will that take social historians next? Any predictions in this domain mix extrapolation from the past with wishful thinking. Let us consider just three possible scenarios: more of the same, sharpening polarization, and dialectic. More of the same would continue the trends documented earlier: ever greater specialization, increasing alignment of epistemological premises with choice of subject matter, continued absorption of some specialties into adjacent social science disciplines, hence declining dialogue within social history as a whole. More of the same would eventually destroy social history as a coherent field. Since some analysts (e.g., Joyce 1995) are already announcing, even celebrating, that destiny, today’s practitioners must take it seriously. Sharpening polarization could also occur, with the fundamental division separating epistemological and ontological positions more than the phenomena under examination. On one side, we might see a gathering of those who regard the stuff of social life to be minds, beliefs, consciousness, or language, and thus to be fundamentally indeterminate or at least inaccessible to systematic explanation. These social historians would align themselves with intellectual history, cultural history, and certain versions of anthropology. On the other side, we might see a variety of realists who claim that social life emerges systematically from individual choices or interpersonal transactions and remains available to observation and explanation. Under these circumstances, dialogue might proceed vigorously on either side of the boundary but would be quite unlikely to take place, much less to succeed, between the two camps. Dialectic interaction could also develop, with descendants of older materialism serving as thesis, linguistic and cultural reductionism as the antithesis, and a renewed social history as the synthesis. That could happen if descendants of materialism took culture, language, and social construction seriously but attempted both to integrate them into analyses of social processes and to treat them as objects of systematic explanation: how and why do culture, language, and social construction vary and change? It could also happen if students of culture, language, and social construction themselves undertook examinations of how these phenomena interact with concrete



Chapter 14: Anglo-American Social History Since 1945  187

social relations. Better yet, materialists and culturalists could both work toward each other’s ground, not necessarily agreeing, but at least arriving at some shared standards of explanation. Reexamination of language as a social production, of categorical differences by gender, class, race, or other principles as socially generated institutions, of collective struggle as social construction and reconstruction sets problems worthy of social historians’ attention, and begins to bridge the apparent gap between events and ideas. As Robert Descimon says, the empirical bent of social historians will lead them well past current controversies that pit social history against the history of events.

References Abbott, Andrew (1994). “History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis,” in Eric Monkkonen, ed., Engaging the Past. The Uses of History across the Social Sciences. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——— (1998). “The Causal Devolution,” Sociological Methods and Research 27: 148–181. Belchem, John (1990). Industrialization and the Working Class: The English Experience, 1750–1900. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press. Brewer, John (1976). Party Ideology and Popoular Politics at the Accession of George III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1980). “The Wilkites and the Law, 1763–74: A Study of Radical Notions of Governance,” in John Brewer and John Styles, eds., An Ungovernable People. The English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Calhoun, Craig (1982). The Question of Class Struggle. Social foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Anna (1995). The Struggle for the Breeches. Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. Berkeley: University of California Press. Clark, Samuel (1995). State and Status. The Rise of the State and Aristocratic Power in Western Europe. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Cohen, Lizabeth (1990). Making a New Deal. Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descimon, Robert (1999). “Autopsie du massacre de l’Hôtel de Ville (4 juillet 1652). Paris et la ‘Fronde des Princes’,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 54: 319–352. Frader, Laura L., and Sonya O. Rose, eds. (1996). Gender and Class in Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Geertz, Clifford (1980). Negara. The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Geremek, Bronislaw (1994). Poverty. A History. Oxford: Blackwell. Gillis, John R., Louise A. Tilly, and David Levine, eds. (1992). The European Experience of Declining Fertility. A Quiet Revolution 1850–1970. Oxford: Blackwell. Hammond, J.L., and Barbara Hammond (1917). The Town Labourer, 1760–1832. London: Longmans. Hanagan, Michael P. (1989). Nascent Proletarians: Class Formation in Post-Revolutionary France. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1964). Labouring Men. London: Weidenfeld.

188  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis ——— (1975). The Age of Capital, 1848–1875. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ——— (1994). The Age of Extremes. A History of the World, 1914–1991. New York: Pantheon. Joyce, Patrick (1991). Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (1995). “The End of Social History?” Social History 20: 73–92. Kuper, Adam (1999). Culture. The Anthropologists’ Account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levine, David, ed. (1984). Proletarianization and Family History. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. ——— (1987). Reproducing Families. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monkkonen, Eric H., ed. (1994). Engaging the Past. The Uses of History Across the Social Sciences. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moore, Barrington, Jr. (1966). Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Boston: Beacon. Novick, Peter (1988). That Noble Dream. The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olzak, Susan (1989). “Analysis of Events in the Study of Collective Action,” Annual Review of Sociology 15: 119–141. Rucht, Dieter, Ruud Koopmans, and Friedhelm Neidhardt, eds. (1998). Acts of Dissent. New Developments in the Study of Protest. Berlin: Sigma Rainer Bohn Verlag. Rudé, George (1964). The Crowd in History. New York: Wiley. Stedman Jones, Gareth (1983). Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinberg, Marc W. (1999). Fighting Words. Working-Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Stone, Lawrence (1979). “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past and Present 86: 3–24. Thernstrom, Stephan (1964). Poverty and Progress. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——— (1973): The Other Bostonians. Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, E.P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz. Tilly, Charles, ed. (1978). Historical Studies of Changing Fertility. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——— (1998). Roads from Past to Future. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Tilly, Louise A., and Patricia Gurin, eds. (1990). Women, Politics and Change. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Tilly, Louise A., et al. (1997).”Scholarly Controversy: Women, Work, and Citizenship,” International Labor and Working-Class History no. 52: 1–71. Vernon, James (1993). Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture c. 1815–1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warner, W. Lloyd, J.O. Low, Paul S. Lunt, and Leo Srole (1963). Yankee City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Willigan, J. Dennis, and Katherine A. Lynch (1982). Sources and Methods of Historical Demography. New York: Academic Press.



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Wrigley, E.A., and R.S. Schofield (1981). The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zelizer, Viviana (1994). The Social Meaning of Money. New York: Basic Books. Zunz, Olivier, ed. (1985). Reliving the Past. The Worlds of Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Source Note “Anglo-American Social History Since 1945,” unpublished paper except for German translation of an early version as “Neuere angloamerikanische Sozialgeschichte,” in Günther Lottes and Joachim Eibach, eds., Kompass der Geschichtswissenschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002.

