The Catalogue of Mechanisms in Analytical Sociology

Since its foundational manifestos, analytical sociologists have stressed the importance of building a catalogue of social mechanisms, understood as a toolbox to provide mechanistic explanations of social phenomena. Despite its centrality, the catalogue has remained largely underdeveloped. We assess and operationalize the idea of such a catalogue of mechanisms by specifying what its construction would entail given analytical sociologists’ other theoretical commitments. We then contrast this operationalization to analytical sociologists’ current practice. We argue that the catalogue project exposes a mismatch between analytical sociology’s empirical successes and how its proponents conceptualize knowledge accumulation and generalization.