Comparative Historical Sociology and the State: Problems of Method

In this article, I take issue with the conceptual apparatus and methodological prescriptions of comparative historical sociology. I will suggest that its problematic features are longstanding. In consequence, a dominant tendency of the field – that of returning to the ‘classics’ as a means of overcoming deficiencies found in more recent contributions – has the effect of reinforcing what is problematic. From its inception, for example, the main concern of classical historical sociology, as Shmuel Eisenstadt suggests, was to understand ‘the peculiar “qualitative” and “descriptive” characteristics of pre-modern European and non-European societies in relation to, and especially in contrast with, modern (initially European) societies’ (1974: 225). Thus, for Max Weber, the starting point of what he regarded as ‘European exceptionalism’ led him to examine the specific circumstances associated with Europe, as well as social and economic processes in other parts of the world in terms of their differences from Europe and as obstacles to the development of capitalist modernity in other parts of the world. I have argued elsewhere that the situation is not substantially different in the case of Karl Marx and later Marxist approaches (Bhambra, 2011). In both Weber and Marx, there was little to no consideration of how the already existing historical connections between parts of the world might be implicated in developments that otherwise were perceived as endogenous and independent processes originating in Europe (though, of course, they differed in their accounts of the mechanisms involved). Insofar as each believed modernity to have world historical significance, the global world prior to the diffusion of modernity was argued to have no significance in determining its subsequent form.