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

668 Stein Rokkan
a famous lecture in 1889, and was attacked by the statistician Galton for failing
to consider possibilities of cultural diffusion. Tylor had set up a 2 x 2 table
to test the association between the traits ‘in-law avoidance’ and ‘patrilocal
residence’, but had included in his count of cases a number of societies which
were geographically and culturally closely related and might have derived the
given combination of traits from a common source.6o Tylor’s~ followers have
heeded this warning and have tried their best to weed out of their samples
societies likely to be interpreted as so many ‘duplicate copies of the same
original’, to use Galton’s phrase.61 But this is hardly a lasting strategy in a
world constantly shrinking through the diffusion of technologies and ideas
and through the accelerated sharing of historical experiences. The Murdock
strategy would be eminently applicable in a world of isolated societies and
local religions, but runs into a variety of technical, logical and statistical dif-
ficulties in a world of proselytizing religions and ideologies, of constantly
expanding networks of communication, exchange and organization.
Comparative sociologists such as Shmuel Eisenstadt, Reinhard Bendix,
Seymour Martin Lipset, Barrington Moore and Talcott Parsons, and compara-
tive political analysts such as Gabriel Almond, Karl Deutsch, Samuel Hunting-
ton, Robert Holt and John Turner have deliberately opted for the alternative
solution : to build the communication - diffusion - innovation variables directly
into their models and to focus their comparative analyses on units developed
through the merger of smaller societies of the type studied by anthropologists.
Jack Goody and Ian Watt have epigrammatically identified anthropology as the
science of man as a talking animal and sociology as the science of man as a
writing animal:62 this is the crux of the division between the comparisons of
isolated societies in the Tylor-Murdock style and comparisons of empires and
nation-states by the followers of Montesquieu, Tocqueville and Weber. The
introduction of written communication extends the possibilities of control over
space and time and alters the character of the social structure. Talcott Parsons
has stressed this ‘cybernetic’ interpretation in his recent statement on the com-
parative history of societies. His wide-ranging account runs from the socially-
culturally-politically least differentiated preliterate societies, over the ‘ideogra-
phically’ literate early empires and the alphabetized ‘seed-bed’ societies of
Israel and Greece, to the advanced nation-states of the modern age.63 Such
sweeping interpretive statements may at times take on the character of exercises
in the philosophy of history but do point to important tasks of detailed compari-
son.
The best documented historical comparisons have focused on limited ranges
of cases or on shorter spans of time: on the conditions for the formation of
centralized bureaucracies and differentiated national polities and on the stages
and sequences of integration and consolidation, stagnation and decline.
These studies differ markedly in their strategies. We may conveniently
distinguish three styles :
- analyses focused on the identification of one type of polity and on the con-
struction of a paradigm for the comparison of all historical cases close to this
type, wherever they may have occurred in time or space;