Author: Sahan S. Karatasli

Featured image: Christopher Columbus statue outside the Minnesota State Capitol, toppled by American Indian Movement members on 10 June 2020. Photo: Tony Webster.

The American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Comparative Historical Sociology (CHS) section has weathered the George Floyd uprising like most other ASA sections: little has changed. Mostly, our predominantly white albeit highly cosmopolitan collective of erudite academicians carried on as usual, with the exception of a statement of support and a symbolic donation to a diversity fellowship. Indeed, we seem to think, little can be expected of us, since we chose to befriend one another and pursue research rather than befriend Jeff Bezos or pursue a progressive legislative career. What power do we have? We have neither plutocracy nor nepotism working in our favor. If we could pull Bezos’s heartstrings or whip Joe Manchin’s vote, the thinking seems to be, we might could do something. But we can’t. Or is it, perhaps, that we won’t?

We have the opportunity to rethink our values, thanks to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others, and to the millions who marched in the streets that their names not be forgotten, that we dismantle the systematic oppression and violence to which Black people are made to suffer. It would be ironic to say the least if the bastion of progressive social scientists that is CHS weathered the George Floyd uprising with composure intact. More ironic still if NASCAR banned Confederate flags at its races and the conservative American Political Science Association scrubbed “Woodrow Wilson” from the name of its top prize all while CHS sat on its laurels. Unless, of course, CHS is already free of racism.

Where are we with racism?

This question began to percolate in the CHS’s leadership Council several months ago after someone observed that a 14^th century scholar penned some politically incorrect lines about Africans’ suitability to slavery. The problem was that the name of that 14^th century scholar, Ibn Khaldun, had been affixed to the section’s top prize, the Ibn Khaldun Distinguished Career Award, as a diversity initiative (Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunisia). The storm was perfect: political correctness faced off against diversity. The 1980s clashed with the 2000s, enveloping the section in near-civil war; recently, with dust beginning to settle, talk of post-conflict reconciliation has ensued.

Curiously, the CHS conflict had nothing to do with the conflict Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd triggered in American society. From CHS’s perspective, the latter conflict—leading to a major debate about defunding the police in order to fund human needs and bolstering a growing consensus that those who perpetrated racial violence are unworthy of commemoration—still seemed to be decades in the future. And from a vantagepoint of the 1980s and 2000s, it was in far off 2020.

This historical vertigo might be expected of other sections, where there is no need to be able to distinguish one epoch from another. It is curious coming from CHS. Why not acknowledge that it is neither the 1980s nor the 2000s anymore?

If this were to happen, we would be faced with a question: Will the remaining statues stay up?

Race, Racism, and Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions

In this essay, I critique Theda Skocpol’s theory of social revolution in an effort to convince you that our statues should not stay up. I focus on Skocpol’s theory of revolutions in part because another of CHS’s prizes—the Dissertation Prize—is currently named after Skocpol but could be named otherwise were we to decide to topple our statues. At first sight, Skocpol’s seminal book might appear to be the last place to look for racism. And yet, with scrutiny, I think it becomes clear that the approach it champions is tacitly racist. This conclusion, in turn, is important not as an indictment of Skocpol, but rather because it suggests that the CHS section is not bereft of racism. It suggests that CHS might be racist without there being racists in the section. 

My point is not that we should ridicule or exclude people whose social science harbors terrible implications. I don’t mean to say Skocpol herself was or is racist, but instead that the approach she advances is an instance of what we might call methodological racism.[1] If we take racism seriously and tell ourselves that it is structural and practiced rather than necessarily individual much less essential, we must also concede that certain approaches, at least when applied to certain topics, may well harbor racist implications without the authors in question necessarily being racists. The racist implications of Skocpol’s approach stem from the way she severs interrelated phenomena, specifies narrow territorial units, and obscures cascading effects.

