Beyond Cleopatra’s Nose: Dialectical Analysis as Social Theory

• In Event: 41066 - Methods and Methodological Innovations in Comparative Historical Sociology

Abstract

Social theory and historical sociology often focus on turning points. Threshold models of tipping-point change and accounts of path-dependent trajectories interrupted by exogenous shocks both help them do so. But they rely on individual units of analysis and exogenous causal factors, respectively. Dialectical analysis, in contrast, applies to social units of analysis and endogenous causes. Prominent in social theory, this article inserts the approach into the historical-sociological methods literature to make it more accessible to researchers. Dialectical analysis can be applied when an historical process is comprised of earlier and later phases, if the social configuration that obtains during the later phase contradicts that which obtains during the earlier one, insofar as both phases are intrinsically related to one another as parts of a single episode. The approach yields ironic explanatory narratives, resembling ones in historical social theory, encompassing both the onset and demise of the social configuration in question.

Author

• Simeon J. Newman, University of Toronto