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Initial Conditions, General Laws, Path Dependence, and Explanation in Historical Sociology

Author(s): Jack A. Goldstone


Reviewed work(s):
Source: American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104, No. 3 (November 1998), pp. 829-845
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Initial Conditions, General Laws, Path
Dependence, and Explanation in
Historical Sociology 1
Jack A. Goldstone
University of California, Davis

Much of the training of the modern economist tends to weaken the


trainee’s natural, intuitive understanding of historical causation, so
that some remedial work is required in addressing an audience, some
of whose members’ advanced education will have left them incapac-
itated in this particular way. (Paul A. David)

Margaret Somers, Edgar Kiser, and Michael Hechter are serious heavy-
weights in the debate on methods of explanation in historical sociology,
with major publications prior to the current symposium (Skocpol and
Somers 1980; Somers 1996; Kiser and Hechter 1991; Hechter 1992; Kiser
1996). But in this symposium, they have come out swinging wildly. Were
I to referee this bout, I would have to penalize both parties for low blows.
Somers criticizes an older and cruder form of rational choice theory (RCT)
than most practitioners currently use; Kiser and Hechter in reply propose
some rather odd criteria for selection among different explanations. In
addition, both parties are guilty of some rather severe misunderstandings
of science, and of principles of scientific explanation. We shall sort through
these errors below. After these errors are cleared away, I hope to lay out
how, far from there being one right way to approach explanation in histor-
ical sociology, scholars seeking to study historical phenomena need to be
aware that different forms of explanatory principles, differently emphasiz-
ing the role of initial conditions, general laws, and path dependency, are
necessary to explain different kinds of historical relationships.

A FALSE DICHOTOMY
Somers begins by laying out two “Kuhnian trajectories.” One, which she
claims is followed by Kiser and Hechter, is “theory centric” and insistent

1
Direct correspondence to Jack Goldstone, Department of Sociology, University of
California, Davis, California, 95616.

 1998 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.


0002-9602/99/10403-0007$02.50

AJS Volume 104 Number 3 (November 1998): 829–45 829

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on deductivist general theorizing. The other, which Somers claims to draw


out herself and follow, is based on “historical epistemology” and insists
on problem-driven, relational and historical theorizing. This is a false di-
chotomy on two counts: there is no basis for this division in Kuhn’s (1970)
argument, and both the “theory-centric” and “historical epistemology”
modes of explanation are straw men, incapable of standing in for sensible
scientific historical explanation.
Somers suggests that theory-centric views of the scientific method are
dominant in textbooks. Noting that “few experimenters in physics [are]
given the Nobel Prize,” and taking literally Kuhn’s pronouncement that
theories are only overthrown by other theories, not by experimental obser-
vations, Somers believes that experiment and observation have somehow
been downgraded to secondary status in the arena of scientific knowledge
and that “theories” are the dominant element of scientific discourse and
explanation. This is simply and terribly mistaken.
First, the vast majority of Nobel Prizes in physics are and have been
given for experimental discoveries or for the perfection of new experimen-
tal apparatus. From the first prize given in 1901 to Whilhelm Roentgen
for the discovery of x-rays, to the 1997 prize given to Steven Chu, Claude
Cohen-Tannoudji, and William Phillips for the development of methods
of supercooling atoms with laser light, most winners have been experi-
menters, some detecting things (e.g., new elementary particles) that were
predicted by theories, but more often finding things unanticipated by
theories (although supremely relevant, of course, for existing and future
theoretical work). Of the 10 most recent prizes (1988–97), eight went to
experimenters for either new discoveries or the development of new exper-
imental methods. Even that most famed general theorist of this century,
Albert Einstein, did not receive his Nobel Prize for either the special or
general theory of relativity. Rather, Einstein won for extremely problem-
driven theoretical work, namely on the photoelectric effect.
I had the good fortune to discuss this matter with Arno Penzias a few
years back.2 He pointed out that the role of experiment in physics is much
misunderstood, and that theoretical development has been abstracted
from real scientific work, thanks in part to populist misreadings of Kuhn.
In fact, experiment, not theory, dominates normal science. Moreover,
there really is no such thing as “general” theory in physics. There are only
degrees of generality. Kepler’s laws were a completely problem-driven

2
Somers (n. 8, in this issue) cites Penzias’s discovery of the low-temperature back-
ground radiation that pervades the universe, which provided the first experimental
evidence for the big bang theory of the origin of the universe, as a case of an experi-
ment whose significance has been reduced in science texts to emphasize the role of
theory.

