訳出願い 長文
Comparative Historical Analysis, James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyerからの引用です。
下記の部分の和訳が上手くいきません。皆様の知恵をお貸しください。
よろしくお願いいたします。
Comparative historical analysis has a long and distinguished history in the social sciences. Those whom we now regard as the founders of modern social science,from Adam Smith to Alexis de Tocqueville to Karl Marx, all pursued comparative historical analysis as a central mode of investigation.
In doing so, they continued a tradition of research that had dominated social
thought for centuries. Even when social science began to organize itself into
separate disciplines in the early twentieth century, comparative and historical investigation maintained a leading position, figuring prominently in the research of such eminent scholars as Otto Hintze, Max Weber, and Marc Bloch. Only by the mid-twentieth century did other approaches to social knowledge partially eclipse comparative historical research, going so far as to threaten its permanent decline. After some period of neglect, however, recent decades have witnessed a dramatic reemergence of the comparative historical tradition. Although important problems of analytic procedure and methodology remain,this mode of investigation has reasserted itself at
the center of today’s social sciences.
These recent advances derived from earlier developments. By the late 1970s and early 1980s,it was already clear that comparative historical research was experiencing a revival across the social sciences. In her concluding chapter in Vision and Method in Historical Sociology,for example, Theda Skocpol (1984a) pointed out that this kind of research was well beyond its days as an isolated mode of analysis carried out by a few older scholars dedicated to the classical tradition. Now, almost two decades later, few observers would deny that comparative historical research is again a leading mode of analysis, widely used throughout the social sciences.
This volume seeks to assess the achievements of comparative historical research over the last thirty years, discuss persistent problems, and explore agendas for the future. we begin that task by delineating the distinctive features of this mode of analysis.
We suggest that comparative historical analysis is best considered part of a long-standing intellectual project oriented toward the explanation of substantively important outcomes. It is defined by a concern with causal analysis, an emphasis on processes over time, and the use of systematic and contextualized comparison. In offering this definition, we intentionally exclude other analytical and methodological traits that are often associated with comparative historical analysis but that we do not consider part of its core features. For example, although many comparative historical analyses offer explanations based on social and political structures and their change, the research tradition is not inherently committed to structural explanation or any other single theoretical orientation. Likewise, while most work in the field employs qualitative forms of data analysis, comparative historical analysis is not characterized by any single method of descriptive and causal inference.
