Lullaby,+Chorale,+or+Hurdy-Gurdy+Tune

Lullaby, Chorale, or Hurdy-Gurdy Tune? ||  || Charles Tilly ||   || 2000 ||  || Kate Tennis ||   || This piece is an afterword to Roger Gould (ed) //The Rational –Choice Controversy in Historical Sociology.// It tries to tie up all the pieces in the volume according to certain criteria according to which Tilly tries to systematize and make more rigorous the study of Historical Sociology.
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The analogy in the title draws on the idea that in contemporary 12 tone music, composers often follow very strict guidelines for composition. Yet the same melodic theme can be orchestrated in dramatically different ways and turn out sounding very different. Thus, beautiful chorals or lullabies may end up being ground out like hurdy-gurdy tunes. He says that more discipline in the field will make more chorals and lullabies and less hurdy-gurdy tunes. Our rules for 12 tone composition are the rules we set out for ourselves in collecting and analyzing evidence.

Tilly claims that many disagreements in sociology stem from the different choices researchers make. Specifically, these choices fall into five fields.

1. Genre. There are four genres of historical sociology, each with a different goal and a different idea of what counts as evidence. a. Historical criticism – “revisits the past as a means of informing human choices in the present and future”. Uses secondary sources. b. Pattern identification – “searches for recurrent structures and sequences across time and space” (ex.s: Comte and Parsons). Uses secondary sources. c. Scope extension – “applies procedures that sociologists have created in studies of contemporary social life to historical situations”. Use both primary and secondary sources. d. Historical process analysis – “examines how social interactions impinge on each other in space and time.” Neither primary nor secondary is adequate – must be creative with sources.

2. Ontology – what are the “social entities whose coherent existence analysts can reasonably assume.” Again, there are four options here. They can be combined to some degree, but each uses different starting points and leads to a different sort of analysis. a. Holism – “social structures have their own self-sustaining logics,” and entire social groups have “lives of their own.” b. Methodological individualism – “human individuals as the basic or unique social reality” (as in microeconomics) c. Phenomenological individualism – “individual consciousness is the primary or exclusive site of social life,” but this can quickly descend into solipsism (the philosophical theory that the self is all that you know to exist) d. Relational realism – “the doctrine that transactions, interactions, social ties, and conversations constitute the central stuff of social life.”

3. Explanatory logics – there are five of these a. Covering law – explanation consists of “subjecting robust empirical generalizations to higher and higher level generalizations.” The highest are laws. b. Propensity – explanation consists of “reconstructing a given actor’s state at the threshold of action, with that state variously stipulated as motivation, consciousness, need, organization, or momentum. c. Systemic analysis – “showing how [a] event, structure, or process … serves and/or results from interactions among [a larger self-maintaining set of interdependent] elements.” d. Mechanism based – accounts for select salient features of episodes … by identifying robust mechanisms of relatively general scope.

4. Mechanisms – covering law accounts require mechanisms, though mechanisms can also be particular to a given case or dependent on a set of circumstances. We can distinguish between (1) mechanisms, (2) patterns, and (3) episodes. Mechanisms combine to form processes. And mechanisms plus patterns combine to form concrete episodes. In addition, there are three types of mechanisms: (1) environmental, (2) cognitive, and (3) relational. Now there is a discussion about why rational choice is bad. Upstream: no account of preference formation. Midstream: no account of decision making. And Downstream: no account of consequences. Nevertheless, rational choice is in vogue, and has more cross-discipline appeal than any other theory since Marxism.

5. Practical procedures (i.e. methods) – Rather than defend one method, Tilly writes a beautiful line here: “So long as it expands our range or viable explanations at reasonable cost, I will endorse any morally defensible sociological method” Following this, is a set of bullet points of methods ideas (the last two pages of the article). I recommend skimming these yourself – they are concise and tidy and further summary would do them no benefit. ||  || - Tilly notes that certain types of explanatory accounts will tend to get paired with certain ontologies and genres – for example, “methodological individualists … commonly adopt propensity accounts … and privilege cognitive mechanisms as they do so.” Does mixing and matching lead to new ideas and new theories, or are the distinctions Tilly draws between these types of questions somewhat artificial, with certain explanatory account/ontology/genre clusters naturally fitting better together than others. - Tilly seems to be claiming that decent historical sociology consists primarily of following good rules. To get a work of genius you require more, but you can get something worthwhile with good methods. This feels reassuring looking forward to dissertation-writing, but I’m also beginning to wonder to what degree decent scholarship always requires more. ||  || = = = = = = = = = = = =
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