A sudden upsurge of interest in "the state" has occurred in comparative social science in the past decade. Whether as an object of investigation or as something invoked to explain outcomes of interest, the state as an actor or an institution has been highlighted in an extraordinary outpouring of studies by scholars of diverse theoretical proclivities from all of the major disciplines. The range of topics explored has been very wide. Students of Latin America, Africa, and Asia have examined the roles of states in instituting comprehensive political reforms, helping to shape national economic development, and bargaining with multinational corporations. 1 Scholars interested in the advanced industrial democracies of Europe, North America, and Japan have probed the involvements of states in developing social programs and in managing domestic and international economic problems. 2 Comparative-historical investigators have examined the formation of national states, the disintegration and rebuilding of states in social revolutions, and the impact of states on class formation, ethnic relations, women's rights, and modes of social protest. 3 Economic historians and political economists have theorized about states as institutors of property rights and as regulators and distorters of markets. 4 And cultural anthropologists have explored the special meanings and activities of "states" in non-Western settings. 5 No explicitly shared research agenda or general theory has tied such diverse studies together. Yet I shall argue in this essay that many of them have implicitly converged on complementary arguments and strategies of analysis. The best way to make the point is through an exploration of the issues addressed in a range of comparative and historical studies-studies that have considered states as weighty actors and probed how states affect political and social processes through their policies and their patterned relationships with social groups. First, however, it makes sense to underline
Comparative history is not new. As long as people have investigated social life, there has been recurrent fascination with juxtaposing historical patterns from two or more times or places. Part of the appeal comes from the general usefulness of looking at historical trajectories in order to study social change. Indeed, practitioners of comparative history from Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber to Marc Bloch, Reinhard Bendix, and Barrington Moore, Jr. have typically been concerned with understanding societal dynamics and epochal transformations of cultures and social structures. Attention to historical sequences is indispensable to such understanding. Obviously, though, not all investigations of social change use explicit juxtapositions of distinct histories. We may wonder, therefore: What motivates the use of comparisons as opposed to focussing on single historical trajectories? What purposes are pursued-and how-through the specific modalities of comparative history?Certain areas of scholarly endeavor in contemporary social science have given rise to methodological reflection even more sophisticated than the substantive applications of the methods in question, but this has certainly not been the case for comparative history. Despite the steady application of variants of this approach to macrosocial topics such as revolutions, religious evolution, political development, economic "modernization," patterns of collective violence, and the rise and fall of empires, there have been remarkably few efforts to explore the methodological aspects of comparative history as such in any systematic fashion.' What is more, the most
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