Skocpol, to refresh your memory, argues that the French, Russian, and Chinese social revolutions were the product of three variables: diplomatic crisis, rigid agrarian structure, and peasant insurgency. Since these countries were enthralled in crisis due to geopolitical turmoil, the result of peasant insurgency amidst rigid agrarian structure was social revolution. Crucially, peasant insurrections did not result when the middle peasantry was either weak or nonexistent, or when the landed elite exercised little influence over the state, as in England, Japan, and Germany/Prussia—the three “negative” cases in Skocpol’s analysis.

Skocpol’s account became canonical. It continues to be one of the greatest books in the social sciences. And we should definitely still read it. But the book, and by association the paradigm it established, has major problems.

Revolution and counterrevolution

Before Skocpol, the foremost thinking about social revolutions was Marxism. Compared to Skocpol, one of the chief characteristics of the Marxist work is the way it conceptualizes revolution and counterrevolution as a single problem. Marx studied these two faces of social revolution through examination of the French 1848 revolution and its “grotesque” aftermath. W. E. B. DuBois did so by examining both radical reconstruction immediately after the American Civil War and the racist backlash that followed. Leon Trotsky did so via study of the Russian Revolution and its “betrayal.” The focus for all three was on processes which were characterized by revolutionary forces on one side and revanchist reaction on the other.

Against this background, Skocpol represented a paradigm shift. The new paradigm focused on explaining the outbreak of revolution as an outcome, an episodic performance that was a priori deemed substantively important as regards after-effects (that is, social revolutions were defined as significant alterations of the state and the class structure rather than studied to discover how significantly these things changed). This separated the study of revolution from the study of counterrevolution. This separation, in turn, gave the new paradigm racist blinders.

Skocpol’s failure to acknowledge the relationship between revolution and racist counterrevolution is especially evident in the way she approaches the German case. She curiously ends her study of Germany/Prussia in the 19^th century, failing to acknowledge the 1919 German Revolution. This obscures not only the German Revolution, but also how it was related to the Nazi counterrevolution. Since counterrevolutions can be gruesomely racist affairs, like Nazism, failing to appreciate counterrevolution can itself be a failure to appreciate race. Insofar as counterrevolution is racist, to ignore counterrevolution is to ignore racism. The separation of revolution from counterrevolution in the paradigm Skocpol inaugurated obscures how the interplay between revolution and counterrevolution relates to race relations.

Colonialism and revolutionary republicanism

Another key feature of Skocpol’s approach is that it considers countries as isolated cases: it separates national territories from their colonial possessions by methodological fiat. One implication is that Skocpol considers the French case in isolation from its colonial possession Haiti, and thus from the Haitian Revolution—which was in many ways an outgrowth of the French Revolution, one with major implications for racial politics in the 19^th and 20^th century Americas. The Haitian Revolution not only established the first Black republic in human history. It also fundamentally shaped the region’s history by inspiring other race revolts: e.g., those led by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, by Denmark Vesey in South Carolina in 1822, and by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831.

The Haitian Revolution also shaped the region’s history by striking fear into the hearts of elites—prompting what amounted to the diffusion of preemptive counterrevolution. This fear reverberated down through the decades, steeling the resolve of the Southern slaveocracy prior to and during the American Civil War, thereby helping to shape that revolution and counterrevolution as well. Nor was its influence limited to North America. Thus, when Spain’s grip on Latin America began to unravel during the early-19^th century, Peru’s creole elites didn’t fight for a republic. They feared, perhaps accurately, that wartime mobilization would inspire an indigenous revolt similar to the Haitian Revolution—and that this would sweep them from the stage of history. (After other Latin American independence leaders defeated the crown they thrust an unwanted republic upon the Peruvian creole elite.) Skocpol’s failure to appreciate the interplay of revolution and counterrevolution and her unwillingness to acknowledge colonial subjects as revolutionary actors amount to racial blinders.