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Symposium: Goldstone

theory that focused on finding regularities in the shape and velocity of


planetary orbits in our solar system. Newton developed a more general
theory of the relative motions of gravitationally bound bodies, but that
too was driven by the problem of explaining how the motions of planets
and terrestrial bodies could be explained by common principles. Newton’s
theories of motion, however, were found inadequate to deal with the be-
havior of light; that required new theories of electromagnetic radiation,
which were eventually developed by Maxwell and others. But in the late
19th century, an experiment on the velocity of light waves by Michelson
and Morley suggested that something was wrong with Newton’s view of
absolute reference frames for the measurement of motion in space. Kuhn
was quite right that this experiment did not suddenly force physicists to
“abandon” Newton’s theories and the many explanations based on them.
But the importance of the experiment was widely noted (Michelson re-
ceived a Nobel Prize for his experiment in 1907) and many different theo-
rists and experimenters sought to explain Michelson and Morley’s results
(Mason 1962, pp. 542–45). Almost two decades later, Einstein offered his
special theory of relativity as a solution to the problem posed by the trou-
bling experiments conducted by Michelson and others; it took another
decade to work out the implications that relativity would have not only
for Newton’s laws of motion, but for Newton’s laws of gravity. In the
end, Einstein’s laws of motion and gravity were more general than New-
ton’s in that they applied to motion at extremely high speeds or in ex-
tremely high gravitational fields. But of course, even Einstein’s theory is
not wholly general, for it remains separate from and unreconciled with
the laws of quantum mechanics.
Moreover, and this is the key point, Einstein did not develop his theory
of relativity in response to a call to “generalize” Newton’s theory of mo-
tion. Einstein’s work—on the photoelectric effect, on Brownian motion,
and on special relativity, all published in the same year, 1905—was highly
problem driven. Each was aimed precisely at explaining the troubling
results of well-known experiments that were inconsistent with the predic-
tions of current theories. Kuhn did point out that the transition from one
theory to another in science is not a smooth, quick process, in which scien-
tists act as impartial judges, reviewing evidence and quickly throwing out
a theory as soon as problematic or disconcerting evidence appears. Theo-
ries have partisans and past successes, and thus continue to be relied on
until alternative theories are developed that can reconcile past results with
the new problematic evidence. But that does not mean that such discon-
certing evidence is swept under the rug or is marginalized in the evolution
of science (remember Michelson received the Nobel Prize, not Einstein,
for the work that eventually led to special relativity). Kuhn never sought
to imply that experimental evidence was not of critical importance, or

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that transitions between theories (or paradigms) were not intimately con-
nected to experimental evidence, or that science is not essentially problem
driven, for none of these things is remotely true.
But if scientific investigation and theoretical development are mainly
problem driven, not theory centric, the label that Somers seeks to pin on
Kiser and Hechter has no foundation. What, then, is the difference that
lies between the Somers and the Kiser/Hechter positions?

INITIAL CONDITIONS, GENERAL LAWS, AND PATH DEPENDENCE


I believe the difference that is fueling this debate is simply a difference
in the foregrounding given to initial conditions by Somers and to general
laws by Kiser and Hechter. Somers seems to believe the importance of
historically specific conditions (which I shall refer to as “initial conditions”)
is so great as to somehow invalidate the applicability of “general laws.”
She instead refers to “mechanisms” as the causal elements in narrative or
“relational” explanations, which she identifies with path dependency and
finds similar in operation to evolutionary biology, which she also claims
has no “true invariant laws” (p. 771).
Kiser and Hechter, on the other hand, seem to fear that an obsession
with initial conditions will lead to purely narrative explanations of partic-
ular sequences of events. Fearing that this “new type of research in com-
parative historical sociology” tended toward Dr. Seuss-like explanatory
principles—“it just ‘happened to happen,’ and was not very likely to hap-
pen again” (Geisel and Geisel 1991, p. 91)—Kiser and Hechter sought to
emphasize the key role of general theory in providing powerful causal
understandings of diverse events. They argue that sociology needs theories
that hold for a wide range of initial conditions. Suggesting that rational
choice theory could serve this role, they sought to redirect the efforts of
comparative and historical sociologists toward the explicit use of general
laws in explaining historical events.
Somers’s position has so many faults it will be difficult to correct them
all, but we should try. First, mechanisms are not the functional equivalent
of “general laws” and in no way substitute for them in explanation. A
general law is a statement of necessary or probable connection between
two kinds of events (e.g., for the law of reflection, the angle of incidence
of light striking a reflecting surface is equal to the angle of exit from the
surface). A general law is not general because it applies to a wide variety
of different kinds of cases and events. It may only apply to a specific kind
of problem. What makes a general law “general” is that it applies to a
range of initial conditions and asserts a necessary or probable connection
between particular initial conditions and a subsequent event or events.
Thus the law of reflection is a general law because it applies to a wide

