GENERALIZATION IN COMPARATIVE AND HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE 51had led me to think that this literature might be the place to go in pursuing my own research
concerns. But auditing lectures in the area failed to excite me, and as I quizzed my friends who
were pursuing physics Ph.D.s about it, I increasingly came to conclude that practicing natural
scientists have little awareness of such philosophy. Judging that natural scientists nevertheless
go about their work just fine without referring to philosophers’ debates about it, I increasingly
found it hard to grasp why I had once thought that the contemporary success of “realists” in the
philosophy of (natural) science would help improve my own thinking about social science.
The fizzling of my interest in the philosophy of science combined with my thoughts on the
origin of many methodological techniques and concepts to support an emerging belief that the
direction from which I wanted to explore “science” and “method” in social science was via the
history of social science. This belief fit well with the attitudes I had developed in my study of
political theory. As I had learned more about the various approaches within that subfield, I had
found myself most attracted to those that came closest in temperament to the work of historians.
This consolidation of a personal preference for a certain way of working with texts was the last
element pushing me to pursue dissertation research on the history of “method” in social science.
My chapter here grows out of that research.
❖❖❖Certainly it does not now have to be
argued that the only thorough method of study
in politics is the comparative and historical.
—Woodrow Wilson (1889, xxxv)In 1889, Woodrow Wilson, one of the first people to hold a Ph.D. in the study of politics from
an American university, published The State, which he took to be the first textbook of “com-
parative politics.” Reading Wilson’s reflections on the book in his preface (1889, xxxiv–xxxvi),
a scholar in today’s field of comparative politics would find key parts of the terminology famil-
iar: Beyond the choice of field label, there is Wilson’s identification of his approach as a “com-
parative and historical” one and of his central object of study as “the State.” Yet, if a scholar
today were to use these terms in the way that Wilson did, colleagues would likely react with
confusion, perhaps even concern. Surface similarities here mask a century of intellectual change
that, for better or worse, has reconfigured the meanings and practices associated with these
terms. For scholars of comparative politics seeking to select and justify an approach for their
research, a glance back to Wilson’s comparative and historical approach does, however, have
its purposes. The contrasts between the practices and aims of Wilson’s approach and those
propounded today under the label of “comparative historical analysis” may serve at minimum
as a reminder that the content of any approach is a contingent product of past legacies, present
contentions, and future hopes.
The construction and elaboration of “comparative historical analysis” as a self-conscious ap-
proach marks one of the more successful intellectual movements within sociology and political
science in recent decades. Pioneers of that movement—such as Theda Skocpol and Dietrich
Rueschemeyer—have recently collaborated with younger scholars trained in the approach—such
as James Mahoney and Paul Pierson—on the edited volume Comparative Historical Analysis in
the Social Sciences (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003a). Its contributors reflect upon the evolu-
tion of their approach over the last three decades, articulate its distinctiveness, defend its meth-
ods, and acclaim its findings. This is a volume liable, I suspect, to leave practicing or aspiring