GENERALIZATION IN COMPARATIVE AND HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE 57practices. Second, it is contended that qualitative cross-societal inquiry can achieve the standards
of this model as well or better than alternative approaches. This is combined with a not-so-subtle
hint that other approaches, caught in a narrow empiricist interpretation of how to pursue this
model, can lose sight of what is really interesting. Third, it is held that scientific success rests here
upon the use of a conceptual scheme that focuses attention onto the factors most crucial for the
building of theory. In sum, while endorsing much of the view of science that the statistical tradi-
tion had crafted in connection with its promotion of new techniques, this stance reconfigures that
view by holding that its conception of scientific rigor can also be achieved via, and indeed even
requires, the crafting and use of a carefully refined, general theoretical scheme.
The overlaps and divergences between Parsons and the statistical tradition outline the main
varieties of the modernist self-understandings that dominated the post–World War II wave of
cross-societal inquiry. The shared epistemological standpoint of these understandings did not end
debates over method; but it channeled them into contention around how best to produce knowl-
edge of a modernist form that was presupposed to be the “scientific” ideal. Expressions of dissent
from the ascendant modernism of the 1950s and 1960s can be found in the work of some indi-
viduals (for example, Mills 1959; Moore 1958), but it was only in the 1970s that such dissent
would develop into shared new agendas within comparative studies. Those agendas were, how-
ever, far from being of one piece: Although some would chart a path beyond modernism, others
domesticated earlier lines of dissent into the more contained endeavor of adding new options to
the menu of modernist inquiry.
COMPARISON, HISTORY, AND THE PURSUIT OF THE “GENERAL”
IN POST-PARSONIAN SOCIAL SCIENCE
The golden age (or perhaps it was only the brass) of the social sciences when, whatever
the differences in theoretical positions and empirical claims, the basic goal of the
enterprise was universally agreed upon—to find out the dynamics of collective life and
alter them in desired directions—has clearly passed.
—Clifford Geertz (1983, 34)The leading agendas of comparative inquiry in the 1950s and 1960s testify to the ascendance of
modernist social science, as variously interpreted by proponents of statistical analysis and by
scholars emphasizing refined theorizing as a source of rigor. Viewed against this background of
contained contention, studies from the 1970s appear marked by new departures in two different
directions. Some scholars rejected the modernist standpoint: a shift exemplified by the rejection
of the “experimental science” model in the opening essay of Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures
(1973a, 5). Rejection of that model, and of the belief in the methodological unity of the natural
and social sciences it embodied, was a basic starting point for the endeavor of interpretive social
science,^11 articulated perhaps most influentially by Geertz. Other new departures were marked, in
contrast, by their continuing reliance upon a modernist standpoint. Pioneers of new modernist
approaches—such as Skocpol (1979) for comparative historical analysis and Popkin (1979) for
rational choice—crafted novel ways to pursue knowledge with the same basic epistemological
form as that sought by the mainstream of prior decades. Alongside these departures, the cross-
national statistical tradition held its ground, though losing some of the excitement it had held in
the 1960s. However, the Parsonian agenda of studies conducted in the framework of a refined
theoretical scheme of systems and functions declined noticeably. This panorama of comparative
inquiry moving into its post-Parsonian period offers us a context of intellectual legacies and con-