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Symposium: Goldstone

range of angles of incidence for light striking a reflective surface. If the


exit angle varied randomly such that the angle of incidence had no relation
to the angle of exit, there would be no law of reflection. However, dis-
covering or positing the “mechanism” by which the interaction of light
and a reflective surface produces an exiting beam of light with the identi-
cal angle to the angle of incidence is quite a different matter than stating
the general law. Positivists may state the general law, which accounts for
all observations, and be content at that. Realists, however, may wish to
explain further what events or principles govern this result. (The realist
answer, as conveyed to me by no less an authority than Richard Feynman,
is that the light actually exits the surface at a variety of angles, as a quan-
tum probability wave, but that the interaction that occurs when we ob-
serve the reflecting light forces the light’s energy to collapse onto the fast-
est path from the point of emission to the reflecting surface to the point
of observation—and this fastest, or shortest, path, is the one in which the
angle of incidence equals the angle of exit). Kiser and Hechter too are
guilty of confusing general laws and mechanisms as elements of explana-
tions, but we shall deal with them below.
Second, because of this confusion, Somers’s claim that “relational” ac-
counts can avoid general laws and use mechanisms to build causal expla-
nations is misguided. Narrative and relational accounts, however problem
driven and historically specific, cannot rise above the wholly contingent
and unique Seussian explanation—it just happened that this happened
first, then this, then that, and is not likely to happen that way again—
unless there is some assertion of a necessary or highly probable connection
between events A, B, and C in the series of events that make up the narra-
tive. Without the assertion of a necessary or probable connection, there
is no causal account—it just happened that way. But how can one assert
that initial condition A leads with high probability to subsequent condi-
tion B without a general law connecting type A and type B events?
So even relational accounts must rely on general laws. Why then does
Somers think such laws can be avoided? My teacher George Homans, one
of the greatest historical sociologists (see, e.g., Homans 1968), also wrote
about explanation in sociology (Homans 1967). He argued that the “gen-
eral laws” of human behavior were mainly psychological, and therefore
of little interest to sociologists. He suggested we can take for granted—
as rational choice theorists would have us do—that people seek to max-
imize their well-being, usually defined in terms of wealth, power, or status,
through their interactions with other people and their environment. The
problem with such general laws, however, is that they tell us very little
about why particular national histories, for example, turn out the way
they do. How do we go from knowing that people seek to increase their
power to explaining that England’s economic and military power sur-

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passed that of Holland in the 18th century and even that of France in the
19th century? The answer is that we must trace the action of this particu-
lar principle through the action of particular historical actors in particular
historical settings. We need to know of the economic and military re-
sources available to the rulers of England, Holland, and France, the coali-
tions and conflicts they faced with their elites, and the political and eco-
nomic support they received from their populations. These “initial
conditions” are rather more complex and striking than the “general law”
that people seek to increase their power and wealth. Indeed, apparently
Somers finds the initial conditions so much more interesting and decisive
that she falsely believes she can causally connect them to later outcomes
without any general laws at all—a problem shared by many historians.
Third, Somers compounds her confusion about mechanisms and laws
by asserting that the property of “path dependence” is equivalent to sensi-
tive dependence on initial conditions. Now as Paul A. David (1997) has
pointed out, this is a common error, but it wholly vitiates Somers’s argu-
ment. Path dependence is a property of a system such that the outcome
over a period of time is not determined by any particular set of initial
conditions. Rather, a system that exhibits path dependency is one in which
outcomes are related stochastically to initial conditions, and the particular
outcome that obtains in any given “run” of the system depends on the
choices or outcomes of intermediate events between the initial conditions
and the outcome. The classic illustration of such a system is that of a Polya
urn experiment (Arthur, Ermoliev, and Kaniovski 1983). To oversimplify,
imagine an urn with four balls in it—one red, one yellow, one white, and
one black. The object is to fill the urn by selecting one ball and then
replacing it along with two more balls of whichever color is chosen. Which
color will dominate the full urn’s contents? Note that whichever ball is
drawn first—red, yellow, white, or black—will gain an advantage in fu-
ture rounds, for there will then be three of that color, and only one of
each of the others. Therefore, 50% of the time, the first color chosen then
will also be chosen second, thus receiving an even larger advantage. None-
theless, this does not mean that the first color drawn will always fill the
urn. There is a 50% chance that another color will be drawn on the second
round, thus restoring parity between at least two colors, and leaving it to
later choice to tip the balance in any one color’s favor. The study of this
class of problems has shown that there is no determinate outcome; rather
the final pattern depends on the particular choices that happen to be made
in the sequence of filling the urn.
To use Somers’s own example, if “14th-century legal institutions . . . can
be shown under certain initial and subsequent conditions” to not simply
disappear “but to become causal factors in the development of 19th-
century democratic institutions” (p. 768; my emphasis) what exactly is she

