Abstract
Historical sociology has not been as global as it might be, instead remaining tied to various forms of state-centrism. This paper explains why and suggests some strategies for redressing the problem. Focusing mostly upon “second wave” historical sociology, it argues that historical sociology’s occlusion of global and transnational forms, dynamics, and processes lies in its analytic infrastructure which analytically bifurcates social relations across space and emphasizes a variable-based causal scientism. Overcoming the occlusion requires rescaling the objects of study and seeking descriptive assemblages of global and transnational forms, dynamics, and processes.
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Notes
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- 2.
On historical sociology’s approach to world-systems and dependency see Adams et al. (2005), pp. 57–58.
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See, for instance, McNeill (1986).
- 4.
And while Tilly places much emphasis on the role of “war-making” for state-making, most of the wars he pinpoints as critical were imperial wars or wars of conquest overseas, occurring this either outside “Europe” or as wars for territory outside “Europe” (see pp. 165–181).
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Part of the problem, of course, is that quantitative data is national, and hence automatically state-centric. But my critique here applies to qualitative work as well.
- 7.
“INUS” refers to “insufficient but non-redundant parts of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the occurrence of the effect” (Mackie, 1988).
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Similarly, many of us in historical sociology are fond of Foucault but we less often imitate his methodological approach. This is an approach that was not about finding causes but rather offering genealogical description, conceptual elaboration (cataloging and describing, for instance, different modalities of power in different historical moments or in different places), or excavating conceptual landscapes (the larger linguistic system in which certain ideas obtain for instance). We all read Foucault but then we go and deploy Popper or Mill (cf. Magubane, 2005). Why? Why not follow Foucault’s own methods and eschew altogether our automatic attachment to causal models?
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, the author thanks Tom Hall, Zine Magubane, George Steinmetz and Ron Aminzade.
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Go, J. (2018). Occluding the Global: Analytic Bifurcation, Causal Scientism, and Alternatives in Historical Sociology. In: Hall, T. (eds) Comparing Globalizations. World-Systems Evolution and Global Futures. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68219-8_7
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