Historical Sociology
in Scott G. McNall & Gary N. Howe, eds., Current Perspectives in Social Theory. Vol. I. (1980) Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press

Historical Sociology

The article gives a brief history and definition of the field of Historical Sociology. He posits that sociology's shift back towards history is a result of the general dissatisfaction with its developmental models of large-scale social change. Sociology, Tilly writes, is clearly differentiated from history in its reduced dealings with historical text and is instead built upon the abstraction and concretization of history; the abstraction of underlying processes from constraints of time and space and the concretizing of social research by aiming it at observations of visible behavior.