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asserting? Is she saying that if we had run this process many times, under
the specified initial and subsequent conditions, then in a preponderance of
these runs the 14th-century legal institutions would “cause” 19th-century
institutions to develop in a certain democratic way? If so, she is asserting
a general law (a law of “historical sedimentation”) to the effect that earlier
institutions inevitably leave their impress on subsequent ones. To return
to the principle of the urn, she is asserting that the particular institutions
and characteristics that she highlights, among all those in the “urn” of
14th-century England, had to be causally connected to particular 19th-
century outcomes—they could not disappear. But she is not thereby speci-
fying a mechanism for that general law—we might still ask whether the
sedimentation is unavoidable because institutions can only be changed
incrementally, because humans are creatures of tradition and habit, or by
what other processes do five century-old institutions inevitably leave their
imprint on later ones. Somers’s own example, in other words, seems to
invoke general laws, does not specify mechanisms, and discusses what is
clearly not a path dependent process, otherwise the possibility that 14th-
century legal institutions might indeed have simply disappeared would
have been an alternative path for the system.
Now, it could be that Somers has simply mischosen her words, and she
means to say something different: “Given certain choices, actions, and
events that were not necessary, but happened to have been made, 14th-
century legal institutions in England had a decisive impact on the shape
of 19th-century democratic institutions.” If this is her intent, she would
be telling a particular narrative in which a path-dependent system, which
could have gone in many different directions from its 14th-century initial
conditions, went in one particular way because of the impact of certain
“subsequent” conditions that are really not conditions at all, but discrete
acts or events. It is certainly true that, in path-dependent systems, the
present state is a reflection of prior events and that knowing those events
can tell us why the present state, and not other possible states, currently
exists and is sustained. This is consistent with Somers’s insistence on nar-
rative as her preferred mode of analysis (Somers 1994). But this mode of
explanation cannot do what Somers claims here, which is to “help to ex-
plain why some aspects of the social world, and not others, became mod-
ern in the first place” (p. 769). The last words are crucial. Tracing the
evolution of a path-dependent system can tell us why certain phenomena
and not others finally emerged. But only a determinate or causal system
governed by general laws can tell us why certain phenomena and not
others became possible in the first place. Only general laws would create
a situation in which 14th-century initial conditions have to affect 19th-
century outcomes. In a path-dependent system, a wide variety of outcomes
are by definition possible in the first place. One can eliminate certain of