Chapter 15

Three Visions of History and Theory How can we develop a viable vision of relations between history and social theory? A comparison of three recent books clarifies the stakes and possibilities of the question.1 Peter Burke’s History and Social Theory looks out at social and cultural theory from the viewpoint of historical practice, sorting theoretical resources chiefly by their contribution to that practice. Julia Adams, Elisabeth Clemens, Ann Shola Orloff, and their contributors focus on historical sociology, but range widely in their search for valid uses of theory. Robert Goodin, Charles Tilly, and their collaborators seek to move beyond the confrontation of modernism and postmodernism by taking seriously how the contexts of political processes affect those processes and scholars’ understanding of them. We might call the three visions of relations between history and social theory practical sense, cultural phenomenology, and systematic constructivism. Although Peter Burke labels his book a second edition, it actually comes third in a line descending from his compact 1980 essay on sociology and history. That first book appeared in an Open University series called Controversies in Sociology, edited by T.B. Bottomore and M.J. Mulkay.2 Sociology and History called for an end of the “dialogue of the deaf” between historians, on one side, and sociologists and social anthropologists, on the other. It did so chiefly by enumerating a number of sociological and anthropological topics—the comparative method, models, structure and function, social roles, and so on—of relevance to historical analysis. But it also offered brief explications of Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Fernand Braudel, William H. McNeill, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Nathan Wachtel, asking whether the four historians (Braudel, McNeill, Le Roy Ladurie, and Wachtel) were pointing toward models of social change “which would take more account of diversity and of long-term trends than previous models have done, and specify the alternative paths and the constraints more clearly than before.”3 Burke’s Sociology and History haunts the second edition of his History and Social Theory like the ghost of a previous occupant. Both books begin with the “dialogue of the deaf,” although now the “differentiation of history and sociology” becomes the “differentiation of history and theory,” just as the “convergence of sociology and 190



Chapter 15: Three Visions of History and Theory  191

history” becomes the “convergence of theory and history.” The new book devotes a full chapter to models and methods, expands the roster of themes from social science that could inform historical analysis, deals more deliberately with problems of knowledge, adds a chapter on postmodernity and postmodernism, but still centers its discussion of social change on Spencer, Marx, and alternatives to them. Twice the original’s size, History and Social Theory gives much more attention to philosophy, literary analysis, and general theory than did its predecessor. Such figures as Ernst Gombrich, Mikhail Bakhtin, Thomas Kuhn, and Michel Foucault (all but Foucault quite absent from the first volume, and Foucault appearing there as an interesting historian of insanity rather than as a subversive social philosopher) now figure importantly as theorists to reckon with. Yet both books concentrate on what lessons historians and social analysts can learn from each other as they pursue their own work. History and Social Theory exudes practical sense. We see Burke in the emporium of social theory, picking up interesting items, inspecting them curiously to see whether they might serve some useful purpose in his own workshop. Burke’s practical sense circumscribes the part that theory can and should play in historians’ work. Burke holds out no hope of constructing a synthetic world history, testing epochal theories by means of historical evidence, or even identifying systematic variation among places and times by means of disciplined comparisons. Instead, he assumes that historians are trying to make sense of particular times, places, phenomena, and transformations for which theorists may supply effective tools of description and explanation. Sociologist Erving Goffman appears, for example, as a source of insight into how courtiers and portraitists of the Italian Renaissance sought to represent themselves and each other rather than, say, as an inspiration for thinking about how Norbert Elias’s “civilizing process” actually produced its effects on individual comportment. Similarly, Burke uses Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu, not to open up a discussion of variations in systems of inequality, but to highlight the frequency with which historical elites advertise their positions by engaging in conspicuous consumption. We watch a perceptive social and cultural historian scanning social theorists for means of doing his local work—and, by extension, other historians’ local work—more effectively. At his book’s very end, Burke reinforces that impression by observing: It will be clear by now, if it was not obvious from the start, that empiricists and theorists are not two close-knit groups, but two ends of a spectrum. Conceptual borrowing tends to take place from neighbouring disciplines on the theoretical side. Thus historians borrow from anthropologists, who borrow from linguists, who borrow from mathematicians. In return, historians, like ethnographers, offer reminders of the complexity and variety of human experience and institutions which theories inevitably simplify. This variety does not imply that theorists are wrong to simplify. As I tried to argue above . . . simplification is their function, their contribution to the division of labour between approaches and disciplines. What this variety does suggest, however, is that theory can never be simply ‘applied’ to the past.4

192  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis We begin to glimpse a vivid vision of history as the repository of humanity’s richness, theory as a set of tools and compartments for arraying those riches. Partly by necessity and partly by choice, Burke’s vision of relations between history and theory excludes substantial bodies of theory that other historians consider relevant, or even essential, to their enterprise. By necessity, Burke’s program excludes serious consideration of ontology and epistemology. Even the discussion of postmodernity and postmodernism concentrates on social construction, decentering, anti-­Eurocentrism, and globalization rather than problems of historical existence and knowledge as such. Burke reports rightly that “deconstruction, poststructuralism, and related developments,” if defined precisely, have made little headway in mainstream history.5 With his practical sense of the historical craft, Burke joins the consensus, remaining coolly skeptical about radical innovations, either philosophical or methodological. Of available theoretical resources in the social sciences, linguistics, geography, and social psychology almost disappear from Burke’s accounting. Another near­absence deserves special attention: formal economic theory. Among economists, only A.V. Chayanov, John D. Hicks, Albert Hirschman, Charles Kindleberger, Witold Kula, David Landes, Karl Polanyi, W.W. Rostow, Thorstein Veblen, and Amartya Sen—the latter inevitably for his famous critique of rational choice models, “Rational Fools”—make appearances in the text. They appear as quasi-historians, not as producers of formal economic theory. Except for a passing mention of cliometrics, not even econometric economic history enters Burke’s discussion of history and theory. Most likely that neglect reflects Burke’s own discomfort with formal and quantitative analysis; in two adjacent sentences, for example, he interprets Fernand Braudel as estimating that the Mediterranean’s gross product per capita during the later sixteenth century was 20 ducats, then deduces wrongly that the poor, defined as earning less than 20 ducats per year, constituted 20–25 percent of the whole population.6 In any case, Burke also ignores the powerful, and largely nonquantitative, influence of economic institutional analysis, as represented by Douglass North, on the last two decades of economic history.7 Implicitly, but understandably, he takes as his point of reference for history-theory dialogues the interpretive social and cultural history of which he is a master. More surprisingly, Burke neglects two “turns” one might have expected him to emphasize: the cultural turn in history, and the historical turn in social science.8 In history, postwar enthusiasm for social science lasted about three decades, but during the 1970s broke the discipline into two unequal parts: a minority that specialized in such synthetic and eminently social scientific fields as econometric history, demographic history, and quantitative urban history, and a majority that turned away from economics, demography, and sociology toward cultural anthropology as its principal source of social scientific inspiration. In the social sciences at about the same time, historical-comparative analysis regained some of the prestige and energy it had lost during decades of abstracted empiricism. Perhaps these two turns began too early to shape Burke’s treatment of history and social theory. But their absence permits Burke to speak as though since 1950



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or so rapprochement between history and social science has increased more or less continuously instead of taking repeated zigzags. Their absence also lends a timeless quality to Burke’s analysis and thereby understates the extent to which the issues on which he offers wise reflection have been matters of bitter struggle in history and the social sciences. For a strong sense of struggle, read Adams, Clemens, Orloff, and contributors, Remaking Modernity. Their 600-plus page book undertakes two related tasks: to interpret changes in the practice of historical sociology, broadly defined, since World War II; and to make the case for what we might call cultural phenomenology as a superior alternative to the deterministic, externalist accounts of social processes most of the book’s authors see as having prevailed during the later twentieth century. In fact, Burke nicely anticipates the attitude toward previous work we find in Adams, Clemens, and Orloff: Today, however, both structuralism and Marxism are frequently rejected as determinist, and the emphasis falls on collective creativity. What used to be assumed to be objective, hard social facts, like gender or class or community, are now assumed to be culturally ‘constructed’ or ‘constituted.’ In contrast to the structuralists, poststructuralists emphasize human agency and also change, not so much construction as reconstruction, a process of continuous creation. For this reason ‘essentialism’ is one of the greatest insults in their vocabulary.9

