Historical Sociology
in International Encyclopedia of the Behavioral and Social Sciences (2001) Amsterdam: Elsevier. Vol. 10, 6753-6757

Historical Sociology

The article provides an overview of the subfield of Historical Sociology which he parses into four intellectual pursuits. The first pursuit is social criticism which aims to reconstruct of the past on the way to informing human choices in the present and future. The second pursuit, pattern identification, aims to discover the necessary and sufficient conditions for large recurrent social transformations. The third pursuit is scope extension which aims to either apply techniques or models of current life to historical situations, or use historical evidence to challenge contemporary sociological thought. The fourth pursuit, process analysis, aims to examine how social interactions impinge on each other in time and space, where time and space are considered defining causes of social processes, rather than simply additional variables.