52 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
interpretivists ill at ease. The volume’s claims as to the need for historical perspective and sensi-
tivity to context will appear familiar. But interpretive social scientists are unlikely to share the
conceptions of theory and causal analysis deployed to articulate the aims of comparative histori-
cal analysis, nor are they likely to endorse the accompanying efforts to show that this approach
can pursue these aims in as systematic and rigorous a fashion as statistical research or formal
modeling. Some interpretivist readers, perhaps eager for allies, might ponder discounting these
aspects of the volume as strategic rhetoric. But they will likely be disabused of that idea when
they find its editors framing “the kind of research considered in this volume” in an explicit con-
trast with “‘interpretive’ approaches aimed at uncovering the culturally situated meanings of
human behavior” (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003b, 11).
Interpretive scholars might respond to this contrast in any of a number of ways. A key decision
is whether to promote, instead, a broader notion of “comparative historical analysis” that would
also encompass interpretive studies with a comparative and historical bent. This chapter is pre-
mised on the belief that there are important differences here, which should be made more, not
less, explicit. Instead of calling for a more inclusive conception, I seek to explicate “comparative
historical analysis” as articulated by its proponents and use it as a point of contrast against which
to highlight characteristics of an alternative, interpretive approach to comparative and historical
social science. In characterizing and contrasting these two approaches, my most important goal is
to suggest that a key difference between them centers not upon their accepting or rejecting efforts
to see particular developments in a more “general” perspective, but upon how they conceive of
the kind of knowledge that such “generalization” sets out to construct. To recognize this differ-
ence is not, in itself, to endorse one approach over the other, but rather to recognize grounds upon
which scholars may select between them in better accord with their own contingent beliefs as to
the kind of knowledge they hope to construct by doing “social science.”
This chapter proceeds in two parts. In the first, I sketch some broader trajectories and turning
points in the evolution of comparative and historical inquiry within the American social sciences.
This material helps me, in the chapter’s second part, to characterize the two contemporary ap-
proaches of concern and to do so in a way that situates them historically. My historical sketch,
which moves from the era of Woodrow Wilson’s The State up into the 1970s, is crafted with a
“genealogical” temperament: I narrate its subject matter as a series of contingent shifts that do not
sum up to any overarching direction of “progress” (or “decline”). In these shifts various ap-
proaches ebb and flow, and although later approaches may inherit legacies from earlier ones, they
do not clearly “build” upon or “progress” beyond them. There are, of course, other ways to
plausibly narrate the evolution of comparative and historical social science, and in adopting a
genealogical perspective I have had certain concerns in mind. From this perspective, contempo-
rary approaches to comparative and historical social science appear as the contingent outcomes of
a succession of events that lack the internal logic of intellectual “progress” that could justify an
approach on account of its having prevailed in the course of this succession. Genealogy thereby
encourages us to view judgments as to the merits of preserving, remaking, or rejecting an ap-
proach as contingent choices that should rest upon recognizing and evaluating, rather than over-
looking or hastily dismissing, possible alternatives, even when, and perhaps especially when, that
approach has been favored by some of a field’s more successful scholars.^1BEFORE “COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL ANALYSIS”As the self-selected label of a consciously distinctive approach, “comparative historical analysis”
is a product of the mid- to late 1970s.^2 The lead figure in this development was Theda Skocpol.