But Adams and company take up poststructuralism with a difference, with a program of recasting the premises of historical sociology. Ontologically, their book forwards a view of individual human consciousness as the principal site and spring of social processes. Epistemologically, it emphasizes the interpretation of consciousness—hence, the treatment of texts documenting that consciousness—as the means to knowledge of historical social processes. Methodologically, it implies a hermeneutic approach, without using the term. In her concluding essay, Elisabeth Clemens presents what she sees as the program’s crucial research questions: How does the available repertoire of practices or schemas shape the space of possible actions? How are distinctive cultural schemas combined? How are existing schemas linked to new projects or available categories embedded in systems of social relations and practice? What unifies these questions is an imagery of history as constructed but not as an endlessly malleable work in progress; moments of reconfiguration are less than routine yet enduringly significant.10

Pursuing that agenda, the editors and their authors produced an expansive survey of recent work in historical-comparative analysis. The editors’ introduction and conclusion occupy about a fifth of the book’s main text. That leaves plenty of room for searching essays by Richard Biernacki, Zine Magubane, George Steinmetz, Philip Gorski, Ann Orloff, Edgar Kiser and Justin Baer, Meyer Kestnbaum, Roger Gould, Nader Sohrabi, Bruce Carruthers, Rebecca Emigh, Ming-Cheng Lo, Lyn

194  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis Spillman and Russell Faeges, Margaret Somers, and Rogers Brubaker—sociologists all, but drawn from the most historically oriented wing of contemporary American sociology. According to the editors, the volume’s contributors belong mainly to a third wave of postwar historical sociology. The small first wave, including such scholars as Barrington Moore, Jr., and Reinhard Bendix, rejected the presentism and modernism of sociological contemporaries, notably including Talcott Parsons. A substantially larger second wave surged during the 1970s, organizing around questions (although not necessarily answers) posed by historical materialism. While displaying considerable respect for first-wave pioneers, Adams, Clemens, and Orloff treat the second wave as hegemons to be toppled. The second wavers, they claim, still cling to the illusion of settled modernity. What is more, they defend their obsolete conceptions by means of intellectual power plays: Historical sociologists, like other academics and intellectuals, have unconsciously depended on this sense of settlement, of achieved modernity, and are disoriented by its loss. So it is natural when they react with nostalgia for old totalities, a past of imagined theoretical stability, or with a sense of perceived threat—by policing the boundaries of intellectual inquiry to try to forcibly settle things anew or by simply refusing to debate or consider new ways of thinking.11

As a named member of the first and second waves, I winced to read about our alleged misconceptions and misdeeds. My mission here, however, is not to defend myself and my second-wave companions, but to examine the vision of relations between history and social science implied by the Adams-Clemens-Orloff analysis. The third wave of the 1990s and thereafter, according to this chronology, rejected Marxist problematics in favor of an emphasis on culture, consciousness, and interpretation. Accordingly, “both actors and the relationships among them are understood as profoundly constituted by culture and historical conjuncture, rather than as reflections of some underlying system of economic relations.”12 In Richard Biernacki’s version, for example, the shift from second wave to third involved moving from means-end reasoning to the reconstruction of situations within which social actors act. Action becomes, not the pursuit of well-defined ends by instrumental means, but a “problem-solving contrivance.”13 Since, as Biernacki points out, Max Weber organized much of his analysis around means-end schemata, a surprise awaits the reader of Remaking Modernity. For the book’s most widely discussed and cited author is none other than . . . Max Weber! In this book, Weber thrives, Marx dies, while Foucault and (more surprisingly) Émile Durkheim survive as sources of inspiration. Weber attracts these theorists for two separate reasons: because he stands as the quintessential historically informed sociologist, and because his version of meansend analysis places the conscious actor at center stage. Foucault occupies such a large place, according to the editors, because:



Chapter 15: Three Visions of History and Theory  195 Foucault’s own unclassifiable work—which if not that of a standard sociologue, certainly flirts with historical sociology and is taught in many of our graduate theory courses—captures the historical emergence of normalizing discourses and “technologies of the self ” and traces the processes by which they are embedded in and help create a range of disciplinary complexes, including the prison, the clinic, the confessional, and state apparatuses. These discourses contribute to creating the very individuals that they describe and regulate. These arguments have been an impetus for exciting sociological work detecting the fingerprints of power on shifting historical categories.14

Thus Foucault, for third wavers, provides a connection between ambient culture and situated social action. Durkheim likewise provides retroactive ratification for a third-wave position. Durkheim, “abominated” by the second wave according to the editors, returns as the patron saint of social determination for cognitive categories.15 The book’s cultural phenomenology centers on the image of conscious human actors who actively organize their worlds using materials supplied to them by the ambient culture. To that extent, they remain prisoners of available language and (to use a term the book draws repeatedly from Pierre Bourdieu) doxa. We begin to see why the authors devote so much energy to bashing the interest-based analyses of second-wave Marxism. Interests derived from locations within social structures contradict culturally embedded phenomenology as the fundamental explanation of social action. In an essay on religion in historical analysis that he titles provocatively “the return of the repressed,” Philip Gorski points out that early sociologists such as Weber and Durkheim assigned capital importance to religion. Even some first-wave analysts, including Shmuel Eisenstadt and Robert Bellah, gave religion central attention. But, Gorski rightly observes, the second wave generally ignored religious factors in historical change.16 Gorski proposes four explanations for that willful ignorance. First, second-wave analysts reacted fiercely against sociology’s derivation of social processes from ideas and values—Parsons again!—and bent over backwards to avoid arguments smacking of what they saw as idealism. Second, within Marxism they drew especially on the Communist Manifesto version, with its insistence on the derivation of ideologies such as religion from the solid base of material relations. Third, the Marxist-inspired work of Theda Skocpol, Immanuel Wallerstein, and other prominent second-wave analysts set the agenda for other practitioners of historical sociology, whether or not they subscribed to Marxist tenets. Finally, as committed modernists, members of the second wave inherited the Enlightenment view of religion as the foe of modernity and as a force that modernization was eradicating. In Gorski’s analysis, like those of his collaborators, the revival of Weber and the downgrading of Marx form essential parts of cultural phenomenology’s program. Let me not, however, give the impression that all nineteen authors in this big book, cadences counted by their editors, march in perfect step. George Steinmetz, for example, offers a competing account of historical sociology’s transformation based on the U.S. movement from Fordism to post-Fordism. Rebecca Emigh revisits transitions to capitalisms in a valuable survey of alternative descriptions and explanations.

