54 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
declaration: “The establishment of the Comparative Method of study has been the greatest
intellectual achievement of our time. It has carried light and order into whole branches of
human knowledge which before were shrouded in darkness and confusion” (Freeman 1873, 1).
Such discussions formed a key background to the Ph.D. training in “historical and political
science” that the new Johns Hopkins University began to offer in the late 1870s. For Woodrow
Wilson, one of that program’s first graduates, the dominance of the “comparative and histori-
cal” method was, as we saw in our epigraph, a given.^4
Among this wave of figures seeking to combine cross-societal comparison with a broad his-
torical perspective, there was, however, significant diversity. For present purposes, two broad
lines of approach may be usefully distinguished. On the one hand, evolutionary positivists, such
as Herbert Spencer, took natural science as an epistemological model. Taking all societies—from
any time and place—as their domain of study, they constructed general types, distinguished evo-
lutionary stages, and sought natural laws of social evolution considered as a progressive whole.
In contrast, developmental historicists, such as Maine, held a more distinctly humanistic concep-
tion of comparative and historical studies. Tending to limit the range of their research, they crafted
synthetic narratives of the origin, diffusion, and development of institutions across selected groups
of historically interconnected societies. This developmental perspective often, in turn, provided
background for practically oriented comparative evaluations of contemporary institutions within
such a group of societies. It was just this blend of cross-societal historical synthesis and practical
evaluation that characterized Wilson’s The State.
Evolutionary positivism and developmental historicism both diffused from Europe to take
solid root in late-nineteenth-century American intellectual life. As such they offer a basic starting
point for understanding how subsequent shifts have successively remade comparative inquiry in
America. Around the turn of the twentieth century, challenges to these two approaches gained
support on both sides of the Atlantic, but the specific agendas that grew at their expense varied. In
America the broad trend up into the 1930s was away from cross-societal syntheses—charged
with being premature at best and lacking adequate factual support—toward primary research
with narrower horizons. Rather than seeking to synthesize such a diverse range of human social
experience, new agendas in America carved that experience up into pieces, each to be made the
object of its own field of detailed empirical inquiry. For example, where historical and practical
inquiry into politics had earlier intertwined in a single conversation, there now emerged two
increasingly separate conversations: “historians” studying the past for its own sake, and “political
scientists” pursuing practically minded studies of present-day issues of governance (Adcock 2003a).
In another fragmentation, “anthropology” and “sociology” became increasingly distinct endeav-
ors as scholars turned away from the search for stages and natural laws of social evolution consid-
ered as a progressive whole. No longer taken as an early stage in a schema of progress, “primitive”
societies were instead to be sympathetically observed in extended detail by anthropologists, while
many sociologists took the social problems and tensions of industrialized society to demarcate
their own distinctive field of detailed empirical study.^5
The decline of developmental historicism and evolutionary positivism was accompanied by
shifts in the practice and conception of comparative and historical method(s). Where the two
earlier conversations approached comparative and historical endeavors as intertwined, the turn of
the century witnessed several examples of the fraying of this intertwining. Thus, among political
scientists, those who persisted in comparative endeavors increasingly focused on the present
day: The developing subfield of “comparative government” was to offer a far less expansive
historical vision than had Wilson’s The State. Another example of this fraying was found in
anthropology, where Franz Boas reconceptualized the “comparative method” of evolutionary