Causation in Meso-History

1 Goal of paper This paper takes a specific objective: to identify and analyze the methodological and conceptual conditions that are involved in postulating causal relations among meso-historical entities, structures, and processes. What is the nature of the causal relations among structures and entities that make up the social world? What sorts of mechanisms are available to substantiate causal claims such as “population pressure causes technological innovation,” “sharecropping causes technological stagnation in agriculture,” or “limited transport and communication technology causes infeudation of political power”? What are the causal mechanisms through which social practices, ideologies and systems of social belief are transmitted? How are structures and practices instantiated or embodied, and how are they transmitted and maintained? Do causal claims need to be generalizable? How do historians identify and justify causal hypotheses? The general answers I offer flow from a very simple perspective. Social structures and institutions have causal properties and effects that play an important role within historical change (the social causation thesis). They exercise their causal powers through their influence on individual actions, beliefs, values, and choices (the microfoundations thesis). Structures are themselves influenced by individuals, so social causation and agency represent an ongoing iterative process (the agency-structure thesis). And hypotheses concerning social and historical causation can be rigorously formulated, criticized, and defended using a variety of tools: casestudy methodology, comparative study, statistical study, and application of social theory.