Abstract
What is positivism, again? Depending on one’s own intellectual lineage, the word may imply any of several related practices. For instance, it could invoke Auguste Comte’s or, in a less strict sense, Émile Durkheim’s position that sociology should be in the business of extending scientific rationalism to social explanation. Or, perhaps, for the philosophy nerd, it will summon the early Vienna circle’s “logical positivism,” which demands that all meaning be verified through observation. Or as is often the case in the tremendous edited volume After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology, positivism can refer to a calcified yet widely employed distillation of John Stuart Mill’s approach to comparison, one in which social worlds are reduced to their “fundamental” parts and then compared to identify causal factors between them.
For decades, maturing conversations in historical sociology, social theory, and related fields have joined in critique of positivist approaches to understanding social life. Their issue, however, isn’t usually with Durkheim, Mill, or some member of the Vienna Circle per se. It is rather that, at some (debatable, likely mid-century) point, the positivist impulses of these theorists collapsed into a crude positivist orientation that became pervasive sociological protocol. And this protocol assumed social reality to be a closed system, one ostensibly governed by universal laws that operate the same way, everywhere, every time.
Yet, critics asked, is social reality really a closed system? Is not our understanding of social reality time, space, and concept dependent? Moreover, it’s been decades. Where are these laws? The fact that nobody has yet found any should tell us something. Perhaps, critics said, it should tell us that social worlds are too processual, heterogeneous, and emergent to be reduced to any ahistorical law. Indeed, perhaps positivism should have long ago met its maker.
If positivism is no longer a defendable position, then, what next? This volume emerged out of a very specific conversation about what sociological approaches to comparison should look like, well, after positivism. In a series of meetings between 2016 and 2018, a “Critical Realism and Comparative Methods” working group convened to come to consensus on this question.
Critical realism is itself a meta-philosophy that has gained selective popularity over past decades, one very much designed as an answer to what social and philosophical inquiry should look like once practitioners accept that positivist (and extreme relativist) positions are no longer justifiable. It would be a mistake, nevertheless, to assume that each of the contributors to this volume is a critical realist. Quite the opposite! While I do not know how many contributors attended the meetings out of which this book grew, these 14 chapters make clear that even if critical realism is a defensible guide for navigating the Scylla of positivism (and the Charybdis of relativism), it is not the only guide Circe could have provided.
What holds this volume together is not its origin in critical realism, then, but rather a promising, pluralistic struggle to discern how and why post-positivist sociologists should employ comparative methodology. And I use the word "struggle" here in the best sense of the word. For trying to figure out how we approach history, comparison, and theory without the comfort of positivist assurance is not easy. It is difficult. But it is also necessary, messy, and exciting, just like this volume.
The volume’s opening chapter, by editors Damon Mayrl and Nicholas Hoover Wilson, sets the stage for this struggle, with charm and acumen. Understanding that the post-positivist future is open, perhaps too open to be the basis for a coherent volume, early on they delineate the volume’s purpose. We are told that it will not focus on positivism’s epistemological issues, or issues regarding the ways in which sociological knowledge is too power-laden and subjective to be in any sense universal. Instead, it focuses on overcoming positivism’s ontological problems, or problems associated with the positivist assumption that social reality is a closed system governed by ahistorical laws. This is smart. For in choosing to bracket, yet of course not completely ignore, such epistemic critique concentrates the volume on the question of what post-positivist comparison can look like once researchers abandon their laboratory envy.
And the rest of the volume is likewise engaging. It is also successfully cohesive just as it is successfully many things at once.
It is an elaboration of various routes post-positivist methodologies can muster in order to move beyond what many, though not all, see as antiquated comparative methodologies. Jonah Brundage’s chapter is exceptional in this regard. It argues for a fully historicized explanatory practice, that is, for comparative attention to the variable background ontologies that set the conditions of possibility or plausibility that constrain and enable social processes in the first place.
This volume is also a critical exploration of comparison as a method. For instance, Xiaohong Xu (in whose memory this volume is dedicated) aims to preserve comparison, but not as is. Comparison today, Xu writes, requires a sort of parallax, phenomenological shift in which it is used to challenge received wisdom and reposition our angle to the processes at issue.
After Positivism is also a discussion of how many established sociological concepts remain vague, unspecified, or ignored, and what to do about this situation. Simeon Newman’s chapter builds supple guardrails against the epistemic hazards that often prevent realist research from actually achieving realist knowledge. And Natalie Aviles’s chapter eloquently argues for a greater role for process theories in comparative analysis, in particular those rooted in the evolutionary ecological thinking of the classical pragmatists.
The authors of various chapters, moreover, often reference each other, if they do not always take the same position (cf. chapters by Stefan Bargheer and George Steinmetz, or those by Simeon Newman and Yang Zhang). This is the sign of a useful book whose broad themes are worth thinking with.
Still, much remains unsettled. After Positivism is the embodiment of a conversation in its early days. The editors clearly made a conscious effort to diversify contributors, though future discussion should go further. Many of the post-positivist themes discussed here are established in sociological fields outside of historical sociology, and integrating a broader range of such conversations will render this discussion more approachable to a wider readership. For instance, there is almost no mention of Philip McMichael’s (1990)“incorporating comparison,” a relational world-historical comparative approach familiar to most global development sociologists, sociologists of food and agriculture, and political ecologists. It is furthermore an approach explicitly built through a challenge to positivist comparison, is in active use (in my own work as well as that of others), and was originally published in the American Sociological Review. Yet only Newman refers to it, and in passing.
In addition, considering how a majority of the chapters use Theda Skocpol’s agenda-setting comparative historical work as a foil, a little more contextual understanding of why Skocpol adapted Mill’s presumably positivist comparative methods will be helpful, as would some more nuanced conversation about Mill. As future discussion builds, a more empathetic embrace of the space-, time-, and concept-dependent context of Skocpol and Mill themselves would have the double benefit of, first, better grounding this discussion in the nuances of social science history and, second, reflexively positioning discussion of Skocpol and Mill within the sort of post-positivist principles so persuasively argued for in the volume.
I would finally push future discussion to consider how material process itself might influence comparison. For this volume reads as if the only processes that exist outside our heads are social. Cannot we include environmental, agricultural, and other natural histories as influential, indelible, “real” processes in the social phenomena we seek to compare without slipping into determinism or relativism? Might, for example, incorporating how some ecosystems across the world are now coupled through contemporary patterns of travel and trade help to further break down positivist demarcations between comparative cases, and in new ways?
The future of this conversation is indeed exciting, and After Positivism will remain central. It is a volume with which all sociologists should become familiar. For positivism is still a central perspective for many practicing sociologists, if only as doxa. This volume is one of the best contemporary arguments that all of us, no matter our substantive interests, preferred methods, or favored theories, should continually struggle with how we come to know about the realities we say we know something about.