The Rise and Domestication of Historical Sociology
The Rise and Domestication of" Historical Sociology Craig Calhoun Historical sociology is not really new, though it has enjoyed a certain vogue in the last twenty years. In fact, historical research and scholarship (including comparative history) was central to the work of many of the founders and forerunners of sociology-most notably Max Weber but also in varying degrees Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Alexis de Tocqueville among others. It was practiced with distinction more recently by sociologists as disparate as George Homans, Robert Merton, Robert Bellah, Seymour Martin Lipset, Charles Tilly, J. A. Banks, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Reinhard Bendix, Barrington Moore, and Neil Smelser. Why then, should historical sociology have seemed both new and controversial in the 1970s and early 1980s? The answer lies less in the work of historical sociologists themselves than in the orthodoxies of mainstream, especially American, sociology of the time. Historical sociologists picked one battle for themselves: they mounted an attack on modernization theory, challenging its unilinear developmental ten- dencies, its problematic histori<:al generalizations and the dominance (at least in much of sociology) of culture and psycllology over political economy. In this attack, the new generation of historical sociologists challenged the most influential of their immediate forebears (and sometimes helped to create the illusion that historical sociology was the novel invention of the younger gener- ation). The other major battle was thrust upon historical sociologists when many leaders of the dominant quantitative, scientistic branch of the discipline dismissed their work as dangerously "idiographic," excessively political, and in any case somehow not quite 'real' sociology. Historical sociology has borne the marks of both battles, and in some sense, like an army always getting ready to fight the last war, it remains unnecessarily preoccupied with them.
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