In this essay, taking as a case study the comparative history of the two groups that gave absolute idealism a leading edge in late nineteenth-century intellectual debate in the United States and Great Britain, I attempt to make a contribution to the recent trend toward the use of sophisticated or “difficult” ideas in comparative analysis (see Moore, 1979). My intentions are twofold: (1) to assist in the clarification of how “social theory” is developed, and (2) to provide an outline of how such comparative cultural analysis can be achieved. After a preliminary discussion of the concept of “social theory” and the component parts into which it can be separated, I proceed to identify the two groups in question, locate their philosophical schemes in the development of contemporary thought, and finally, attempt to demonstrate the value of the approach in an analysis of one aspect of their specifically social and political theories.

The settlement of Tennessee and Kentucky in the decades before and after statehood can be thought of as displaying great inequality. Large tracts owned by nonresidents contrasted with those of rather uniform size held by resident settlers. The fact, however, that at least a minor portion of settlers were tenants can distort this view. The very presence of the poor leads to the suspicion that relative inequality among settlers may have been rather great, whether or not unoccupied holdings of nonresidents are considered. A clear understanding of the concept of a proper statistical distribution of holdings and a study of the available evidence can add meaning to land settlement at the end of the eighteenth century.

Many theories of demographic transition stem from attempts to explain fertility differentials across economic and social groups. These differentials typically emerge once a decline in natality commences. Thus it is commonly observed that the fertility of urban populations falls short of that recorded for agricultural districts, that the upper classes tend to precede the working classes in the adaptation of family limitation, and the like. These observations are, in turn, used to justify economic and sociological theories which, by associating both social status and economic costs and benefits with occupation and residence, account for the fertility decline in terms of status and constrained choice.

As recently as a decade ago, an authoritative introduction to computing for historians recommended an approach which essentially employed the computer as a rigid, if very large, tabulator. Edward Shorter’s The Historian and the Computer (1971) described how to reduce complex information to simple fixed-choice codes, transfer the coded data to punched cards, read the cards into fixed-format package programs, and prepare large tabulations or statistical analyses from the data. Shorter’s advice made sense: it encouraged historians who knew little about computers or quantification to move ahead, and enabled them to produce useful results without becoming programmers. During the 1970s, however, three important changes in computing made the sturdy old procedures obsolete. The first change was the increasing availability of flexible, inexpensive microprocessors—small machines with memories as big as many large computers of the 1960s, which would operate by themselves or in conjunction with powerful central computers, which came with a great variety of prepared programs, and which would serve for the entry, transmission, storage, editing, manipulation, analysis, and presentation of many different sorts of information, including ordinary words. The second change was the improvement of interactive computing, in which a relatively inexperienced analyst could carry on a prompted “conversation” with a sophisticated machine while searching or analyzing a complex machinereadable file. The third was the development of data base management systems which, from the user’s point of view, greatly simplified the storage and manipulation of large bodies of machine-readable evidence.