GENERALIZATION IN COMPARATIVE AND HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE 53She gave the phrase currency as a label for the blend of practices, and ways of thinking about
those practices, that she crafted in the work that led up to her 1979 book States and Social Revo-
lutions. While drawing significantly on other scholars, Skocpol combined and reshaped the ideas
and exemplars that they offered. However, rather than proclaiming its novelty, Skocpol presented
“comparative historical analysis” as having “a long and distinguished pedigree” going back to
canonized figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville (Skocpol 1979, 36). The approach as it has devel-
oped in recent decades is indebted to her, not only with regard to its name, practices, and method-
ological self-reflections, but also for its self-image regarding how it stands in relation to the
intellectual past.
This image is well expressed by the brief positioning sketch with which Mahoney and
Rueschemeyer open their introduction to Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences.
This sketch has two key elements. First, it asserts the “long and distinguished history” of their
approach: Comparative historical analysis is portrayed as central to the work of “the founders of
modern social science” (the named exemplars here are Adam Smith, de Tocqueville, and Marx),
and as retaining “a leading position” when “social science began to organize itself into separate
disciplines in the early twentieth century” (the exemplars here are Otto Hintze, Max Weber, and
Marc Bloch). Second, it offers a subsequent trajectory of decline and revival: Comparative his-
torical analysis is portrayed as entering relative “eclipse” by the mid-twentieth century, to the
point of being threatened with “permanent decline,” but that “neglect” has given way in “recent
decades” to “a dramatic reemergence” in which “this mode of investigation has reasserted itself at
the center of today’s social sciences” (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003b, 3).
As with many sketches of the intellectual past offered by social scientists advancing their con-
temporary agendas, this sketch offers an image that is somewhat simplistic. Comparative historical
analysis is dubiously aggrandized by its narration as the revival of a classic tradition peopled by a
few European intellectuals. This narration provides one recent strand of American social science
with illustrious predecessors, while bypassing inquiry into how the practices and aims of the con-
temporary approach might differ from those of the European figures invoked, or whether other
past figures and developments, perhaps even some American ones, might not be more relevant for
understanding its intellectual roots. Although Mahoney and Rueschemeyer favor a narrow vision
of comparative historical analysis when distinguishing it from other approaches within contempo-
rary comparative social science, when sketching predecessors their vision jumps over major dif-
ferences. Exploring the genealogy of their approach with the same sensitivity for distinctiveness
that they apply in dealing with the present yields a different sort of history.
Mahoney and Rueschemeyer’s sketch overlooks a wide wave of mid-nineteenth-century
conversations that articulated and implemented the belief that a combination of cross-societal
comparison and broad historical perspective is the best approach to social science.^3 Exempli-
fied in the diverse work of such European figures as Auguste Comte, Sir Henry Maine, and
Johann Bluntschli, these conversations diffused to America, where they had a vital impact on
the shape the social sciences assumed during the expansion and transformation of the Ameri-
can academy in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Telling histories and making
comparisons were not, of course, wholly new activities at this time, but the participants in these
conversations saw themselves as practicing new, more scientific methods of pursuing them.
They spoke with pride of their “comparative method,” their “historical method,” or their “com-
parative and historical method.” They believed, moreover, that methodological advance was
producing major intellectual progress. The English scholar Edward Freeman, who coined “com-
parative politics” as a name for the field of inquiry applying the “Comparative Method” to
matters political, exemplified this excited belief. His lectures on the field opened with a ringing