196  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis But she reduces the third wave’s distinctiveness to a turn away from Eurocentrism, a reintroduction of cultural factors, a recognition of gradualism, and an enumeration of multiple paths: Emigh insists on the multiplicity of both transitions and of capitalisms. In a third display of independence, Rogers Brubaker argues against the representation of ethnicity as a characteristic of durably constituted groups and for a view of ethnicity as a contingent, constructed form of political interaction. The array of individual contributions in Remaking Modernity undermines the impression of conformity to the editors’ daring ontological and epistemological positions, but offers greater hope that historical sociologists will continue to serve as important pivots between history and theory. In fact, Brubaker’s essay could easily have appeared in the third book under discussion here: the Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis. Robert Goodin and I assembled the book as a constructive reply to polar challenges within political science: on one side, the claim to establish timeless, spaceless general laws of political behavior by means of such approaches as rational choice analysis; on the other, the postmodern claim that, since all political realities rest on social construction, analysts can do little more than interpret those realities in pursuit of their preferred political outcomes. To the first claim, the book replies that the contexts in which political processes occur affect how they occur. To the second, it replies, “Yes, social construction matters, but we must face the challenge of explaining how it actually works and produces its effects.” We can therefore reasonably call the book’s overall approach “systematic constructivism.” Dwarfing even the Adams-Clemens-Orloff collection, the Handbook runs 869 pages—a fat fistful of a book. After an editor’s introduction, it breaks into ten sections, each taking up a different aspect of context. In nine of them, a long general essay on that sort of context precedes three or four shorter, more specialized essays. The headliners include:

• • • •



• • • •

Why and How Philosophy Matters (Philip Petit) Why and How Psychology Matters (Kathleen M. McGraw) Why and How Ideas Matter (Dietrich Rueschemeyer) Why and How Culture Matters (Michael Thompson, Marco Verweij, and Richard J. Ellis) Why and How History Matters (Charles Tilly) Why and How Place Matters (Göran Therborn) Why and How Population Matters (David Levine) Why and How Technology Matters (Wiebe E. Beijker)

The book closes with reflective essays from two veterans of political science’s paradigm wars: David E. Apter and Lucian Pye. With 51 different authors and coauthors, the Handbook speaks in many voices. Yet cumulatively it makes the case for systematic constructivism: for the dual view that all political processes vary in actual operation as a function of context, but that



Chapter 15: Three Visions of History and Theory  197

the effects of context are themselves amenable to systematic analysis. More precisely, its essays demonstrate contextual effects on a) analysts’ understanding of political processes, b) the evidence available for empirical examination of political processes, and c) the processes themselves. As a consequence, it devotes significant effort to sorting out interactions among a, b, and c—how, for example, available evidence and analysts’ understandings affect each other. Take the section titled “Culture Matters.” In their introductory essay, Michael Thompson, Marco Verweij, and Richard J. Ellis argue for “constrained relativism” as a way of thinking about the interplay of culture and politics, clarify the extent to which institutional approaches to politics involve just such constrained relativism, then illustrate their argument by applying it to current political discussions of climate change. In a chapter called “How to Detect Culture and its Effects,” Pamela Ballinger reviews competing anthropological conceptions of culture before looking hard at how sensitive field workers actually acquire knowledge of the shared understandings and their representations in symbols and practices—the cultures—that prevail in their field settings. Under the heading “Race, Ethnicity, Religion,” Courtney Jung, in parallel with Brubaker, argues negatively that “Constructivism sets forth the proposition that race, ethnicity, and religion (and also class, gender, and sexuality) do not have any essential core that determines their fundamental character.”17 Positively, she calls attention to the processes by which people and groups become subjects and/or agents publicly identified by race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, or sexuality. Susan Gal next takes up “Language, its Stakes, and its Effects.” She centers her analysis on how people come to communicate in certain languages and not others, a question that inevitably involves the exercise of power. But she also inverts the question by asking how the availability of a given language shapes political relations. In a final essay on “The Idea of Political Culture,” Paul Lichterman and Daniel Cefaï analyze how political culture “structures the way actors create their strategies, perceive their field of action, define their identities and solidarities.”18 In this light, they compare alternative (but mostly complementary) analyses of political culture as shared representations, performance, and everyday communication and action. Throughout the Handbook’s section on “Culture Matters,” then, analysts are building toward an understanding of culture as continuously constructed, as politically consequential, and as amenable to systematic analysis. To be sure, Goodin and I recruited contributors to this and other sections with some such conception in mind. But the volume as a whole makes my point: as compared with Burke’s practical sense and the Adams-Clemens-Orloff cultural phenomenology, the Handbook’s contributors converge on a different vision of the relation between history and theory. To name that vision “systematic constructivism” draws attention away from consciousness and toward social interaction. It focuses attention on the continuous reconstruction of persons, groups, and social processes through negotiated transactions among social sites. It draws on the analogy of conversation as a process that incessantly transforms its participants and

198  Part IV. Historical Social Analysis produces continuous social action. It calls up an image of history as a huge series of consequential conversations. Visions of relations between history and social theory as practical sense, cultural phenomenology, and systematic constructivism contradict each other along two divides. The first divide separates the Burkian vision as self-contained practice in possible need of occasional assistance from the two more ambitious efforts to synthesize history and theory in a single enterprise. But the two synthesizing visions differ fundamentally from each other with regard to ontology, epistemology, and historical method. For advocates of cultural phenomenology, culturally drenched consciousness lies at the center of social existence, knowledge depends on analysts’ ability to penetrate that consciousness, and hermeneutic methods provide the means of acquiring that knowledge. For followers of systematic constructivism, social analysis centers on transactions among persons, groups, and other social sites; knowledge accumulates from systematic observation of those transactions; and a wide variety of methods from network analysis to ethnography all make contributions to systematic knowledge. I have obviously already placed my bets on the third approach. At least this comparison of three recent books demonstrates that the stakes are high.

Source Note “Three Visions of History and Theory,” History and Theory 46 (2007), 299–307.

Notes 1. Peter Burke, History and Social Theory, second edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff, eds., Remaking Modernity. Politics, History, and Sociology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 2. Peter Burke, Sociology and History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980). 3. Burke, Sociology and History, 105. 4. Burke, History and Social Theory, 188. 5. Burke, History and Social Theory, 176. 6. History and Social Theory, 36. Burke is conflating Braudel’s figures for the active population and the population as a whole: Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), vol. I, pp. 458, 460. Given the disproportionate contribution of very high incomes to total and therefore per capita income, the proportion of active population earning 20 ducats per year or less must have reached at least 60 percent, the proportion of all persons living below that threshold far higher than that. 7. See, e.g., Douglass C. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).



Chapter 15: Three Visions of History and Theory  199

8. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: Norton, 1994); Terence J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Eric H. Monkkonen, ed., Engaging the Past. The Uses of History Across the Social Sciences (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative,” Past and Present 85 (1979), 1–24. 9. Burke, History and Social Theory, 175. 10. Adams et al., 505. 11. Adams et al., 68. 12. Adams et al., 69. 13. Adams et al., 76-82. 14. Adams et al., 41. 15. Adams et al., 40. 16. I must, however, defend my own credentials as an analyst of religion. My first published article and my first book analyzed an ostensibly religious rebellion, my books on the evolution of contention in France and Britain repeatedly dealt with religious mobilizations and conflicts, and my analyses of Irish politics in recent books inevitably featured religious divisions. See, e.g., Charles Tilly, “Civil Constitution and Counter-Revolution in Southern Anjou,” French Historical Studies 1 (1959), 172–199; The Vendée (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); The Contentious French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Trust and Rule (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 17. Goodin and Tilly, 366. 18. Goodin and Tilly, 393. 