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those outcomes at the outset by causal laws, or one can eliminate certain of
those outcomes in the process of system change in response to subsequent
events, but one cannot explain why anything had to happen in the first
place solely by reference to the operation of a path-dependent system.
It is for this reason that the study of evolution, although certainly the
study of a path-dependent process, does utilize invariant laws, as well as
allowing for the contingent role of key but undetermined events. The criti-
cal law for the evolutionary process in Darwinian science is the law of
natural selection, which posits that, other things equal, individuals with
a genetic characteristic that aids in their survival will pass that character-
istic to their offspring, who will appear in the next generation in greater
frequency than the offspring of individuals who lack that characteristic.
Spoken of in terms of greater reproductive success, or the spread of desir-
able traits throughout a population, this principle is sometimes not firmly
described as an “invariant law.” But if this principle were not true for all
species, at all times, then Darwinian evolution could not govern the origin
and evolution of species.
Darwinian evolution in fact has a number of laws that act precisely to
rule out certain subsequent events in the first place. For example, because
the transmission of traits for multicellular organisms is specified to be the
result of reproduction (not of acquired characteristics nor of transmission
between unrelated individuals) many pathways are ruled out, in a way
they are not ruled out for the evolution of bacteria (which can directly
exchange genetic materials) or culture (in which new characteristics can
be acquired and transmitted to many unrelated individuals.) Darwinian
selection, for example, although a path-dependent process that allows
many particular outcomes, has general laws of the transmission and selec-
tion of traits that make it impossible for new genetic characteristics to be
transmitted to human populations (with their 20–30 year generational
time) as rapidly as to many insect populations (with generational time
intervals measured in months or even days). These laws allow geneticists
and evolutionary biologists to estimate the rate of continental drift, or to
judge how long Australia has been isolated, by studying the differences
in speciation and genetic information between the fauna in various world
regions. Contrary to Somers’s assertion that “Evolutionary biology . . .
lacks invariant laws,” such invariant laws are at the core of the enterprise
and allow evolution to be studied in a scientific manner. To be sure, evolu-
tionary biology lacks singular determinant outcomes. But that does not
mean it lacks invariant laws, only that such laws work in combination
with a variety of initial conditions and that contingent events (e.g., an
extraterrestrial fireball ending the reign of the dinosaurs) may reshape
those conditions and produce different specific outcomes at any time.
Where I fully agree with Somers is that evolutionary biology is a fine

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model for the historical social sciences. Done well, evolutionary biology
utilizes invariant laws and principles but combines them with a sensitivity
to the effect of a wide range of initial conditions and the role of contingent
events in altering those conditions over time (see Gould 1983, 1989).
If both of Somers’s claims that (1) there is a theory-centric approach to
science that downplays concrete observations and (2) she has a “relational”
alternative that can find causal explanations in “mechanisms” and “path-
dependent” narratives instead of general laws are false, what is there to
her debate with Kiser and Hechter?
Much of her criticism seems to be directed at Kiser and Hechter’s claims
that rational choice theory is a good example of a general theory that can
help sociologists explain historical change, and, more particularly, that
Kiser and Hechter can see no other general theory as a clear competitor
for RCT. Now Kiser and Hechter do also make a muddle of general laws
and mechanisms, and make some other rhetorical errors in their 1991 arti-
cle that are moderated or corrected in this symposium. But I believe Som-
ers has misrepresented or misunderstood Kiser and Hechter’s claims.

RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY AND HISTORICAL EXPLANATION


First of all, it should be understood that the predictions of rational choice
theory are in fact quite sensitive to initial conditions. Indeed, much of the
thrust of rational choice theory is finding out how, given certain initial
distributions of rewards and penalties for certain actions and certain pat-
terns of interpersonal interaction (e.g., simultaneous play, alternate play,
repeating play), and given certain assumptions about the motivations for
actors’ behavior, the choices of actors will produce particular outcomes.
Some of these outcomes may be to actors’ advantage (cooperation), other
outcomes may not (e.g., prisoner’s dilemma). Modest changes in initial
conditions of either rewards or information can lead RCT to predict quite
different outcomes or characteristics of interaction (Schelling 1960). Ratio-
nal choice theory certainly has just as much ability to explain the arrival
at and maintenance of suboptimal states as do narrative accounts pointing
to path dependency. Indeed, these modes of explanation are not at all
adversarial; economists such as Paul David and W. Brian Arthur rely on
rational self-interest to explain why certain equilibria arrived at through
path-dependent processes, including the famous QWERTY keyboard, are
sustained.
I suspect that Kiser and Hechter would in fact not quarrel in principle
with Somers’s argument that 14th-century legal institutions had a sub-
stantial impact on the shape of 19th-century English democracy. How-
ever, Kiser and Hechter would tell this story somewhat differently, in
terms of individuals between the 14th and 19th centuries making a series

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of choices, based on efforts to maximize their well-being in the face of


