Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons

6. Universalizing Comparisons

6 UNIVERSALIZING COMPARISONS The Decline of Natural History Forthe first half of the twentieth century, social scientists often did their theorizing in the form of standardized "natural histories" of different social phenomena. Individual careers, family lives, communities of a certain type, social movements, revolutions and civilizations all had their own natural histories. The theorist would typically begin with a well-known instance, break the experience of that instance into a sequence of events or a set of stages, then propose the extension of the sequence or stages to many instances-sometimes even to every known instance. The demonstration ofthe theory's validity then consisted of taking up new cases and showing that the course of events within each of them fit into the proposed scheme. The analyst compared the new cases with the old, but not for the purpose of identifying their particularities. On the contrary: The point was to argue their common properties. The natural history involved a primitive but common form of universalizing comparison. Natural history cut a wide swathe through social analysis. Analysts proposed natural histories of delinquent careers, of communities, of social movements. They purported to verify those natural-history 98 UNIVERSALIZING COMPARISONS schemes by showing that the main elements of diverse instances fell into the same sequences. Theories of economic growth and of modernization gave natural history its most prestigious twentieth-century applications. They often took the form of stages: preconditions, takeoff, transition, maturity, and so on. As Sidney Pollard complains: ... we have treated each country like a plant in a separate flower pot, growing independently into a recognizable industrial society according to a genetic code wholly contained in its seed. But this is not how the industrialization of Europe occurred. Rather, it was a single process: the plants had common roots and were subject to a common climate. Further, the development and chronology of the industrial revolution in each area was vitally affected by its place in the general advance, by those ahead of it as well as those trailing behind it, and this relative role must form part of any description or analysis. [Pollard 1973: 637] Alexander Gerschenkron made a daring, influential innovation: He proposed that the tempo and mechanisms of economic growth varied systematically from "early" to "late" developers; the state, for example, appeared to playa larger and more direct part in the accumulation and investment of capital among the latecomers. Gerschenkron did not, however, abandon the idea of a standard sequence. In his natural history, the species evolved in response to a changing environment. Almost inevitably, models of modernization in general commonly appeared in natural-history form: stages, sequences, transitions, growth. Thus Clark Kerr theorized about the "commitment" of industrial workers: ... there is a certain "normal" pattern in the process of commitment of workers to industrial life. Four stages may be distinguished, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that four points may be identified in the continuum of behavioral change which marks the transition of the worker from traditional society to full adherence to the industrial way oflife. These four stages may be designated as follows: (1) the uncommitted worker, (2) the semicommitted worker, (3) the committed worker, and (4) the overcommitted worker. [Kerr 1960: 351] Kerr then built his model as a commentary on the characteristic behavior of workers in each of the four stages. The illustrations did not come from the same workers at different points in their lives, but from THE DECLINE OF NATURAL HISTORY 99 different groups of workers: South African gold miners, bachelor workers in Nairobi, and so forth. Kerr's analysis epitomizes the application of natural history to modernization. Such ideas had two attractions: first, to connect changes in communication, family structure, political activity, and any number of other social phenomena with alterations in production; second, to suggest programs of action-speeding up or guiding the process of modernization. To find natural history credible and useful, one must believe that the social phenomena in question fall into coherent, self-contained clusters; and that change within any particular instance results largely from internal causes. To accept Arnold Toynbee's massive scheme of rise, maturity, and breakdown of civilizations, for example, we must believe that a "civilization" is a self-contained, coherent entity, that each civilization organizes around a fundamental set of values, that people within the civilization gradually exhaust the possibilities within that set of values, and that the exhaustion of...