New Books in Sociology

Marcus Kreuzer, "The Grammar of Time: A Toolbox for Comparative Historical Analysis" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Apr 26, 2025
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INSIGHT

Rethinking Context as Insight

  • In social sciences, context is often seen only as noise to control for confounding effects.
  • In historical settings, context offers rich, theoretically constructed insights crucial to understanding phenomena.
INSIGHT

CHA Bridges Historians and Positivists

  • Comparative historical analysis (CHA) bridges ideographic historical methods and positivist generalizations.
  • CHA is problem-driven, with the research question guiding the choice of methods, blending interpretivist and positivist approaches.
INSIGHT

Time Unifies CHA Traditions

  • The genealogical roots of CHA trace back to 19th-century scholars like Weber and Marx.
  • CHA’s central focus on various notions of time helps unify its diverse traditions and clarify its vocabulary.
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