After positivism: New approaches to comparison in historical sociology. By Nicholas HooverWilson, DamonMayrl (Eds.), New York: Columbia University Press. 2024

What is the role of comparison in historical sociology? How can, or should, researchers make comparisons if they do not subscribe to positivist ontologies, epistemologies and procedures? These are the central questions posed by Nicholas Wilson and Damon Mayrl in their edited collection, After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology. The main purpose of After Positivism is to disassemble and then reconstruct the relationship between ‘historical’ and ‘comparative’ in comparative historical sociological work. As Wilson and Mayrl point out in a wide-ranging, insightful introductory chapter, the fusion of ‘historical’ with ‘comparative’ to form ‘historical-comparative’ is a product of disciplinary developments rather than a substantive requirement. This is even more the case when it comes to the use of particular forms of positivism, often derived from John Stuart Mill's work, through which ‘historical-comparative’ work has been operationalised by historical sociologists. Once this dual move (the fusion of ‘historical’ with ‘comparative’ to form ‘historical comparative’, and the rendering of this fusion as positivist) is disturbed, then a range of alternative possibilities open-up. After Positivism provides a considered, clear critique of positivism—the attempt to unify the natural and social sciences through common procedures, most notably forms of experimentalism that aim to find constant conjunctures between variables. For positivists, these invariant causal regularities contain distinct attributes that are independent of researchers, making it possible to compare entities across time and place. The problem with this view, Wilson and Mayrl argue, is that the social world is not static and fixed, but open and dynamic—social forms emerge, are reproduced, contested and transformed. This makes events interdependent rather than independent. At the same time, because the social world is bound-up with meaning-making processes, social forms are intimately connected to positionalities of various kinds—actors, agents and objects of enquiry are bound up in a reflexive, relational dance. It follows that researchers need alternative views of causation and methodologies that can sustain non- or post-positivist understandings of social processes. This view presents a problem for comparatists because their work is often thought to rely on the assumption of static ‘things’ (societies, economies, genders, states, revolutions, empires, and so on) that contain distinct properties (class structures, developmental trajectories, patriarchal hierarchies, coercive apparatuses, violence, extraction, etc.). Mayrl, Wilson and their collaborators argue that seeing the social world as on the move, and bound up with contextual practices of meaning-making, does not mean giving up on comparison. Rather, comparison is a creative practice that gains its utility through the elaboration of causal mechanisms (i.e., patterns drawn from substantive enquiry) that are, at least potentially, portable across a range of settings. After Positivism is divided into three parts: ‘what to compare’, ‘why compare’, and ‘how to compare’. Each section, and the chapters within them, are united more by what they are against (positivist comparative-historical sociology) than what they are for. This is by design. As Philip Gorski explains in his useful Afterword, the foundations of the book lie in a range of meetings intended to deepen the place of critical realism within US Sociology. Over time, the tightness of the project was loosened. As a result, After Positivism follows Gorski's ambition that ‘Many things go!’. Wilson and Mayrl do not set out a specific framework or strategy for contributors to follow; rather, they provide an opening for diverse ways of conducting postpositivist comparative-historical sociology. Each of the chapters builds on this opening, whether via metatheoretical work, theory-building or an attentiveness to methodological procedures. Some apply these moves to substantive issue-areas. This ‘many things go’ approach meant that I sometimes wondered what an aspiring postpositivist historical sociologist was meant to do with this volume. Take the chapters that make up the first part of the book. In the contribution by Stefan Bargheer, readers are asked to pull apart the terms ‘comparative’, ‘historical’ and ‘qualitative’ rather than see them as necessarily connected. Daryl Mayrl's chapter argues that making comparisons is a creative, ‘facilitative heuristic’ through which researchers, bound up with ‘immersion and recursion’ learn to ‘see things differently’. For Mayrl, logics of discovery and verification go hand-in-hand. The late Xiaohung Xu's stimulating contribution argues that comparison should be seen as a tool both of ‘deconstruction’ and ‘reconstruction’ in the analysis of ‘dynamic transformational processes’. Josh Pacewicz argues that both historical sociologists and ethnographers should focus on ‘constitutive’ arguments or ‘formation stories’, which may or may not involve comparison. I enjoyed reading these chapters, as I did the other contributions to the volume, which are consistently thought-provoking. I will use many of them in teaching, particularly for graduate students. What I am less clear about is what constructive project ties the chapters together. All share a robust critique of Millian-Skocpolian understandings of comparative-historical work, so much so that virtually every chapter contains strident, if sometimes repetitive, evaluations of this approach, alongside largely positive assessments of well-established critiques by Andrew Abbott, William Sewell, George Steinmetz (who is a contributor to the book), and others. And all of the contributors agree that comparison is a creative act through which to make meaningful statements about the social world. Beyond these two broad brushstrokes, though, I found it difficult to draw a central plotline through the chapters. For me, therefore, this book works better as a collection of hits rather than as a single album. The introductory chapter will, I think, be very useful as a starting point for engaging this issue. So too will many of the other chapters, which can almost all be read as standalone contributions. All in all, my sense is of a volume that is a prelude, or perhaps better a foundation, for an emerging research agenda on postpositivist comparative historical sociology.