Postrevolutionary states and national liberation

Skocpol’s approach also separates postrevolutionary governments from their contexts and goals, which were intimately informed by racial domination. The Russian and Chinese social revolutions, after surviving counterrevolution and emerging into a world of colonizer and colonized, gave rise to postrevolutionary regimes. One need not glorify the bureaucratic monstrosity that emerged from the combined forces of foreign invasion and domestic reaction in the case of Russia, nor downplay the missed opportunities to unite workers with peasants or the Communists’ disastrous alliance with “progressive” elites in the case of China, to acknowledge that these governments were major catalysts for nationalist revolts across the colonized world, both directly and indirectly.

They catalyzed national liberation in at least four ways. First, postrevolutionary states worked more or less directly with some national liberation leaders, as in Vietnam. Second, postrevolutionary states curtailed global powers’ hegemony in ways that allowed domestic forces to erupt and then align with one or more of these powers, as in Cuba. Third, regimes arising from social revolutions sometimes directly midwifed national liberation revolutions, as with Cuba’s decisive military aid staving off Apartheid South African military forces in Angola. And fourth, the very existence of these postrevolutionary states opened space in the global scheme for a non-aligned status category into which many decolonizing countries flooded during the mid-20^th century.

Skocpol only considers postrevolutionary governments in terms of their domestic implications, as if countries were stand-alone stages upon which revolutionary performances took place. By failing to assess postrevolutionary governments’ international initiatives and effects, the approach obscures most of the revolutions in the non-white world.

Conclusion

Each of these shortcomings stem from Skocpol’s method, according to which revolutions are mere performances, countries are walled-in stages, and we are spectators. These features obscure race: when we see revolutions not as performances but as battles that may be won or lost, we can see that loss may help generate the most gruesome of racist regimes; when we see countries not as isolated stages but as nodes in an interconnected world, we can see them as perpetrators and survivors of colonial subjugation and racial domination; and when we see intellectuals not as spectators who can’t participate because we are neither diplomats nor peasants, but instead as actors, we can see how we might weigh in on historical processes as they unfold. Indeed, we can do this even now by deciding not to continue to idolize, emulate, or praise work with such implications in our section.

Skocpol’s work should be read by all. But as regards the approaches we enthrone, the values implied by those approaches, and the affiliation of prizes with those approaches and values, we should move on. Moreover, if we cease to be spectators, it is possible that our efforts will spread, just as revolutions do. Sparking a revolution would be a noble goal for CHS, something about which we could be proud. For as it stands, even within sociology, other ASA sections continue to have prizes named after racists: the Social Psychology section’s top prize is named after George Herbert Mead, who as Daniel Huebner’s work documents, was a proponent of American colonization of Hawaii. Sociology is not unique among the social sciences, and may even be less terrible than kindred disciplines. But we’re not perfect. We should remove these names from our prizes.

By doing so, perhaps sociology could lead. Perhaps CHS could inspire the social sciences—not least because inspiration is sorely needed. Not long ago, the American Political Science Association gave a prestigious award to David Petraeus. And the namesake of the main fellowship available to fund anthropology graduate students’ fieldwork, Axel Wenner-Grenn, was personal friends with Hermann Göring. Racism runs deep in the social sciences. But it doesn’t have to. One way to break from that past would be to topple the statues. We have nothing to lose but our racism.

Simeon J. Newman is a white, heterosexual male. He was Student Council Representative to CHS during the three years ending in August. His dissertation research is on clientelism in 20^th century Latin America.

[1] Nor did Skocpol have much choice but to employ her approach, embattled as she was by naysaying positivists who all but forced her to champion a method and apply it to her topic, presumably without thinking the implications through.

Simeon J. Newman (University of Michigan)

Stephanie Mudge (University of California, Davis) and Anthony Chen (Northwestern University) recently assumed the editorship of Studies in Historical Sociology, a new book series by Cambridge University Press. Since this development is likely to be of broad interest to historical sociologists, I approached them for an interview. I was interested to know their views about historical sociology in general and their vision for the series in particular. Here’s what they said.