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Part V Conclusion

Chapter 16

Epilogue If you have worked your way through the preceding chapters, you have learned at least that explaining social processes takes persistence and courage. If my vital vision of a dynamic historical social science does not please or enlighten you, at least it shows you that alternatives to conventional explanatory strategies exist. Where next? Let me distinguish among three overlapping futures: for social science and history, for me, and for you, my reader. For social science and history, I advocate not fusion, but a closer alliance than has existed since the heady days of history from the bottom up (see especially chapters 15 to 17 on urban history, Anglo-American social history since 1945, and competing visions of history-social science collaboration). Most social scientists should continue to define their work as the analysis of particular social processes—migration, family formation, contentious politics, and more—in varied social settings. Most historians should continue to specialize in times and places such as imperial China or contemporary Latin America, accumulating enough local knowledge about those times and places to show how different processes interact in concrete human experience. But in both enterprises knowledge of how time and place affect the operation of social processes should play a major role. The continuous expansion of capitalist property and exchange across the world of the last few centuries, for example, poses problems for social scientists and historians alike. On the social scientific side, we need better explanations of how increasing involvement in capitalist property and exchange relations generates such momentous shifts as the worldwide moves toward longer life and lower fertility. On the historical side, we need better accounts of the different ways that capitalist relations, demographic transitions, and the quality of interpersonal connections interact in different settings. On either side, collaboration across the history/social science boundary will produce superior explanations of social processes. On both sides, success will result from getting inside social processes. That means taking time seriously, seeing exactly how what happens now affects what happens next. Within the mechanism-process approach, analysts can reach inside social processes from either of two directions: aggregating from mechanisms to processes, or 202



Chapter 16: Epilogue  203

starting with processes and detecting mechanisms within them. The two strategies aren’t simply symmetrical. If we begin with the mechanism of brokerage, we can reconstruct how processes of mobilization occur by identifying the sequences and combinations of brokerage with other mechanisms such as diffusion compound into increases of collective control over resources—that is, mobilization. To the extent that those sequences and concatenations recur in many different instances of mobilization, we can think of the mobilization process itself as robust. But it will still take multiple concrete forms in different times and places. And we may prefer to concentrate on how brokerage or diffusion works in the many instances, since getting a crucial mechanism right will serve in explaining a wide range of other social processes. In the second strategy, we begin with a concrete, historically located process such as the development of a revolution, or the development of many revolutions. We look inside the process to see which mechanisms are at work, in which combinations and sequences. In the case of revolution, we are likely to discover that in setting after setting the mechanism of polarization precedes the mechanism of splitting the regime into two or more armed segments. But we are also likely to discover that the kinds of claims to legitimacy made by revolutionary challengers—dynastic right, popular sovereignty, national identity, or religious purity—vary systematically from one historical setting to another, and that each sort of claim calls up a somewhat different set of certification mechanisms. Of course, that discovery may well turn us to a broader examination of how certification operates in different settings, thus shifting from the second strategy back to the first. Appropriate methods for reaching inside social processes differ somewhat between the two strategies. In the bottom-up aggregation from mechanisms to processes we might employ simulations, experiments, and the quasi-experiments of survey research to introduce one mechanism at a time, but we are less likely to succeed with historical reconstruction unless we adopt a device such as an event catalog to discipline the evidence. In the top-down disaggregation of concrete processes, historically constructed analytical narratives and/or ethnography will help us more effectively to single out crucial mechanisms within the tangle of human interaction. Simulation, in contrast, will help little until we already have a promising inventory of the mechanisms that interact within the process under study, and neither experiments nor quasi-­experiments are likely to give us much aid in top-down strategies. Nevertheless, the future of historically informed social science and social scientifically informed history depends on intense conversation between practitioners of bottom-up aggregation (who will more often be social scientists) and top-down disaggregation (who will more often be historians). I hope, furthermore, that reading this book will persuade a few ambitious people to straddle the boundary, working from bottom up and top down, as both social scientists and historians. As the book shows, it isn’t easy, but it is rewarding. As for me, like the milk wagon horses I remember from my youth, I expect to plod along my habitual analytic paths: state transformations, democratization and de-democratization, inequality, contentious politics, and smaller-scale interpersonal

204  Part V. Conclusion processes (for recent samples of each, see Tilly 2006, Tilly 2007, Tilly 2005, Tilly and Tarrow 2006, and Tilly 2008). Each one of these rich topics continues to present challenges for the mechanism-process analyses I am advocating. In each case, prevailing explanations (including my own) lack the precision and conviction their subjects deserve. There is plenty of work to do. As for you, my reader, you can carry away any of three positive messages from this book. First, you can see how one zealous practitioner of history and social science does his work, and decide whether the model appeals to you. Second, you can actually apply the book’s models to your own investigations, to see whether they work well for you. Third, you can read other people’s analyses of social processes with a clearer appreciation of the methodological and explanatory choices they have made. Whether or not you agree with my book’s teachings, they should help you recognize the stakes of self-consciousness about method and explanation.

References Tilly, Charles (2005). “Rethinking Inequalities,” Polish Sociological Review 3: 207–220. ——— (2006). Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— (2007). Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2008). Credit and Blame. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tilly, Charles, and Sidney Tarrow (2006). Contentious Politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Source Note Written for this volume.

index Adams, Julia, 190, 193–196, 197 ADF. See Allied Democratic Forces Afghanistan, 60, 73, 98, 145 Africa, 111–112 Aggregation, and event catalogs, 50 Algeria, 60 Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), 102 American Sociological Association, 85 Anderson, Benedict, 57–58 Annual Register, 15 Anthropology, 184 Antony, Louise, 5 Apter, David E., 196 Argument, and formalisms, 38 Aristotle, 62, 63 Armenia, 144 Armitage, Richard, 96 Assimilation, 127, 167–168 Atavism, 61 Australia, 60 Austria, 10, 144 Autonomists, 102, 103 Aya, Rod, 78 Azerbaijan, 144, 147 Baer, Justin, 193 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 191 Ballinger, Pamela, 197 Bangladesh, 142 Basque separatists, 100 BCC. See Big case comparison Bearman, Peter, 30, 76–77 Beijker, Wiebe E., 196 Beissinger, Mark, 149 Belgium, 113

Bellah, Robert, 195 Bendix, Reinhard, 85, 194 Bentham, Jeremy, 62 Biernacki, Richard, 193, 194 Big case comparison (BCC), 84–89 Bin Laden, Osama, 98 Black, J. Cofer, 96 Bodnar, John, 168 Bolsheviks, 144 Bottomore, T. B., 190 Botz, Gerhard, 10–11 Boundaries, 55–56, 60 Bourdieu, Pierre, 63, 191, 195 Boyle’s law, 70 Braudel, Fernand, 110, 175, 190, 192 Brennan, John O., 96–97 Brewer, John, 183 Brokerage, 143, 149–150, 156 Brubaker, Rogers, 58, 194, 196, 197 Buddhism, 60 Bulgaria, 144 Burke, Peter, 190–193, 197 Burma, 60 Burt, Ronald, 166 Bush, George W., 93 Bush administration, and terrorism, 95–96 Cambodia, 73 Campaigns, and social movements, 153 Canada, 60 Capitalism, 109–110, 178, 179, 195–196 Captain Swing (Hobsbawm and Rudé), 18 Carruthers, Bruce, 193 Category formation, and social movements, 152