“certain initial and subsequent conditions,” that resulted in certain 19th-
century democratic institutions emerging as the dominant choice of En-
glish political elites. Kiser and Hechter would thus see the 19th-century
outcome as a path-dependent process that could have turned out other-
wise, whose explanation requires tracing the specific choices faced by
groups of individuals at specific times (exactly what Brustein [1996] does
in discussing the reasons for the expansion of the Nazi party in Germany
in what Kiser and Hechter point to as a model RCT historical work).
It is unfortunate that Kiser and Hechter too have confused issues of
“general laws,” “mechanisms,” and desirable principles of explanation. For
example, Kiser and Hechter asserted in their 1991 article and repeated in
this symposium that “three criteria can help us assess explanations based
on rival causal mechanisms: plausibility, reducing the time lag between
cause and effect, and testing each mechanism’s unique empirical implica-
tions” (p. 790). Except for the last, I do not know of any scientific basis
for these criteria. Certainly quarks and superstrings do not pass any tests
for plausibility, nor did black holes or continental drift or relativistic or
quantum effects. (Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein continued to find many
quantum principles wholly implausible long after they had been firmly
established!) Nor is the time lag between cause and effect relevant. Let
us say that Jane and Joe have a fight on Tuesday and that a bus honks
loudly outside their house at 4 p.m. on Thursday; Jane grabs a knife and
stabs Joe at 4:30 p.m. on that same day. Would a theory that the honking
of the bus drove Jane mad strike us as a better explanation than the rival
theory that her action was due to the fight on Tuesday? It does, after all,
fare better on the criterion of “reducing the time lag between cause and
effect.” No doubt, it is desirable for a mechanism that links events to fill
in the temporal gaps between cause and effect, and indeed often what we
mean by a “mechanism” is precisely the pattern of events that links a
distant cause to its necessary effect. (Perhaps this is why Somers confuses
having a “mechanism” to link 14th- and 19th-century institutions with
having an explanation, although mechanisms to link causes and effects
are accompaniments to general laws, not to contingent outcomes.) But in
no way should temporal proximity of events (as opposed to temporal or-
der) be a criterion for choosing between rival causal theories.
While much of what Kiser and Hechter claim is unexceptional, it is
this sort of confusion that helps fuel debates. Similarly, Somers may be
confusing the claim of RCT that individuals seek to maximize their per-
sonal outcomes with the claim that social groups seek to maximize their
outcomes and do so regardless of their history. If this were so, then there
might be a macroclaim on the part of such a theory that 19th-century
English political institutions were chosen by the English elites because

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they were the most efficient for maximizing their well-being and that prior
elements and issues in English history had little relevance. Now, if Somers
were arguing the different macrocausal theory that 19th-century English
political institutions had to have certain features because of the presence
of certain features in England’s 14th-century legal institutions, then we
would indeed have two sharply opposed macrotheories of 19th-century
English democracy. One theory would say those institutions were chosen
for maximal efficiency in attaining elite goals, not because of any historical
events that mattered; the other (Somers’s?) would say those institutions
were tied to centuries-earlier institutions by some historical causal pro-
cesses that made the linkage unavoidable.
I have some problems asserting that this is Somers’s theory, since she
seems so concerned to avoid explanations based on general laws and to
favor path-dependent models in which the linkage between 14th- and
19th-century institutions would be avoidable. But if Somers does believe
that laws of “sedimentation” and incremental institutional change (similar
to the laws of evolutionary biology) do hold in social history, then perhaps
she believes that there is a necessary and not merely contingent connection
between the 14th- and 19th-century institutions in England and, if so,
that would account for her dispute with a theory that could be interpreted
as saying that only current efficiency of outcomes, and not historical pro-
cesses, matter.
If that misunderstanding is the source of the dispute, perhaps we can
lay it to rest. Rational choice theory is sensitive to initial conditions and
path-dependent processes and is not in conflict with giving these factors
due attention. Even asserting the maximization of self-interest as an in-
variant principle of human behavior (although it may strike some as churl-
ish) is fully consistent with allowing historical and contingent changes in
initial conditions to determine what the eventual social outcomes of that
behavior will be—for good or ill.
But I fear that is not the sole source of the problem. Rather, what Som-
ers and other critics of RCT are reacting to is the tendency of some prac-
titioners of RCT to grossly simplify the actual complexity of initial condi-
tions in order to make deterministic calculations of social outcomes. For
in fact, RCT’s ability to reach firm conclusions from given initial condi-
tions and patterns of interaction is limited. Many sets of initial conditions
and interactions are indeterminate—like the path dependence of the Polya
urn. For most RCT theorists, such problems are uninteresting—rather
than tracing the steps that led to a particular outcome that may only hap-
pen once, many RCT theorists would prefer to find the solution to a class
of problems, and finding a determinate solution may require severe and
even unrealistic restrictions on the initial conditions and interactions.
This difference in interests is precisely what causes the conflict or mis-

