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Historical Methods in the Social Sciences
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Historical Methods in the Social Sciences

Four Volume Set
Edited by:


June 2005 | 1 664 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
Historical methods are at the foundation of research in the social sciences. This synthesizing and integrative project on the methodology of historical social science addresses programmatic objectives, interpretive principles, explanatory logic, and substantive applications to form a unique contribution to the field.

Historical Methods in the Social Sciences offers the broadest disciplinary coverage available - with contributions from prominent historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, economists, psychologists, and philosophers - and also features a deeper and broader interdisciplinary engagement with the most pressing issues of theory and method. By republishing many of the most seminal contributions in the field of historical social science, this four-volume set draws together some of the most illuminating reflections on historical-sociological research practices presently available, and should thus serve as an indispensable scholarly source for all those engaged in this interdisciplinary enterprise.

 
Volume One: Historical Social Science: Presuppositions and Prescriptions
 
Introduction
Towards Integration and Unity in the Human Sciences: The Project of Historical Sociology

 
 
A Classical Exordium
Max Weber
Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences
Karl Marx
Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
 
PART ONE: HISTORY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Fernand Braudel
Unity and Diversity in the Human Sciences
Eric Hobsbawm
From Social History to the History of Society
M M Postan
The Historical Method in Social Science
Philip Abrams
History, Sociology, Historical Sociology
Charles Tilly
Future History
Bernard Cohn
History and Anthropology
The State of Play

 
Clifford Geertz
History and Anthropology
Thorstein Veblen
Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?
Robert Solow
Economic History and Economics
Paul Pierson
Not Just What, but When
Timing and Sequence in Political Processes

 
Frank Manuel
The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History
Alexander Luria
Towards the Problem of the Historical Nature of Psychological Processes
Kenneth Gergen
Social Psychology as History
 
Volume Two: Foundations of Historical-Sociological Inquiry
 
Introduction
The Historicality of Human Social Existence: The Search for a Grounded, Synthesizing Analytics

 
 
PART TWO: Ontology of the Social-Historical
 
Section One: Nominalism, Social Realism and Dialectical Totality
Ernest Gellner
Holism versus Individualism in History and Sociology
J W N Watkins
Historical Explanation in the Social Sciences
Ernest Gellner
Reply to Mr Watkins
Theodore Adorno
Sociology and Empirical Research
Herbert Marcuse
Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism
Peter Berger and Stanley Pullberg
Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness
Paul Ricoeur
Explanation and Understanding
On Some Remarkable Connections among the Theory of the Text, Theory of Action and Theory of History

 
Margaret Archer
Morphogenesis versus Structuration
On Combining Structure and Action

 
William Sewell Jr
Theory of Action, Dialectic and History
Comment on Coleman

 
James Coleman
Actors and Actions in Social History and Social Theory
Reply to Sewell

 
Andrew Abbott
Transcending General Linear Reality
 
Section Two: Temporality and Causality
Jean-Paul Sartre
Temporality
Phenomenology of the Three Temporal Dimensions

 
George Herbert Mead
Time
Fernand Braudel
History and the Social Sciences
The Longue Dur[ac]ee

 

Immanuel Wallerstein
The TimeSpace of World-Systems Analysis
Ronald Aminzade
Historical Sociology and Time
Andrew Abbott
Temporality and Process in Social Life
Michael Scriven
Causes, Connections and Conditions in History
Donald McCloskey
History, Differential Equations and the Problem of Narration
Dietrich Rueschemeyer and John Stephens
Comparing Historical Sequences - A Powerful Tool for Causal Analysis
 
Volume Three: The Logic of Historical-Sociological Inquiry
 
Introduction
Evidence, Interpretation and Explanation in Historical Social Science

 
 
PART THREE: EXPLANATORY DISPUTES AND CHALLENGES
 
Section One: From Laws That 'Cover' to Narratives That 'Bind'?
John Goldthorpe
The Uses of History in Sociology
Reflections on Some Recent Tendencies

 
Joseph M Bryant
Evidence and Explanation in History and Sociology
Critical Reflections on Goldthorpe's Critique of Historical Sociology

 
Nicky Hart
John Goldthorpe and the Relics of Sociology
Nicos Mouzelis
In Defence of 'Grand' Historical Sociology
Michael Mann
In Praise of Macro-Sociology - A Reply to Goldthorpe
Jill Quadagno and Stan Knapp
Have Historical Sociologists Forsaken Theory
David Carr
Narrative and the Real World
An Argument for Continuity

 
 
Section Two: Historical Evidence and the Logic of Hermeneutics
Raymond Aron
Evidence and Inference in History
Vernon K Dibble
Four Types of Inference from Documents to Events
Jennifer Platt
Evidence and Proof in Documentary Research, I and II
Peter Laslett
The Wrong Way through the Telescope
A Note on Literary Evidence in Sociology and in Historical Sociology

 
Alison Wylie
Archaeological Cables and Tacking
Ann Laura Stoler
Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance
 
Section Three: Emplotment, Rhetoric and the Postmodernist Challenge
Roland Barthes
The Discourse of History
Hayden White
The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory
Joseph M Bryant
On Sources and Narratives in Historical Social Science
Raymond Martin
Progress in Historical Studies
 
Volume Four: Social Worlds in Flux: Legacies and Transformations
 
Introduction
Theories and Methods Applied: Research Exemplars in Historical Social Science

 
 
PART FOUR: EXPLICATING THE DIALECTIC OF STRUCTURE, CULTURE AND AGENCY
 
Section One: Origins, Trajectories, Legacies
M I Finley
Technological Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World
Bryan S Turner
Origins and Traditions in Islam and Christianity
Louis Dumont
A Modified View of Our Origins
The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism

 
Timur Kuran
The Islamic Commerical Crisis
Institutional Roots of Economic Underdevelopment in the Middle East

 
Miguel Angel Centeno
Blood and Debt
War and Taxation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

 
Lynn White Jr
The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis
Paul A David
Clio and the Economics of QWERTY
 
Section Two: Conjunctures, Ruptures, Transformations
Alfred Crosby
Conquistador y Pestilencia
The First New World Pandemic and the Fall of the Great Indian Empires

 
Randall Collins
Three Faces of Cruelty
Towards a Comparative Sociology of Violence

 
Steven Shapin
Pump and Circumstance
Robert Boyle's Literary Technology

 
E P Thompson
Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism
Marshall Sahlins
Goodbye to Tristes Tropes
Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History

 
Michael Mann
Were the Perpetrators of Genocide 'Ordinary Men' or 'Real Nazis'? Results from Fifteen Hundred Biographies
Aihwa Ong
The Production of Possession
Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia

 
Frank Pieke
Bureaucracy, Friends and Money
The Growth of Capital Socialism in China