Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

658 Stein Rokkan
growth of centralized bureaucracies and mass democracies reflected more than
a century of discussion on contrasts and similarities between national develop-
ments in Europe and America and between the West and the East. The data for
suchventuresvaried enormously in reliability,precision and coverage, and ranged
from fairly well-researched historical and legal evidence, over unevaluated
bodies of crude official statistics, to impressionistic accounts of the workings
of particular institutions and the ‘psychology’ of different local populations.
Scholars following Weber’s path face a serious dilemma. If they decide to con-
tinue his work in theory-construction, they will either find it impossible to
establish an adequate data basis for their analyses or come under heavy and
justified attacks from historians and area specialists for ignorance and distortions
and for Procrustean classifications of institutions and processes. On the other
hand, if they concentrate their efforts on comparative data gathering and evalu-
tion they soon run into difficulties of conceptual integration and theoretical
interpretation.28
Shmuel Eisenstadt’s gigantic contribution to comparative analysis, The
Political System of Empires”9, exemplifies one possible research strategy. He
develops an elaborate model of processes of centralization, bureaucratization
and debureaucratization, and then seeks to test the consequences against evi-
dence for five pre-bureaucratic societies and twenty-seven historical bureaucratic
societies. The problems encountered in such attempts are two-fold: first, are
the categories precise enough for effective analysis and are they meaningful
across so many different areas of the world and, secondly, does the evidence
available allow some measure of consensus among experts on the categorization
of concrete instances ? To fit so many different cases, Eisenstadt’s categories
had to leave a considerable margin of imprecision, but this very imprecision
makes many of his one-man categorizations of concrete cases highly debatable,
despite an extraordinary display of detailed historical erudition.
Reinhard Bendix’s volume on Nation-Building and Citizensh@30 exemplifies a
more cautious approach: a number of theoretical distinctions first set out by
Tocqueville and Weber are worked out in greater detail and then illustrated
through the analysis of a number of concrete national developments. Barring-
ton Moore’s work on the conditions for the emergence of multi-party democra-
cies or mass dictatorships3I offers a detailed review of the comparative histories
of alliance formation among agricultural, commercial and bureaucratic elites
in England, France, the United States, China, Japan and India, and demonstrates
how it is possible to make use of a variety of concrete data from culturally very
different countries for purposes of systematic comparison. Seymour Martin
Lipset’s early work exemplified an empirical strategy:3e Political Man is essen-
tially the outgrowth of a series of efforts to assemble prima facie comparable
data on society and politics for a number of countries. His later contributions
seek to achieve a better balance between theory-construction and empirical
analysis. His work The First New Nation is essentially an attempt to bring
Tocqueville’s interpretation of the uniqueness of American society up to date
through the development of a new analytical framework and through the
collation of illustrative quantitative comparisons. Many future cornparativists