The methodological legacies of Theda Skocpol’s State and Social Revolutions: Locating the three pillars of comparative historical analysis

Abstract

Stein Rokkan and Barrington Moore revived comparative historical analysis (CHA) in Europe and the United States, respectively, during the 1960s without, however, elaborating its methodological underpinnings. Theda Skocpol’s State and Social Revolutions as well as her Visions and Methods Historical Sociology filled this gap. In her important essay with Margaret Somers, she identified three distinct strands of CHA that tackled macro-historical question in distinct but ultimately also complimentary ways. In doing so, she established the foundation for subsequent work on CHA methodology. The article elaborates the subsequent elaborations of Skopol and Somer’s CHA typology and the factors contributing to this evolution. It also underscores how many of those innovations were already implicit in Skocpol’s State and Social Revolutions even though she herself did not highlight it in her own methodological writings. Skocpol the empirical scholar thus turns out to have been methodologically more advanced than Skocpol the methodologist.