MA Program “Global Sociology: Comparative
Perspectives”.
Faculty of Sociology, St. Petersburg State University.
COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY
Professor Andrey V. Rezaev |
www.rezaev.comparsociology.com
Dear Friends
•
This is a Class of “Comparative Sociology” in MA Program
developed at the Chair of Comparative Sociology, Faculty of
Sociology, St. Petersburg State University.
The Program “Global Sociology: Comparative Perspectives” was
launched back in 2006 and all the Classes are conducted in English.
• The Program has a subtitle: “Comparative Perspectives”. And
this is very important point.
• It also means that our Class is one of the Core Courses in the
Program.
Here
comes
a
SURPRISE…
I want to let you know that HISTORICAL
perspective is CRUCIAL for an exploration of
sociological and comparative visions of a society.
Rationale, Objectives and Goals
• Fall 2011 Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and
Historical Sociology Section Volume 23, No.1
[http://www2.asanet.org/sectionchs/newsletter/SCHSfall2011.pdf]
“All Sociology is Historical and Comparative”
Neil Fligstein, University of California-Berkeley
Neil Fligstein
Chancellor's Professor in UC Berkeley's Department of
Sociology;
Director of the Center for Culture, Organization, and
Politics at the Institute of Industrial Relations
• (2002) The Architecture of Markets: An Economic
Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies
• (1993) The Transformation of Corporate Control
• (1982) Going North: Migration of Blacks and Whites
from the South, 1900-50 (Quantitative studies in
social relations)
Neil Fligstein:
“Historical and comparative sociology is not just
a section, a method, or a set of unconnected
studies that people engage in for obscure
reasons. It should be at the core of how we look
at any social process”.
Neil Fligstein:
“One cannot study social stratification without understanding its
dynamics over time.
One cannot do political sociology without a historical sense of
institutions and the nature of their current crises and how they
are resolved…
Sociology that tries to create understandings of society
without regard to context or history cannot help but
miss what is going on”.
Types of studies used in
sociology
• directly observe people;
• formally ask people questions;
• those that use data (official records, testimonies,
diaries, etc.);
and
• a mixture of data from studies using some or all
of the methods mentioned.
Types of Studies (Methodology)
used in History
• What does, and what can, history as an academic
discipline claim to do?
• Epistemology and memory;
• Causation and narrative;
• Objectivity;
• Historical example and analogy;
• Counterfactual history;
• Global history;
• Advantages and drawbacks of historical
fragmentation.
Marc Bloch
(1886-1944)
French historian, co-founder of the
Annales School of French social history
•
•
•
•
Méthodologie Historique (1988);
Les Rois Thaumaturges (1924), his doctoral dissertation
La Vie d'Outre-tombe du Roi Salomon (1925)
Feudal Society: Vol 1: The Growth of Ties of
Dependence (1989); Feudal Society: Vol 2: Social Classes and
Political Organisation(1989)
•
Apologie pour l'histoire ou Métier d'historien (1949),
translated as The Historian's Craft (1953)
Marc Bloch
APOLOGIE pour L’HISTOIRE ou METIER D’HISTORIEN
(1949)
• «Иногда говорят: «История – это наука о прошлом». На мой взгляд,
это неправильно. Ибо … сама мысль, что прошлое как таковое
способно быть объектом науки, абсурдна. Как можно…сделать
предметом рационального познания феномены, имеющие между
собой лишь то общее, что не современны нам?..(С.16)
• «…История – наука о людях… Это еще очень расплывчато. Надо
добавить: «о людях во времени». Историк не только размышляет о
«человеческом». Среда, в которой его мысль естественно движется, это категория длительности…» (С. 18)
• «Люди больше походят на свое время, чем на своих отцов».(С.23)
(пер. Е.М. Лысенко, М. Наука, 1986 г.)
Maxim Kovalevskiy
(1851-1916)
Needs no Introduction…
•
•
•
•
«Общественный строй Англии в конце средних
веков» (1880)
«Историко-сравнительный метод в
юриспруденции и приемы изучения истории
права» (1880 г)
«Происхождение современной демократии»
(1895—97)
«Очерк происхождения и развития семьи и
собственности» (1939)
Историко-сравнительный метод … есть параллельное
изучение общественной эволюции различных народов,
древних и современных, которое должно, в конечном счете,
дать общую формулу поступательного движения
общественной жизни"
«Очерк происхождения и развития семьи и собственности», 1939 (с. 19)
Craig Calhoun
(@craigjcalhoun)
President of the Social Science Research Council;
Director of NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge;
Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science
•
•
•
•
(2007) Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan
Dream. Routledge.
(2001) Nationalism. Open University Press and University of
Minnesota Press.
(1995) Critical Social Theory. Basil Blackwell.
(1982) The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of
Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution. University
of Chicago Press and Basil Blackwell.
Craig Calhoun,
Why Historical Sociology?
•
•
•
“The compelling reason for the existence of historical sociology is embarrassingly
obvious ... This is the importance of studying social change. (…) (P.383)
“…A second compelling reason … It is a way of dispelling the illusions of false
necessity. Along with comparison, attention to historical specificity is one of the
crucial ways of demonstrating that what happens to be is not what must be…
…A third compelling reason … is nee to grasp analytic categories in the historical
contexts of their production and application. There is no access to past or present
or reality … through categories of thought which are themselves historical
products and results of conscious and unconscious choice, of social as well as
individual selection ... and never more relatively adequate to the pursuit of
knowledge”.(P.384)
Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003 (pp. 383 -395)
Craig Calhoun,
Why Historical Sociology?