205

206  Index Caucasus, 144 Causal mechanisms, 121–122, 124, 126– 130, 138, 139; and big case comparison, 87–89; and historical political analysis, 140–157. See also individual causal mechanisms, Robust causal mechanisms Cefaï, Daniel, 197 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 95–96 Certification, 140–143, 152–153, 156 Chain migration, 168–169 Charles I, 126 Chayanov, A. V., 192 China, 60, 73, 109, 181, 202 Christianity, 60 CIA. See Central Intelligence Agency Circular migration, 168–169 Cities, 166 Citizenship, and big case comparison, 89 City in History (Mumford), 165–166 Civilizations, 55–61 Civil society, 93 Civil wars, historical analysis of, 137 Claims, contentious, and event catalogs, 50 Classics, 62–65 Classified event counts, 10 Clemens, Elisabeth, 190, 193–196, 197 Cobbett, William, 156 Coercion specialists, 94, 102, 103, 104 Cognitive mechanisms, 139 Cohen, David, 111–112 Cold War, 145, 179 Collective action, 125, 128; and event catalogs, 49–50 Collective biography, 180; and social history, 177–178; and urban history, 163 Collective claims, and social movements, 151–152, 153–154, 155–156 Collective contention, 128–129 Collective violence, analysis of, 30–34; and event catalogs, 49. See also Violence Collision of Wills (Gould), 26–27, 30–34 Colombia, 98, 114 Commons, John R., 30 Communal-national movements, 57, 59, 61 Communist Manifesto (Marx), 195 Comparative-historical analysis, 84–86

Comparative history, 112 Comparative method, 84–89, 122 Competition, 143, 149–150, 156 Computers, and event catalogs, 49 Comte, Auguste, 30, 123 Conflict, and event catalogs, 49–50 Conspirators, 103, 104 Contentious claims and event catalogs, 50 Contentious episodes, definition of, 48; and event catalogs, 48–51. See also Episodes Contentious events, 15–18; definition of, 15 Contentious gatherings, 15–16, 129–130; definition of, 129 Contentious politics and collective biography, 177–178; and event catalogs, 10–15 Contentious repertoires, transformation of, 15 Controversies in Sociology (Open University series), 190 Corsica, 31 “Country Reports on Terrorism” (NCTC), 97 Covering law, 8, 9, 135 Crowd in the French Revolution (Rudé), 48–49 Cultural entrepreneurs, 61 Cultural phenomenology, 190, 193, 195, 197, 198 Culture, 182–183, 186–187; Distinctive culture, 55–56, 60 Czechoslovakia, 144 Das Kapital (Marx), 64 Daumard, Adeline, 110 Decertification, 140–143, 152–153, 156 De-democratization, 64–65; analysis of, 28 Democratization, 15, 64–65; analysis of, 28; and event catalogs, 50; historical analysis of, 137 Demographic history, 184 Demonstrations, and event catalogs, 48 Descimon, Robert, 175–176, 187 Descriptive particularism, 168 Dialectic interaction, 186–187 Diasporas, 60

Index  207 Diggers, 108–116 Disposition accounts, 8, 27–35 Dmitri, 126 Durkheim, Émile, 62, 64–65, 194, 195 Dynastic competition, 125–126 Eastern Europe, 68, 78 Egypt, 60 Eisenstadt, S. N., 6, 55–61, 68, 85, 195 Elias, Norbert, 191 Ellis, Richard J., 196, 197 Emigh, Rebecca, 193, 195–196 Empires, disintegration of, 68. See also Soviet Union, disintegration of Enclaves, 60 Encompassing comparison, 114 England, 60, 73, 76–77, 114, 126, 129, 164, 181 Environmental mechanisms, 139 Episodes, 138–139, classes of, puzzling features in, 150–156; dissimilar, analogies among, 156–157; puzzling features of, 143–150. See also Contentious episodes Epistemology, 4–5 Estonia, 144, 148 Ethnic conflict, 57–58 Ethnicity, 182, 183–184 Ethnic solidarity, 168–169 Europe, 58, 77 European Community, 86, 147 European revolutions, 124–126 Event catalogs, 4; and computers, 49; and contentious episodes, 48–51; and contentious politics, 10–15; definition of, 46; employment of, 50–51; phenomenon measured by, 48–51; as theories, 19, 46–51 Evidence and formalisms, 38; and social history, 177–179; theories of, 18–20 Explanation, 2–4, 68–79, 133–134, 138, 139–140; conceptions of, 135–136 Faeges, Russell, 194 Falwell, Jerry, 61 Farhi, Farideh, 71–72 FBI. See Federal Bureau of Investigation

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 95–96 Finland, 31, 144, 147 Formalisms, 37–42; definition of, 37–38. See also Formal representations Formal representations, typology of, 40–42, 41 fig. 3.1. See also Formalisms Foucault, Michel, 191, 194–195 Fox-Genevese, Elizabeth, 110–111 France, 10, 11, 14, 31, 60, 72, 73, 100, 129, 181 Franzosi, Roberto, 13, 14 Freedom House, 95 French Revolution, 19, 61, 100 Fundamentalism, 57, 59, 61 Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution (Eisenstadt), 56–57, 61 Furet, François, 61 Gal, Susan, 197 Galton, Francis, 84 Gandhi, Mahatma, 61 Gellner, Ernest, 58 Gender, 182, 183–184 Gender inequality and big case comparison, 89. See also Inequality General history, 185 General Model of Early Modern Revolutions, 125 Genocide, in Rwanda, 101–102 Genovese, Eugene, 110–111 Gentleman’s Magazine, 15 Georgia, 144, 147 Germany, 11, 113, 144 Giddens, Anthony, 124, 166 Gîle, Nilufer, 57 Globalization, 30–34 Global terrorism, 94, 95. See also Terrorism Glorious Revolution, 126 Glossers, 108–116 Godunov, Boris, 126 Goffman, Erving, 63, 191 Goldstone, Jack, 72–73, 124 Goldthorpe, John, 84; and big case comparison, 86–87 Gombrich, Ernst, 191 Goodin, Robert, 190, 196–198

208  Index Gorbachev, Mikhail, 145–148 Gordon, Lord George, 130, 156 Gorski, Philip, 193, 195 Gould, Roger, 26–27, 30–34, 193 Great Britain, 10, 72, 114, 129, 155, 156, 181 Great Britain Study, 15–18, 19, 20 Great Depression, 179 Greece, ancient, 60 Groups, and terror, 94, 102, 103 fig. 9.2, 104 Guinea, 60 Gurr, Ted, 58, 72 Haas, Ernst, 58 Habermas, Jürgen, 124 Hagen, Everett, 114 Hammond, Barbara, 176 Hammond, J. L., 176 Handlin, Oscar, 161 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 15 Harakat ul-Mujahadin (HUM), 98 Hechter, Michael, 76 Hicks, John D., 192 Hinduism, 60, 142 Hindu nationalism, 142. See also Nationalism Hirschman, Albert, 192 Historical analysis, 2–3; of political processes, 133–157 Historical Method, 122–123 Historical political analysis, and causal mechanisms, 140–157 Historical research, and formalisms, 39–40 Historicist thinking, and big case comparisons, 86 History and logics of explanation, 9; and monadism, 121–122, 130; and social theory, 190–198; and sociology, 120–130 History and Social Theory (Burke), 190–193 “History from below,” 176 “History from the bottom up,” 176 Hobsbawm, Eric, 18, 58, 110, 180 Holism, 6, 7 Holland, 88 Homans, George, 62

