Principles of Historicist-Analytical Sociology

I present a brief and plea for historicist-analytical sociology. Analytical because it seeks to logically break down reality and the arguments developed to capture it into their constituent elements, planks, cogs and wheels; historicist because it takes time, discontinuity and contingency seriously; it digs into the specificity of empirical objects; and it strives to retrieve forsaken lateral possibilities in the unfolding course of events. I bring Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu together to articulate the six principles guiding this epistemological-methodological approach: (1) eschew the logic of the trial which seeks to establish responsibility and attribute culpability to social agents and institutions (social scientists are not moralists); (2) differentiate folk from analytic constructs; (3) define your concepts clearly and formulate your theory expressly; (4) disaggregate phenomena by breaking them down into their baseline constituents; (5) search for mechanisms, that is, recurrent processes producing, reproducing or transforming the phenomenon of interest; (6) heed temporality, detect discontinuities and specify counterfactuals. Historicity and analyticity are commonly seen as antagonists, the one wedded to the search for concrete specificity and the other geared toward abstract generality. I argue instead that they are moments of social analysis and that they can be practically brought together into a tensionful hitch driving the carriage of inquiry, and that this tension can be epistemically fruitful.