•
•
“History and sociology both need historical sociology. It is an indispensable help to
each in counteracting the baneful effects of the Methodenstreit. This German
argument over method … flourished over a hundred years ago, but left an
enduringly problematic heritage. (P.385)
“Historical sociology …stands between the idiographic and the nomothetic in both
history and sociology. As it happens, the label is more commonly used among
sociologists, though the practice clearly includes historians… one of the oddities of
labeling is that ideas of ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ are often used to label opposing
approaches in history, and social history is further divided between a ‘social
science’ variant that is often quantitative and a more interpretative”(P.386)
Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003 (pp. 383 -395)
Craig Calhoun,
Why Historical Sociology?
“Historical sociology is in fact as old as any other sort of sociology. When
Comte coined the word ‘sociology’, and certainly when Durkheim launched
his discipline-forming project in the 1890s, sociology was already in part a
project of historical analysis. Vico, Montesquieu, Ferguson and Tocqueville all
figure even before Marx in his dimension of sociology’s history – and its
history as historical sociology”(P.386)
Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003 (pp. 383 -395)
Craig Calhoun,
Why Historical Sociology?
“…marginalization of historical sociology came from a different quarter. This was the
canonization of ‘classical social theory’ by Talcott Parsons and other, which fixed the
historical concerns of the founding sociologists as theory rather than as themes for
continuing research. Sociologists began to absorb their views of history … from
reading Weber and Durkheim rather than studying history directly, either in primary
source research or in study of the writings of historians. History became a backdrop to
sociology , invoked as part of theory more than the object of research.”(P.387)
Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003 (pp. 383 -395)
• “…One of the results of this was that historical sociology
would re-emerge as a challenge to dominant orthodoxies in
the discipline, commonly supported by Marxists or a
rereading of Weber. It is worth recalling the extent to which
the revitalization of historical sociology in the 1970s grew out
of the politics of the 1960s, and the sense that grand theory
as it then existed wasn’t adequately answering the grand
questions of contemporary world”.
Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003 (pp. 383 -395)
Debate on Comparative Analysis
in the Social Sciences I
The problem of defining cases or units of
comparison:
• How to define cases as the basis of comparative
analysis?
• What constitutes a case? What defines the
boundaries of the case?
• Are cases (however defined) the appropriate
objects of comparative socio-analysis?
Debate on Comparative Analysis
in the Social Sciences II
Classic approaches to comparative sociology
• The logic of comparison developed by John
Stuart Mill;
• The Verstehende comparative practice of Max
Weber;
• Emile Durkheim: “Comparative sociology is not a
particular branch of sociology; it is sociology
itself, in so far as it ceases to be purely
descriptive and aspires to account for facts”.
Debate on Comparative Analysis
in the Social Sciences III
Very general and concise definition of the
comparative analysis:
• “Comparative socio-analysis encompasses a
broad range of practices that focus on the
juxtaposition of cases or aspects of cases to one
another, and the use of either inductive or
deductive logic in relation to those juxtapositions,
either to test theoretically derived hypotheses or
to produce bounded generalizations and “rules
of experience”.”( John R. Hall)
Authors in sociology who did important historical
research and helped to ‘re-vitalize’ sociology as a
historical sociology I:
Neil Smelser;
Phlip Selznick;
Seymour Martin Lipset;
Robert Merton also did it…
Richard Bendix.
Authors in sociology who did important historical
research and helped to ‘re-vitalize’ sociology as a
historical sociology II:
• Barrington Moore “Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy” (1966);
• George Homans
e.g. “English Villagers of the Thirteenth
Century” (1941);
• Charles Tilly “As Sociology Meets History” (1981);
• Immanuel Wallerstein “The Modern World-System”(19742011).
Authors in sociology who did important historical
research and helped to ‘re-vitalize’ sociology as a
historical sociology III:
“Michel Foucalt has been the most important French influence
on historical sociology after the core Annales school. His work is
central to a variety of themes, including….methodologicaltheoretical about continuity and discontinuity in historical
change and the historical specificity and embeddness of
categories of knowledge…”
Craig Calhoun, p. 390.
Authors in sociology who did important historical
research and helped to ‘re-vitalize’ sociology as a
historical sociology IV:
“In Britain, historical sociology … appears largely in the form of
theorization of large-scale historical phenomena: nationalism,
wars, class relations, gender, power. If theory and research had
to be opposed … much of the British writing would look like
theory (or synthesis), not research, to Americans.
Craig Calhoun, p. 391
In Europe: (1) Marxists:
Jurgen Habermas, E.P. Thomson, Eric Hobsbawm
.
Preliminary Conclusions …
Literature:
• Handbook of Historical Sociology, SAGE, 2003
• Vision and Method in Historical Sociolgy
/ edited by Theda Skocpol, Cambridge University Press, 1984
• Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social
Sciences
/ edited by James Mahoney, Dietriech Rueschemeyer, University
of Cambridge, 2003
Comparative Perspectives on U.S. &
European Societies
“At the beginning of the 21st century it had become abundantly clear that
North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan had developed
enormously successful forms of modern capitalist societies: immense wealth,
extensive social security nets …, vastly expanded health care systems and
increased life expectancy, an impressive edifice of education and research
with unparalleled scientific advances across many fields, and a vibrant culture
for creative and performing arts … reaching larger segments of the population
at lower cost and better quality than in any other time in history”.
(Class at the Sociology Department, Berkeley)
Thank You!
I welcome any feedback and I would be very
interested in receiving both specific/narrow
comments as well as a general or more
fundamental critique.
http://comparsociology.com