Horowitz, Donald, 58 HUM. See Harakat ul-Mujahadin Human capital, 127 Human rights, 94 Human Rights Watch, 95 Hume, David, 2 Hungary, 60, 126, 144 Identity, 64, 65, 140–141; analysis of, 28, 34–35; and social movements, 150–156 Identity shift, 143, 149–150, 156 Immigration, 127–129, 130; and urban history, 167–168. See also Migration Imperial disintegration, 143–144. See also Soviet Union, disintegration of Improving the model, 71 Incidence, and event catalogs, 50 India, 57, 60, 97 Individualizing comparison, 114 Individuals, and terror, 94 Indonesia, 60 Industrial capitalism, and social history, 178 Industrialization, 185 Inequality, 64, 89, 127; analysis of, 28–29; and urban history, 163–164, 169–170 Injustice, 93 Institutional thinking, and big case comparison, 86 Institutions, change in and social history, 182, 184 Internal regularities, and event catalogs, 50–51 Invariant model, 68–79, 120–125, 126–128, 130, 135 Invention, and social movements, 155–156 Iran, 60, 71, 73, 147 Iraq, 60, 95, 97 Irish Republican Army, 100 Islam, 60 Islamic fundamentalism, 57 Israel, 60 Italy, 13, 31, 38, 164 Ivan V, 126 Ivory Coast, 60 James II, 126

Index  209 Japan, 57, 60, 114, 181 Jordan, 60 Judaism, 60 Judt, Tony, 111 Jung, Courtney, 197 Justification, 63, 64–65 Kakar, Sudhir, 58 Kansas Event Data System (KEDS), 13 Kashmir, 97, 98 Kazakhstan, 148 KEDS. See Kansas Event Data System Kennedy, John F., 94 Kenya, 60, 111 Kestnbaum, Meyer, 193 Khomeini, Ruholla, 61 Kidnapping, and terrorism, 102 Kimmel, Michael S., 124 Kindleberger, Charles, 192 Kiser, Edgar, 193 Korea, 60, 113 Kriesi, Hanspeter, 11, 58 Kuhn, Thomas, 5, 191 Kula, Witold, 192 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 190 Laitin, David, 58, 75–76 Landes, David, 192 Lang, James, 114 Language, 186–187 Latvia, 144 Lazarsfeld, Paul F., 46–47, 49 Lebanon, 113 Lenin, Vladimir, 144 Levine, David, 196 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, 100 Lichterman, Paul, 197 Linkers, 108–116 Lithuania, 144, 148 Logics of explanation, 8–9 London Chronicle, 15 Magubane, Zine, 193 Making of the English Working Class (Thompson), 181 Malaysia, 60, 113 Mali, 60

Manchuria, 113 Marx, Karl, 7, 30, 56, 63, 64, 65, 85, 124, 165, 190, 194, 195 Marxism, 7, 179–180, 193, 195 Mass migration, 169 Materialism, 186–187 McGraw, Kathleen M., 196 McNeill, William H., 190 McPhail, Clark, 11–12, 49 Mead, George Herbert, 30, 64, 65 Measurement, theory of, 46–47 Mechanism-based accounts, 8, 9, 136. See also Causal mechanisms Medick, Hans, 108, 112 Merton, Robert, 165 Method, 2–4, 83–84, 84–89, 122–123, 139–140 Method of Agreement, 83, 84, 122, 139–140 Method of Concomitant Variation, 83, 122, 139–140 Method of Differences, 83, 84, 122, 139–140 Method of Residues, 83, 122, 139–140 Methodological individualism, 6, 7, 86 Middle East, 109 Migration and urban history, 168–169. See also Immigration Military activity, 88 Militias, and terrorism, 103, 104 Mill, John Stuart, 5, 62, 63, 64–65, 87; and method, 83–84, 122–123, 139– 140 Ming-Cheng Lo, 193 Mirror of Parliament, 15 Mobility. See Social mobility Modern fundamentalism, 57, 59 Modernization, 56–59; and social history, 179–180 Moldavia, 144, 147 Monadism, 120, 121–122, 128, 130 Mongols, 60 Monkkonen, Eric, 162–163 Montesquieu, 62, 63 Moore, Barrington, Jr., 85, 180–181, 194 Morawska, Ewa, 127 Morning Chronicle, 15

210  Index Morocco, 60 Moshiri, Farrokh, 72 Most, Benjamin A., 50 Mulkay, M. J., 190 Mumford, Lewis, 162–163, 165–166 Murder, and terrorism, 102 Muscovy, 125 Mutilation, and terrorism, 102 Mystification, and social movements, 154–155 Napoleonic Wars, 19 Nash, Gary, 161 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 96 National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), 96–97 National government, and social history, 178 Nationalism, 57–58, 61; explanation for, 69, 78; and robust causal mechanism, 141–143, 156 National state, 112–114 NATO, 147 NCTC. See National Counterterrorism Center Netherlands, 11, 60 Networks, and terror, 94, 102, 103 fig. 9.2, 104 New School for Social Research, 15 New urban history, 163 New Zealand, 60 Nicaragua, 71, 73 9/11 Commission, 96 Noiriel, Gérard, 58 North, Douglas, 192 North America, urban system in, 165 Norway, 38 Object shift, 152, 156 Occupational mobility, 185. See also Social mobility O’Connell, Daniel, 130 Oil pipelines, and terrorism, 98 Olson, Mancur, 128 Ontology, 5–8; and big case comparison, 85–86

Opportunity spirals, 143, 149–150, 156 Orloff, Ann Shola, 190, 193–196, 197 Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (ed. Goodin and Tilly), 196–198 Pakistan, 60, 97, 98, 142, 181 Palestine, 73 Park, Robert, 63 Parliamentarization, 19–20 Parsons, Talcott, 30, 56, 124, 136, 194, 195 Pattern identification, historical, 134 Patterns of Global Terrorism (U.S. State Department), 95 Periodicals, 15–16 Persian Zoroastrianism, 60 Peter III, 126 Peter the Great, 126 Petit, Philip, 196 Phenomenological individualism, 6, 7, 86 Philippines, 73 Place, Francis, 130, 156 Poland, 73, 126, 144 Polanyi, Karl, 192 Polarization, 139 Political conflict, invariant model of, 121–122 Political processes, historical analysis of, 133–157; invariant model of, 68–79 Political sociology, 133 Political Systems of Empires (Eisenstadt), 56 Politics, 183 Popular politics, 183 Population change, 184 Populism, 163 Powell, Colin L., 93, 96 Power, and social mobility, 164 Practical sense, 190, 191–192, 197, 198 Pred, Allan, 165, 166 Process, theories of, 18–20 Process analysis, historical, 134 Processes, 138, 139 Propensity accounts, 8, 9, 135, 136 Prosopography, 180 Protest, and event catalogs, 49, 50 Proto-fundamentalism, 57

Index  211 Proto-industrialization, 162 Prussia, 17, 88 Pugachev, Emelian, 125–126 Purposive social action, 165 Putnam, Robert, 29 Pye, Lucian, 196

Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, 196 Rule, James, 78 Russia, 60, 68, 73, 76, 125–126, 144, 181. See also Soviet Union Russian empire, 125–126 Rwanda, genocide in, 101–102

Qualitative-quantitative divide, 36–37, 38, 39 Questioning, and the classics, 63–65