Question: What are your views about the current state of historical sociology? What do you like about it? What trends worry you? 

Mudge: I think historical sociology is doing great — expanding its horizons geographically and temporally, taking up new topics (and old topics in new ways). I’m especially excited about the potential to finally, and hopefully permanently, blur the hard line that is sometimes drawn between quantitative versus qualitative methods in historical research. The trend that worries me, and which I hope this new series will help to address, is the dispersion of works of historical sociology across topical fields, rather than having a shared home for historical sociological work — and, more importantly, a shared conversation.

Chen: I’m greatly heartened by the growing number of talented, young sociologists who are choosing to take a historical approach to their sociological investigations. Giving them a place to publish their best work is definitely one of the key motivations for launching the series.

Question: What do you expect the near future to hold for the field? What kinds of books would you most like to publish? I’m sure you don’t expect submissions to conform to your every wish. But what are your wishes?

Chen: I think we would most like to publish books that make high-quality contributions to historical sociology, broadly conceived. This means, among many other things, books that raise important new questions, books that provide original and compelling evidence of theoretically meaningful claims, books that change our angle of vision on a well-tilled problematic, books that significantly shift the conversation in a certain area of inquiry, or books that introduce innovative theories or concepts that deserve wide exploration. We certainly have our own interests and preferences, and naturally, we would be delighted if books that fit them wind up getting published. But what we care the most about is quality.

Mudge: There are many ways of writing great works of historical sociology. I’m particularly interested in seeing manuscripts that are outstanding in terms of careful, explicit theoretical grounding, and attention to matters of explanation. I also hope to see plenty of submissions that push out historical sociology’s boundaries in terms of topics, time periods, geographies, concepts, and methods. Last but not least, given the crisis-ridden historical moment in which we now find ourselves, I’d love to see work that has the potential to be public-facing — that is, work that can be translated into journalistic formats and op-eds for general audiences, informing contemporary debates about how to think about the past and orient ourselves toward the future.

Question: In recent years, historical sociologists have turned to primary sources much like those with which historians often work. Will this orientation persist? How important do you feel primary sources will be to the historical sociology of the future? 

Chen: I hope that serious research using primary sources is here to stay for the long term in historical sociology. But I wouldn’t want to see it become an object of fetish or a badge of authenticity. Working with primary sources is indispensable to historicizing (by which I roughly mean “placing into historical context”) many different pieces of your analysis, ranging from what you are trying to explain (or interpret) to what you think is propelling the causal or interpretive action. It is essential to reconstructing and setting into spatial and historical context the things specific people said, did, or thought. But it is certainly possible for historical sociologists to gratuitously cite primary sources they don’t need. At the same time, there are plenty of talented and important historians who have done spadework of their own in the primary sources, and historical sociologists risk reinventing the wheel if they fail to become familiar with the relevant historiography before citing everything they found during their plunge into the archives.

Mudge: I’m sure the turn to primary sources will persist, though perhaps in new forms, especially considering the expansion of digital archival resources and materials, new tools for translation, and computational “big data” modes of analysis. I completely agree with Chen that, at the same time, we should be wary of fetishizing primary sources — and in particular “the archive.” History is everywhere around us, and the empirical resources historical sociologists use should reflect that — while always attending, at the same time, to questions of the quality and appropriate use of different kinds of empirical sources. I also think it’s important that historical sociologists recognize the value of existing historical scholarship, across the human sciences — and build on it.

Question: What about comparison? During a previous era, historical sociologists defended the field against naysayers, in part, by asserting that comparison made the enterprise scientific. Few of those naysayers remain vocal, and practitioners seem to oscillate between calling the field “comparative-historical sociology” and just “historical sociology.” Indeed, the word “comparison” doesn’t even feature in the name of the series you’re editing. Is comparison still a good thing? If it is no longer needed to assuage doubts, what, if any, laudable ends does it continue to serve? And how much comparison is too much comparison (and not enough history)? 