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communication between theoretical economists and economic historians


remarked upon by Paul David (1997) in the quote that opens this essay. All
modern economists, whether they are neoclassical theorists or economic
historians, are firmly in the RCT camp. But the theorists seek to solve
problems with determinate equilibria solutions; the economic historians
are interested in particular outcomes (e.g., the Industrial Revolution in
England or the standardization of the QWERTY keyboard) that may
have been flukes of particular choices. Thus the theorists concentrate on
solving complex problems whose initial specifications are sometimes
found to be unrealistic and irrelevant by economic historians, while the
economic historians concentrate on explaining particular outcomes that
the theorists find to be of no great interest. Thus, to point to the most
egregious example, until just over a decade ago, economic historians’ ma-
jor preoccupation was explaining economic growth, while economic theo-
rists put that issue aside as depending on conditions (such as increasing
returns) that seemed, at the time, to void an equilibrium solution (Arthur
1994).
A similar difference in vantage points may be separating RCT theorists
operating in historical sociology from Somers and other critics of rational
choice. One example from my own field, the study of revolutions, is the
response to Gordon Tullock’s (1971) work on the “paradox” of revolutions.
Tullock showed that if individuals made separate choices as to whether
to join a revolutionary movement, and if the benefits of a revolution went
to everyone and not just those who rioted or rebelled, then revolution
would be impossible, as a rational calculation of self-interest would always
lead individuals to try to free ride on the efforts of others to create a revo-
lution rather than to incur the risks and costs of revolutionary activity
themselves. The reasoning was that for any one individual, his or her
action would make no difference to the success of the revolution. Since
this individual would enjoy the benefits of a revolution whether or not
he or she participated, but would incur risks and costs only through partic-
ipation, then he or she should certainly not participate. And if every indi-
vidual calculated in this fashion, revolutionary mobilization could not
occur.
The reaction to this result was twofold. Economists championed the
result as a triumph of logic and a fascinating result. Historians and sociol-
ogists who actually studied revolution ignored it, since they knew full well
that revolutions do occur, and their goal was to explain this social fact,
not to posit conditions under which it would not be possible.
However, this bifurcation was not necessary and now is starting to be
overcome by sociologists who have shown that the premises regarding the
initial conditions, not the reasoning, in Tullock’s analysis were faulty (see,
e.g., Opp, Voss, and Gern 1995; Goldstone 1994). Individuals do not de-

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Symposium: Goldstone

cide to join, or not to join, revolutionary movements as isolated individu-


als. Instead, they decide within the dynamics of groups to which they have
prior commitments and within which it appears likely that their actions
will make a difference. Once the role of groups is added to the rational
choice analysis, such analysis, leads to results—such as the necessity of
cross-class coalitions, the role of neighborhood ties, and the development
of two different pathways to revolution (one based on urban uprisings in
the capital, the other based on guerilla mobilization in the countryside)
corresponding to different kinds of regimes—that confirm and provide
microlevel foundations for the results of macrosocial studies of revolution
(Goldstone 1994). For their part, rational choice theorists are exploring
themes such as the institutional and historical ways to avoid the free-rider
problem (Lichbach 1995), the bases of group action and group solidarity
(Hechter 1987), and the real-world implications that arise from the fre-
quent concealment or falsification of preferences (Kuran 1995).
In sum, Tullock worked with one set of initial conditions that yielded
a firmly determined, if negative and paradoxical, solution. But in the real
world, the initial conditions that may give rise to revolution or revolt are
more complex and involve a good bit of uncertainty among the actors
(Goldstone 1989, 1994). Many different sets of initial conditions may give
rise to rebellion or revolt, depending on the actions of rulers and rebels;
but as Lichbach (1995) shows, these conditions are harder to specify than
those chosen by Tullock. Further, once specified, conditions neither form
a simple closed set, nor do they produce a simple determinate solution.
In fact, discovering precisely which initial conditions give rise to which
kind of rebellion or revolution, and with what outcomes, has been a cen-
tral issue for the comparative historical study of revolution (see Moore
1966; Tilly 1978; Eisenstadt 1978; Skocpol 1979; and Goldstone 1991).