Sabean, David, 108, 112 Saudi Arabia, 60 Schlesinger, Arthur, Sr., 161 Schrodt, Philip, 12–13 Second Commonwealth Judaism, 60 Sectarianism, 57 Self-regulating processes, 55–56, 60–61 Sen, Amartya, 192 Senegal, 60 September 11, 2001, terrorist attack, 93, 95, 96, 98, 104 Seven Years War, 17 Sewell, William H., Jr., 70 Sexual preference, 183–184 Sharpening polarization, 186 Shifting mentalities, and social history, 182–183 Simmel, Georg, 7, 30 Singapore, 60 Skinner, G. William, 114 Skocpol, Theda, 71–72, 124, 195 Smith, Anthony, 58 Social analysis, and strategy choices, 114–115 Social class, and social history, 180–182 Social construction, 186–187 Social criticism, historical, 134 Social history, 175–176; and evidence, 177–179; role of, 108–109, 160–161; and social mobility, 184–188; and social science, 184–187; theories of, 179–184; and urban history, 161–162 Social inequality, features of, 163–164. See also Inequality Social life, and urban history, 165–166 Social mobility, 120–121; and power, 164; and social history, 184–188; and urban history, 163–164 Social movements, 57–58, 128; and causal mechanisms, 150–156; and event

Race, 183–184 Ragin, Charles, 122 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 142 The Rational Choice Controversy in Historical Sociology (ed. Gould), 26 Reactive sectarianism, 57 Reed, Ralph, 61 Relational accounts, 27, 34–35 Relational mechanisms, 139 Relational realism, 7, 86 Relational thinking, and big case comparison, 86 Religion, 183–184 Remaking Modernity (Adams, Clemens, and Orloff), 193–196 Repertoires, 128 Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Goldstone), 72–73 Revolutionary chronologies, 77 Revolutionary outcomes, 77 Revolutionary situations, 77 Revolutions, 124–126, 130; explanation for, 68–69, 70–78; invariant model of, 70–78, 121 Riesman, David, 133–134 Ringmar, Erik, 140–141 Riots, 93 Robust causal mechanisms, 133, 136, 140–143. See also Causal mechanisms Rokkan, Stein, 85 Roman Empire, 60 Romania, 144 Rostow, W. W., 192 Roy, Beth, 58 RSS. See Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Rudé, George, 18, 48–49, 180

212  Index Social movements (continued) catalogs, 50; historical analysis of, 137; historical features of, 151 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Moore), 180–181 Social relations, and urban history, 166–167 Social science, and social history, 184– 187 Social science history, 184 Social Science Research, 36 Social theory, and history, 190–198 Society, 55–61, 112–114, 120 Sociology, 133–134; and history, 120–130 Sociology and History (Burke), 190–191 Sociology Today, 85 Sohrabi, Nader, 193 Solidarity, and social movements, 151–152 Solnick, Steven, 146 Somers, Margaret, 70, 194 Sorokin, Pitirim, 56, 61, 85, 136 South Africa, 73 South Asia, 98, 142–143 Soviet Union, 60, 100; disintegration of, 68, 75–76, 143–150. See also Russia Spain, 38, 60, 114 Specialists in coercion, 94, 102, 103, 104 Spencer, Herbert, 190 Spengler, Oswald, 85 Spillman, Lyn, 193–194 Sri Lanka, 60, 100, 142 Stalin, Joseph, 100, 144, 150 Starr, Harvey, 50 State formation, and event catalogs, 50; and urban history, 164 State-led nationalism, 141. See also Nationalism State(s), behavior of, and big case comparison, 87–89; world’s recognized, 113 States and Social Revolutions (Skocpol), 71 State-seeking nationalism, 141. See also Nationalism State system, disintegration of, and Big Case Comparison, 86 Steinmetz, George, 193, 195

Stinchcombe, Arthur, 75, 121, 124, 128, 165 Stone, Lawrence, 110, 163, 180 Stouffer, Samuel, 2 Structural sociology, 166–167 Structural violence, and event catalogs, 49 Structuration, 166 Structures, change in, and social history, 182, 184 Sudan, 60 Swanson, Guy, 114–115 Sweden, 38, 140, 141, 147 Switzerland, 11 Syria, 60 Systematic constructivism, 190, 196–197, 197–198 Systematic variation, 112 Systems accounts, 27–35, 86, 135–136; and logics of explanation, 8 Tadjikistan, 147 Taiwan, 60 Taliban, 98 Tanzania, 60 Tarrow, Sidney, 13–14 Technical innovation, and social history, 178 Terror, 93–104; definitions of, 100–104, 103; multiple uses of, 101–102; origin of word, 100; as a strategy, 94, 101, 102 Terrorism, 93–104; data on, 95–96; and oil pipelines, 98 Terrorists, 93–104; and international attacks, 1980–2004, 98, 99 fig. 9.1; and specialists in coercion, 94, 102, 103, 104; and terror-wielding groups and networks, 102, 103 fig. 9.2, 104 Terrorist Threat Integration Center, 95–96 Texas, 113 Thailand, 60 Theoretical Methods in Social History (Stinchcombe), 124 Theories, event catalogs as, 46–51; of evidence, 18–20; of process, 18–20 Theory and Society, 36 Therborn, Göran, 196

Index  213 Thernstrom, Stephan, 161, 163, 170, 185 Thirty Years War, 141 Thompson, E. P., 180, 181–182 Thompson, Michael, 196, 197 Thucydides, 62 Tilly, Charles, 190, 196–198 Times, 15 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 64–65, 75 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 61, 62 Touraine, Alain, 58 Toynbee, Arnold, 56, 61 Transactional accounts, 27–35 Trotsky, Leon, 75, 144 Trust, analysis of, 29 Trust networks, 29 Tunisia, 60 Turkey, 60, 147 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 176 Tylor, Edward, 84 Uganda, 60 Ukraine, 144, 148 United Kingdom, 113 United Nations, 142 United States, 29, 57, 58, 60, 96, 98, 104, 145, 148, 169 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, 95 Universalizing comparison, 114 University of Michigan, 15 Urban history, 160–170; importance of, 160; and social history, 161–162 U.S. Congress, and human rights, 94 U.S. Department of Defense, 96 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 96 U.S. Department of State, and human rights, 94–95, 102; and terrorism, 94–100, 102, 103 USS Cole, 98 Variation, 121; and urban history, 161–164 Variation-finding comparison, 114–115

Veblen, Thorstein, 191, 192 Vendée civil wars, 100 Verweij, Marco, 196, 197 Vietnam, 60, 73 Violence, and event catalogs, 49, 50. See also Collective violence Virtual Research Associates (VRA) System, 13 Votes and Proceedings of Parliament, 15 VRA System. See Virtual Research Associates System Wachtel, Nathan, 190 Wada, Takeshi, 13, 14–15 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 121, 195 Warner, W. Lloyd, 185 Warsaw Pact, 68 Waxman, Henry, 96 Weber, Max, 7, 56, 60–61, 64, 65, 85, 124, 194, 195 Wellman, Barry, 166 Westphalia, treaties of, 141 White, Harrison, 70, 121, 166 Wilkes, John, 130, 156, 183 William of Orange, 126 Women’s history, 182 World Trade Organization, 86 World War I, 144 World War II, 142, 144–145, 178–179, 185 “Year in Review (Revised)” (U.S. State Department), 96 Yeltsin, Boris, 146, 148 Yemen, 98 Yugoslavia, 113 Zealots, 102, 103, 104 Zelikow, Philip, 96–97 Zimbabwe, 73 Zoroastrianism, 60 Zunz, Olivier, 160–161, 162

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About the author Charles Tilly, Columbia University, is one of the premier sociologists of our time. Among his fifty highly influential books are Contentious Politics (Paradigm 2006) and Trust and Rule (Cambridge University Press 2005). 

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