The Grammar of Time
A Toolbox for Comparative Historical Analysis

The first systematic guide to the tools researchers employ to explore and answer broad macro-historical questions in the social sciences.

Marcus Kreuzer (Author)

9781108483780, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 May 2023

180 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.47 kg

'Kreuzer reminds us that doing history is much more than mining data from a more or less remote past to test our hypotheses or establish some causal effect. He offers us a nuanced and thorough guide for how to go about it and, in doing so, he widens our horizons and improves our research.' Stathis N. Kalyvas, Gladstone Professor of Government, University of Oxford

Kreuzer offers guidance to scholars looking to comparative historical analysis (CHA) for the tools to analyze macro-historical questions. Like history, CHA uses the past to formulate research questions, describe social transformations, and generate inductive insights. Like social science, CHA compares those patterns to explicate generalizable and testable theories. It operates in two different worlds—one constantly changing and full of cultural particularities and another static and full of orderly uniformities. CHA draws attention to the ontological constructions of these worlds; how scholars background historical and geographic particularities to create a social reality orderly enough for theorizing, while others foreground those particularities to re-complexify it to generate new inductive insights. CHA engages in ontological triage, dialogue between exploration and confirmation, and conversation in how to translate test results into genuine answers. This book is supplemented by online materials including introductory videos, diagnostic quizzes, advanced exercises, and annotated bibliographies.

Introduction: how to study a disorderly world in an orderly fashion
Section I. The Temporal foundations of comparative historical analysis
1. Historical thinking: stop talking about testing for once!
2. Varieties of historical time: history is not a dummy variable
3. Physical time: capturing the rhythms of history
Section II. How to use history to describe patterns
4. A primer on the origins of electoral systems
5. Eventful analysis: using dates to explore patterns of (dis-) continuities
6. Longue Durée analysis: looking for serial patterns
7. Macro-causal analysis: physical time and the temporal construction of theories
Section III. What about causality?
8. situating comparative historical analysis: heterodox yet still systematic
9. Historical explanations: making sense of continuities and discontinuities
10. Causal process tracing: making testing symmetric
Conclusion: different origins and shared complementarities.

Subject Areas: Social research & statistics [JHBC]