Mudge: My feeling on comparison is the same as my broader position on all matters of method: it should be appropriate for the question, and grounded in the history of the subject matter. Comparison is one of the most powerful tools in the historical sociologist’s toolbox, but there’s no use in doing comparison for comparison’s sake. 

Chen: Comparison has a place in the intellectual armamentarium of historical sociology. It’s often a good thing to do; it’s often the right thing to do. But I’m not wedded to a single conception of comparison, and I don’t think it’s the only rigorous method of analysis or the only method of analysis capable of generating high-quality empirical evidence of sociologically meaningful claims. Generally speaking, I think of comparison as a powerful subset of “small-N” approaches that have a strong family resemblance, but to me it is far from the only important family of approaches out there. As for whether comparison serves laudable ends, I think it can serve laudable ends in the same manner that every other analytical approach can serve laudable ends — when it is applied to questions or problems that it is well-suited to addressing. There cannot be, there should not be “one (methodological) ring to rule them all,” in my view. Of course, abjuring Methodenstreit is one way that sociologists signal their intellectual sophistication. That’s not my intent. Our quarrels over method — and epistemology even more fundamentally — continue to recur over the generations, and I don’t see myself operating above the fray any more than anyone else is. I suppose my point is that our ideas about methods and epistemology change dynamically, and our critical appraisal of different investigative approaches (what is strong or weak about them) change dynamically as well. We should lean into these conversations as historical sociologists and then make the best methodological choices we can at the moments we need to make a choice. Right now, for a lot of historical sociologists, some form of comparison continues to make strong sense — and for good reasons.

Question: Will sociology books keep getting shorter? When does a contribution merit 100,000 words, and when does one merit (or suffer from) twice that? Clearly publishers have their preferences. But what considerations would lead you as series editors to recommend that a work go to press with more words (or with fewer)? 

Chen: Books should be as long as they need to be, no longer and no shorter. Of course, it’s easy enough to say that. It can be hard to make a call about length when a decision is needed. That being said, I think authors should be given the length they require to make whatever high-quality contribution they are aiming to make. If they can’t make their high-quality contribution without going longer, then they should go longer. But if they can make their high-quality contribution in 75,000 words, then 75,000 words (or whatever number) is what they should aim for. I am definitely sympathetic to the argument that certain types of high-quality contributions require a great deal of space. For instance, if a manuscript were based on the discovery of several hitherto untapped manuscript collections and if presenting detailed findings from a close reading of these manuscripts were essential to making a strong case, I could see myself recommending more words. At the same time, if multiple passages of a book manuscript strike me as redundant or irrelevant or insignificant, I would be less receptive to raising the word limit. 

Mudge: For me, the key considerations are scope, methods, audience, and the quality of the writing. More words make sense when the writing is well-crafted and the book is ambitious in terms of empirical scope, theory, and methods. Multiple cases, long time periods, multiple forms of evidence, narrative modes of analysis, and highly technical work requiring careful explanation are all good reasons for a slightly longer book — that is, as long as the writing is as clear and tight as possible. Finally, a lengthier book may also make sense when it is oriented toward multiple audiences — that is, multiple disciplinary audiences and/or both academic and public audiences — but, if so, there needs to be a very good road map at the beginning. 

Question: How do you weigh a book’s empirical vs. its theoretical contribution? How much case evidence is too much? And at what point does a theoretical apparatus overpower a historical-sociological contribution?

