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On Comparative History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Bert F. Hoselitz
Bert F. Hoselitz
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

When John Stuart Mill composed his System of Logic, he maintained that valid application of the comparative method to problems in the moral or social sciences is impossible, or, at best, inadmissible, since it must be based on a priori judgments. Mill founded his objection to the use of this method in social science on two essentially interrelated propositions: the uniqueness of each social event, and the multiplicity and variety of causal factors which may be considered as having a determining influence on these events. Although this conception of the special nature of social events has, on the whole, remained unchanged, social scientists have freely applied the comparative method to the analysis of social problems. History has been outstanding among the social sciences in rejecting longest the application of this method. The main argument against its use was derived from the description of history formulated by Ranke and his school, a description which was endowed with a philosophical underpinning by Windelband and Rickert, who classified sciences according to method into a nomothetic and an ideographic group. History was the ideographic science par excellence, and with the strong historical emphasis that was placed in Germany upon other social sciences as well, there was a tendency to return to the viewpoint of Mill and to regard as scientifically suspect generalizations in social science based on the application of the comparative method.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , January 1957 , pp. 267 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1957

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References

1 Mill, John Stuart, A System of Logic, 8th ed., New York, 1895, pp. 610–13.Google Scholar

2 Bryce, James, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, New York, 1901, pp. 619ff.Google Scholar

3 The classic exposition of the Rickert-Windelband thesis is contained in Rickert, Heinrich, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, 5th ed., Tübingen, 1929Google Scholar, and idem, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, 3rd ed., Tübingen, 1915. This position is ably summarized by Mandelbaum, Maurice, The Problem of Historical Knowledge, New York, 1938, pp. 119–47.Google Scholar Lamprecht's position is expressed in his work, What Is History?, New York, 1905. The philosophical background of his theory is expounded by Rothacker, Erich, Ueber die Mōglichkeit und den Ertrag einer genetischen Geschichtsschreibung im Sinne Karl Lamprechts, Tübingen, 1911.Google Scholar Cf. also Thompson, James W., A History of Historical Writing, New York, 1942, 11, pp. 422–28.Google Scholar

4 Only two of these essays have appeared in English translation, in Weber, Max, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. by Shils, E. A. and Finch, H. A., Glencoe, Ill., 1949.Google Scholar These two studies are “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” and “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences.” The third essay, “Roscher und Knies und die logischen Probleme der historischen Nationalökonomie,” appeared first in three installments in Schmollers Jahrbücher, Vols. 27, 29, and 30, and is reprinted in Weber, Max, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, Tübingen, 1922.Google Scholar

5 Cf. Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, VI (1953–1954), Nos. 2 and 3; Steward, Julian H., ed., Irrigation Civilizations: A Comparative Study, Washington, D.C., 1955Google Scholar; Société Jean Bodin pour l'histoire comparée, Receuils, Vols, I-VII, Brussels, 1936–1956.

6 Wright, Quincy, A Study of War, 2 vols., Chicago, 1942Google Scholar; and Schumpeter, Joseph, Imperialism and Social Classes, New York, 1955.Google Scholar

7 See, for example, appendices XIV, XV, and XVI in Vol. I, but also chapter 15 (pp. 372–405) in the same volume.

8 See Bloch, Marc, La Société féodale, Paris, 1940, 11, pp. 241ff.Google Scholar

9 Cf. Weber, Max, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 50–112Google Scholar, esp. pp. 94–105.

10 I do not wish to deny that the conception of feudalism as a predominantly or exclusively political phenomenon, from which certain social and economic consequences may be derived, has a very respectable ancestry. I believe that the main protagonists of this idea were the German legal historians and those influenced by them. For example, Pollock, Frederick and Maitland, F. W. (The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, Cambridge, Eng., 1898, 1, pp. 66ff.)Google Scholar tend to favor this interpretation, and it can also be found in numerous German writings on the feudal period. It is clearly marked in as recent a book as the last (fourth) edition of Mitteis, Heinrich, Der Staat des hohen Mittelalters, Weimar, 1953Google Scholar, passim. I believe that this conception of feudalism is antiquated. Its adequacy was questioned even in Germany by such men as Alfons Dopsch and Georg V. Below. In France it began to be abandoned when Joseph Calmette published La Société féodale (Paris, 1923), and it received its final blow in die brilliant work of Marc Bloch. In England the old interpretation also has been replaced, and Stenton, F. M. in The First Century of English Feudalism (Oxford, 1932)Google Scholar treats feudalism as a social system radier than as a form of political organization. I am persuaded mat a survey of the literature on feudalism, especially in English and French works of the last twenty years, will show a predominant interpretation of feudalism as a social, rather than a governmental, system.

11 Ostrogorskij, George, Pour l'histoire de la féodalité byzantine, Brussels, 1954, esp. pp. 9–258.Google Scholar

12 Cf. Bloch, , op. cit., 1, pp. 289ff.Google Scholar

13 Schumpeter, , op. cit., pp. 5 and 7.Google Scholar (All references to this work are to the paperbound edition in Meridian Books, New York, 1955.)

14 Ibid., p. 25.

15 In spite of the extended dispute over methodology in history and social science and the boundary between these disciplines, as well as the precise nature of cultural history (Kulturgeschichte), which clutters up the pages of German journals in social science and German doctoral dissertations, the problem has apparently not been definitely solved. One result appears to be that cultural history or history of civilization tends to be regarded as a special field in German and also Dutch scholarship. For example, the editors of the Collected Works of the Dutch historian Jan Huizinga divide his essays between the fields of “general history” and “cultural history.” Another symptom of this uncertainty of the proper place of cultural history is a work by Weber, Alfred, Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie (Munich, 1951)Google Scholar, which is intended by him to be a contribution to sociology, but which most American social scientists would doubtless regard as a work in history.

16 Brinton, Crane, The Anatomy of Revolution, New York, 1952, p. 27.Google Scholar