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Initial Conditions, General Laws, Path
Dependence, and Explanation in
Historical Sociology 1
Jack A. Goldstone
University of California, Davis
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.
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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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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?
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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.
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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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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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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.
REFERENCES
Arthur, W. Brian. 1994. Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Arthur, W. B., Y. M. Ermoliev, and Y. M. Kaniovaski. 1983. “A Generalized Urn
Problem and Its Applications.” Cybernetics 19:61–71.
Brustein, William. 1996. The Logic of Evil. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
David, Paul A. 1997. “Path Dependence and the Quest for Historical Economics: One
More Chorus on the Ballad of QWERTY.” Manuscript. All Soul’s College, Oxford
University.
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Skocpol, Theda, and Margaret R. Somers. 1980. “The Uses of Comparative History
in Macrosocial Inquiry.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22:174–97.
Somers, Margaret R. 1994. “Narrative and the Constitution of Identity: A Relational
and Network Approach.” Theory and Society.
———. 1996. “Where Is Sociology after the Historic Turn? Knowledge, Cultures, and
Historical Epistemologies.” In The Historic Turn in the Social Sciences, edited by
Terence J. McDonald. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Tilly, Charles. 1978. From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley.
Tullock, Gordon. 1971. “The Paradox of Revolution.” Public Choice 1:89–99.
Wrigley, E. A. 1988. Continuity, Chance, and Change: The Character of the Industrial
Revolution in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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