GENERALIZATION IN COMPARATIVE AND HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE 61for gaining an understanding of such complexes. Their endeavor to interpret meanings involves
attending, on the one hand, to the material, social, and cultural setting(s) of those whose meanings
they are; and, on the other hand, to the actions through which these settings are made, remade,
and sometimes transformed. For interpretive scholars, sensitivity to context involves following
through a complex of meaning, setting, and action as it develops in a specific time and place. It is
a conception of “context” that diverges markedly from that held by comparative historical ana-
lysts. No judgment in favor of one or the other is needed to recognize that, to an interpretive
scholar, the claim that a work such as Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions is sensitive to
context may appear confusing or even mistaken.
Interpretive social science is usually, and correctly, associated with situated efforts to under-
stand the meaningful character that action has for those whose action it is: the characteristic
question in such scholarship is, “What do, or did, these people believe themselves to be doing?”
Interpretive scholars do not, however, all conceive of the character or purpose of these efforts in
the same way. Efforts to understand particular viewpoints might, for example, be seen as an end
in themselves, or they may be seen as serving a kind of political/moral engagement that centers
on giving voice to marginalized, subaltern viewpoints. Alternatively, some scholars subsume
efforts to understand particular viewpoints as an important, but not the only, component of an
endeavor to fashion accounts that locate such viewpoints in a broader perspective. Geertz is spe-
cifically concerned with this last endeavor when he differentiates between experience-near and
experience-distant concepts. In doing so, he does not seek to promote one type of concept over
the other, but to explain that, in his efforts to understand concepts that are experience-near for
those he studies, his larger goal is to grasp such concepts “well enough to place them in illuminat-
ing connection with experience-distant concepts theorists have fashioned to capture the general
features of social life” (1983, 57–58).
Geertz’s talk of the “general” here is far from tangential. It flags a concern that is basic to his
scholarship and that makes his works prominent examples of a strand of interpretive social sci-
ence marked off by its practitioners’ endeavors to locate particular viewpoints in more general
perspective. This strand encompasses, though it is not restricted to, interpretive studies that use
macro-societal comparisons, such as Reinhard Bendix’s Kings or People (1978) and several of
Geertz’s studies (1968; 1983, chapters 6, 8; 1995, chapter 2). The use of this form of comparison
makes such works a significant point of reference for comparative historical analysts, who locate
the distinctiveness of their own use of macro-societal comparison in terms of a focus on “macro-
causal analysis” absent from the work of Bendix and Geertz (Skocpol and Somers 1980; Skocpol
1984). There is indeed a significant contrast here, and in revisiting it below I am not concerned to
reject it, but to consider how it looks from another point of view. In reflecting on certain charac-
teristics of the approach of Bendix and Geertz,^15 my aim is not, however, simply to further eluci-
date this contrast. By drawing out these characteristics, I also hope to illuminate more broadly
two ways in which interpretive social scientists may employ a comparative and historical stance
in order to locate particular viewpoints in more general perspective, regardless of whether or not
they specifically deploy a macro-societal lens in doing so.
Comparative historical analysts draw on a number of presuppositions when, to contrast their
approach with that of Geertz and Bendix, they emphasize their own concern with macro-causal
analysis. First, they presuppose that there are such things as macro causes; second, that the action
of these causes can be represented in the form of modernist propositions about recurring relation-
ships; and, third, that such generalizing propositions can be both carefully formulated and thor-
oughly evaluated using their own, primarily qualitative approach. The macro-causal inquiry that
rests upon these presuppositions treats cross-societal comparison as a way to identify and probe