Mudge: Great works in historical sociology inform our understanding of the unfolding of specific processes, in specific times and places, while also drawing out implications in ways that travel to other processes, times, and places. To me this means that the weight and importance of an empirical contribution depends a great deal on how well the analysis is framed theoretically and, more importantly, whether the theoretical perspective makes the analytical story possible — that is, whether it provides a way of thinking and a conceptual vocabulary that drives the questions asked, the evidence gathered, and the explanations advanced. I think it’s not too hard to tell when theory is doing real work, and when it is not. As regards ‘too much’ case evidence: if a book is tightly formulated, the author’s rules of evidence are clear, and there is evidence that bears clearly and directly on an explanatory argument, then I’m not sure there can be too much.

Chen: It’s definitely the case that books can be too theory-heavy. But it’s also the case that they can be too theory-light. There are so many different types of books, and many different ways to strike a sensible balance. As a general rule, if a book is clearly and compellingly motivated — that is, if a strong intellectual justification for the project is laid out at the outset, it is usually straightforward to identify the right balance between theory and evidence. Often, it’s when the motivation for a book is not clearly formulated or articulated that imbalances crop up. 

Question: Historical sociology is mostly a subtype of political sociology. Assuming you agree, how do you feel about that? Does this represent a strength or a weakness?

Mudge: I think this is broadly true historically, at least in terms of how historical sociologists have tended to define themselves and their subject matter. But there is a great deal of historical work that is not centrally about politics or political institutions — in economic sociology, sociology of science and knowledge, the sociology of race, and cultural sociology, for instance. The human world unfolds in a historical way, and so my position is that historical sociology’s topical net should be cast very widely. I would like to cultivate a series that cuts across topical subfields, showcasing the breadth and strength of historically-minded sociological analysis.

Chen: I agree. I think that historical sociology these days is much more than a subtype of political sociology, although a great many historical sociologists are interested in power and politics. This breadth is a strength. Historical sociologists are free to follow their sociological imaginations and investigate a wide range of outcomes and processes. But this breadth is also a weakness. It can obviously exacerbate some of the centrifugal forces that run through the subfield. We were partly motivated to propose the series in order to counteract these centrifugal forces by establishing a common intellectual venue where the most exciting, agenda-setting books in historical sociology might be published.

Question: Are there major topics that have not featured prominently enough in American historical sociology that you envision entering its purview and becoming major concerns? 

Mudge: I’d frame this a little differently; I’d say that among authors who do historical work, not enough of them identify themselves, specifically, as historical sociologists. I hope that this series provides a space for authors who approach the formulation of questions and the analysis of evidence historically, in a temporally-sensitive way, who might ordinarily consider themselves topical specialists, to situate themselves also under the (hopefully) ever-broadening tent of historical sociology. 

Chen: Not surprisingly, I agree with Mudge. There is important scholarship that not only takes a historicist approach to defining and investigating problems of sociological interest, but also touches directly on the interests and concerns of historical sociologists. In many cases, such scholarship straddles historical sociology and another subfield. Yet it is only faintly identified as historical sociology. We hope the establishment of the Studies in Historical Sociology series gives future authors of such work the intellectual opportunity and professional incentive to engage with historical sociology more fully than they might have had in the past. 

Question: There is sometimes a perception that historical sociology is an elite affair. And yet many of the scholars who had the largest impact on sociology in the past developed theoretical models of processes and outcomes, much as historical sociologists do today. What do you make of this? Is historical sociology a luxury? Is it just rudimentary? Or is it something else altogether?

Mudge: This is such an important conversation to have! If we think history is important for the present, then historical sociology cannot be a luxury; it is essential, and rightfully at the core of the discipline. Whether, why, and to whom it seems inaccessible or closed-off are questions we need to address in conversation, especially, with graduate students and early-career sociologists. The impulse behind the new series is to widen the space for historical-sociological work, to give it a platform and a broad audience — to connect what’s known and knowable about the past with our thinking about the present and future. If, along the way, we’re able to cultivate a conversation about building a renewed, broad-ranging, inclusive historical sociology, I’m all for it. In the meantime, I hope that this series pushes us in the right direction. 

Chen: I agree!