280 ANALYZING DATA
his own categories and conceptual tools. To the extent that ethnographic analysis tries to simultaneously
highlight both hermeneutic circles under discussion here, it moves closer to the model that I sketch later in
the chapter.- “Structural” prosthetics—those that conceptualize events as occupying relatively determinate posi-
tions relative to other events and institutions and that seek to delineate a kind of transcendental grammar
governing those relations—replicate the problems of the single hermeneutic analyses that emphasize the
scholar’s active interpretive role. “Agentic” prosthetics either operate with a more or less determinate con-
ception of the interests and preferences of social actors, in a neopositivist manner, or replicate the second set
of problems by trying merely to describe what those actors think and do. Both kinds of prosthetic are
certainly available for scholarly use, but neither fulfills the imperative of preserving agency as well as the
“processual/relational” (P.T. Jackson and Nexon 1999) prosthetic on offer here. - “Legitimation” is not the only process that can be conceptualized in this manner, of course;
“routinization” and “institutionalization” have been similarly reconfigured by other scholars. - Technically, what I am proposing here is a relational social constructionism: relational inasmuch as
it analytically privileges “bonds” rather than “essences” and dynamic social ties rather than static social and
constitutive relations (Tilly 1998, 18–22); constructionist inasmuch as it emphasizes contingency rather
than naturalistic inevitability (Hacking 1999, 6–7); and social inasmuch as it focuses on action (behavior
plus meaning) rather than behavior conceptually devoid of meaning (Parsons 1954a, 234–35; M. Weber
1976, 11–12; Ringmar 1996, 66). The extent to which this is a form of “interpretivism” broadly understood
remains, to my mind, an open question, particularly since many forms of interpretivist analysis eschew or at
least minimize causation and causality (Geertz 1973a, 5). - Serious practitioners of these techniques make no such claims. But at the same time they are not as
clear as they might be about the ideal-typical character of their analyses. - Genealogical analysis enjoys a broad and varied history. The procedure was initially pioneered by
Friedrich Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century (Nietzsche 1967) as a critique of the Enlightenment
philosophical project of integrating diverse social phenomena under the banner of Reason centered on the
knowing subject. Genealogical analysis involves, among other things, a suspension of the temptation toward
functionalism and teleological reasoning characteristic of much of classical social thought, and a focus
instead on how the exercise of power affects the subsequent meaning that we assign to some piece of social
life. Michel Foucault refined the procedure in his seminal studies of prisons and sexuality (Foucault 1978,
- and is perhaps the single most important figure in the development of this analytical technique.
- In a sense, “Western Civilization” is the mirror image of what Edward Said calls “orientalism” (Said
1978). Where Said focuses on the “sense” that Europeans made of others, I focus more on the “sense” that
Europeans (and some Americans) made of themselves. - Before it was used in postwar German reconstruction debates, the commonplace was central to the
case for militarism made during World War I, as well as an important component of the interwar effort to
make sense of Germany’s defeat as indicative of a general civilizational crisis (P.T. Jackson 2006, chapter 4). - Somewhat unreflectively, Samuel Huntington (1996) replicates this argument. I would suggest that
the reason why aspects of his book have at least an intuitive plausibility is precisely the fact that it deploys an
existing commonplace—“Western Civilization”—and taps one of its historical potentials. - Although Fritz Ringer (1997, 111–6) provides an excellent discussion of Weber’s strategy of “singu-
lar causal analysis,” his presentation does downplay the extent to which Weber’s delineation of causal mo-
ments is ideal-typical rather than “objective” in a neopositivist sense (Ringer 1997, 70–71) and also
misunderstands what Weber’s treatment does to the traditional notion of “objectivity” (Ringer 1997, 125–
26; cf. Hennis 1988). - As with the delineation of rhetorical commonplaces, this specification of causal mechanisms derives
from my previous work on the subject. Other specifications are of course possible. - “Abendland” is not simply the German word for “West.” There are at least two other terms—“West”
and “Okzident”—that would also serve, so it is significant that Adenauer uses this term and not one of the
available synonyms.