The Grammar of Time: A Toolbox for Comparative Historical Analysis

ISBN-13: 9781108718233 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023

Markus Kreuzer

Opis

Researchers across the social sciences study a constantly changing world and thus must always consider history. This is the first systematic guide to the tools they employ to explore and answer broad macro-historical questions about the transformations of capitalism, democracy, war, nation states, identities, or pandemics.

Recenzje

'Kreuzer reminds us that doing history is much more than mining data from a more or less remote past to test our hypotheses or establish some causal effect. He offers us a nuanced and thorough guide for how to go about it and, in doing so, he widens our horizons and improves our research.' Stathis N. Kalyvas, Gladstone Professor of Government, University of Oxford

Spis treści

Introduction: how to study a disorderly world in an orderly fashion; Section I. The Temporal foundations of comparative historical analysis; 1. Historical thinking: stop talking about testing for once!; 2. Varieties of historical time: history is not a dummy variable; 3. Physical time: capturing the rhythms of history; Section II. How to use history to describe patterns; 4. A primer on the origins of electoral systems; 5. Eventful analysis: using dates to explore patterns of (dis-) continuities; 6. Longue Durée analysis: looking for serial patterns; 7. Macro-causal analysis: physical time and the temporal construction of theories; Section III. What about causality?; 8. situating comparative historical analysis: heterodox yet still systematic; 9. Historical explanations: making sense of continuities and discontinuities; 10. Causal process tracing: making testing symmetric; Conclusion: different origins and shared complementarities.