PRINCIPLES OF HISTORICAL EXPLANATION


If Kiser and Hechter and Somers are not truly in conflict over two differ-
ent methods of historical explanation, does that mean there is one best
mode that everyone can agree on? That would be, and is, too good to be
true. Historical explanation is complex, and an enormous literature has
been devoted to it over many decades (for a recent survey, see Lloyd
[1993]). But one point I would like to make is that good historical analysis
is distinguished not by any one method, but by choosing the method of
explanation best suited for its explanatory goal.
If one is concerned to explain a historical phenomenon that emerges
quite commonly, yet from a variety of different settings or initial condi-
tions, then it would be bad practice to use a path-dependent model. What
we appear to have in such cases is convergence on an equilibrium solution

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American Journal of Sociology

from a variety of origin points. In these cases, looking for a solution based
upon rational choice theory—or any other theory that leads to selecting
a particular outcome as optimal from a broad set of possible outcomes
and starting points—would be wise. For example, Kiser (1994) finds that,
despite widely differing histories of state formation, nearly all early mod-
ern states used tax farming to collect central government revenues. It is
this kind of historical situation that is most plausibly explained by solution
to a common optimization problem—that of maximizing revenues under
conditions of expensive monitoring and scarce information.
However, if one is concerned to explain a historical phenomenon that
emerges only occasionally, but from recognizably similar initial condi-
tions, then one should seek a general law connecting particular initial con-
ditions with particular outcomes. Thus, for example, Reuschemeyer, Ste-
phens, and Stephens (1992) found that mass democracy has emerged in
some places but not others and only where workers or small farmers
formed strong political parties that gained support from bourgeois elites.
They thus argue that they have found a general principle (they shrink
from calling it a law, as too deterministic sounding for historical studies)
that strong parties that create cross-class coalitions are a crucial condition
for the emergence of mass democracy. Skocpol (1979) found that social
revolutions emerged in some places and not in others and traced this to
the general principle that social revolutions in agrarian-bureaucratic
states occur only where one finds the combination of international compet-
itive pressure on the state, leverage from an autonomous elite, and organi-
zation among the peasantry.
Hechter and Kiser (1991) challenged Skocpol’s analysis as not being an
approach based on general theory, but they are wrong. By asserting a
necessary connection between a set of initial conditions and a particular
outcome, her argument is precisely one of developing a general law or
principle that shapes specific patterns in history. The scope of the theory
may be narrow—it fails to hold for Iran, for example, and other cases
where urban groups were more important than peasants in revolutionary
activity (Farhi 1990). But as a form of explanation it rests as much on the
principles of general laws as Kiser’s explanation of tax farming. It simply
takes on a different type of problem than Kiser did, one in which the
outcome is somewhat rare and found only with a particular set of initial
conditions, and thus aspects of the explanation must perforce appear dif-
ferent. Kiser and Hechter may rightly claim that the scope of RCT—
which is held to obtain for all individuals at all times—is much greater
than the scope of Skocpol’s theory, which only obtains for pre-industrial
agrarian-bureaucratic states. And unlike the other criteria that they ad-
duced, the scope of a theory (what is sometimes popularly called its “gener-

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Symposium: Goldstone

ality”) is a widely used criteria for choosing among rival theories. But they
cannot claim that explanations based on RCT are based on a general the-
ory and historical macroexplanations like Skocpol’s are not; that is simply
not a valid basis of distinction.
Finally, if one is concerned to explain a particular unique event, one
that has occurred only once and then perhaps diffused or spread but did
not repeat, despite similar initial conditions being found elsewhere, then
one has most likely identified a path-dependent system in which the
unique outcome was produced by some contingent conditions or choices
that separated the outcome in that particular system from outcomes in
other systems that started from similar conditions. One example of such an
event is the discovery and implementation of steam power for mechanical
energy in 18th-century Britain. Despite advanced organic economies hav-
ing existed for many centuries with similar resources of wood, coal, and
water, and similar histories of economic growth and technological discov-
ery, only Britain independently developed steam power (Wrigley 1988).
This suggests that the explanation for this event, and for the Industrial
Revolution that steam helped power, lies in some contingent event that
threw the path of technological evolution onto a different track in Britain
than was the case elsewhere in the world (Mokyr 1993; Goldstone 1987,
1998), and not in the solution of a common optimization problem nor in
a necessary outcome of initial conditions.
Historical analysis based on RCT, on macrolevel general principles,
and on identification of unique path-dependent contingencies are thus all
possible, valid modes of historical explanation. What is important, then,
is to avoid conflating these modes or claiming that one is “best” to the
exclusion of others. What matters for good historical explanation is that
whichever mode of explanation is used, it is wisely applied with due re-
gard for the different roles of general laws and of varying initial conditions
and of path-dependent processes in shaping various patterns of historical
events. If the papers in this symposium make that clear, they will have
done historical sociology a great service.

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