56 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
the modernist vision to their self-image as scientists unconvincing. The threat was more pressing,
however, for the few scholars still pursuing projects of cross-societal inquiry. Lacking the cre-
dentials to “rigor” that case study and fieldwork practitioners could locate in the careful design
and practice of primary data gathering, they reacted to new views of scientific method in either of
two ways:^9 1) rejection in favor of views reminiscent of the nineteenth century; 2) endorsement
combined with efforts to bring their comparative endeavor up to modernist standards. These two
were not, however, to remain the only responses in the decades ahead.
When we turn from the interwar to the post–World War II period, we find another shift of
terrain. As the aftermath of World War II unfolded into the cold war and European decolonization,
cross-societal studies acquired attention among American social scientists to an extent they had
not enjoyed for decades. High student interest mixed with generous government and foundation
funding in the 1950s and 1960s to fuel a burgeoning wave of such studies. These circumstances
alone, however, do not account for the confident “scientific” self-understanding that dominated
this wave of inquiry. This self-understanding extended beyond the growing large ‘n’ statistical
tradition, exemplified by such projects as A Cross-Polity Survey (Banks and Textor 1963) and the
World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (Russett et al. 1964). It also permeated studies
largely or entirely qualitative in character and studying a small number of societies, or even just
one, in a cross-societal perspective. Scientific confidence here drew on a third response to the
view of science promoted by modernist epistemology. This response blended partial endorse-
ment with partial reconfiguration. It accepted the belief that a reconstructed logic of experiments
could and should provide the model for all scientific inquiry. But, the promotion of statistical
analysis that had accompanied this belief was supplanted by arguments holding that, at least
under current conditions in the social sciences, non-statistical studies could also constitute cut-
ting-edge exemplars of “science.”
A leading role in shaping this reconfigured variant of modernism was played by Talcott Par-
sons. He combined a sweeping image of the evolution of social science, reconstructions of the
work of selected earlier scholars, and a specific line of argument as to how non-statistical, cross-
societal inquiry could constitute rigorous science. The image of convergence was central to his
project. Its use extended beyond his famous vision of a modern social theory born out of a turn-
of-the-century convergence between grand European traditions (Parsons 1937). It also framed
an ideal of social science in which refined theory and empirical research come together as
mutually supportive partners. Parsons singled out the “broad comparative treatment of total
social systems and of large-scale societies” as leading the way toward this convergence (1954a,
12–13).^10 In doing so, he offered a noteworthy framing of the logic of Weber’s comparative
sociology of religion:[B]y the use of the comparative method on the broadest scale, Weber was carrying on em-
pirical research which came closer to the logic of the crucial experiment than was the case
for the work of almost any of the “empirical” sociologists whose coverage of the suppos-
edly important facts of an empirical field was often much more “adequate” than his. The
essential point is that the very breadth of the range Weber covered gave him, since he had a
fruitful conceptual scheme, the opportunity to select out what for him were the theoretically
crucial considerations of fact. (1954a, 15–16, italics in original)This framing incorporates several key moves characteristic of the reconfigured modernist stance
that Parsons helped to formulate and promulgate. First, it is accepted that an idealized logic of
experimental inquiry provides the epistemological model against which to assess social science