The understanding that we now have about social development and change through the work of Theda Skocpol and other contemporaries is not just academic by nature - developing lawlike generalizations in a natural sciences style and reporting for the limited scholarly community. It is as much civilizing in its potential consequences, both in the world of higher education and in the world of advice and consultancy. Using some of Skocpol's work as illustration, I shall argue that explicit and careful methodology is necessary for comparison to have civilizing consequences, what these civilizing consequences can be in the context of higher education and in the context of the never-ending support the political realm seeks from the academic.

Skocpol's work is best summarized in her own words: it is macro-analytic comparative-historical social science.¹ Quite a daunting exercise when simply looking at the semantics. It becomes clearer, though, when we outline what that stands for, and comparison with other 'types' of comparative literature will show where Skocpol's work stands.

Comparative studies can be classified according to what they compare: nation and states, policies, organizations, levels of government, previous and present circumstances, and so forth. Guy Peters distinguished between cross-national, cross-level, cross-policy, and cross-time comparisons.² From the start of her career Skocpol has combined cross-national and cross-time analysis. In the course of the 1980s a cross-policy focus became more and more explicit, especially concerning the development of welfare policy in the U.S.A. Finally, from the second half of the 1980s onward a cross-level perspective seemed to emerge, evidenced by remarks about how, for instance, women's associations were built up from the local, to the state, to the federal level³ and how industrial policy for economic growth was more pursued at state and local levels than at federal level.⁴ Unlike the other three perspectives, though, the cross-level perspective is not systematically investigated.

Equally important is how we compare. Skocpol and Somers categorized three approaches: parallel demonstration of theory, contrast of contexts, and macro-causal analysis. Skocpol favors the last of these types, which is characterized by controlled comparisons of macro phenomena by using, for instance, Mill's method of agreement and method of difference, explaining well-defined outcomes or patterns, always exploring alternative explanations, not using a preconceived general model.⁵ Skocpol outlines an ambitious research goal:

From an institutionalist perspective, we should be looking for the cultural and ideolgocial dimensions of all institutions, organizations, social groups, and political conflicts, so that we can integrate those dimensions into all aspects of our explanations and accounts of both the roots and outcomes of social revolutions.⁶

Skocpol is ambitious as well as realistic and humble in what can be achieved. She firmly believes in and works at macro-causal analysis but does not believe in the development of grand theory old style (evolutionist etc.) nor in the (second best) development of lawlike generalizations. That there are limits to generalization is not simply because of Galton's observation a century ago that causal patterns could only be 'proven' if the independence of units of analysis could be guaranteed. Skocpol is certainly aware of this but to argue that causal analysis as such is therefore impossible would be to throw out the baby with the bathwater. The comparative historical method in the social sciences, instead, seeks to establish causes and to analyze trajectories while appreciating the unique context of each development.⁷ In her approach, history is certainly not efficient in the sense that problems can rapidly be solved conditional upon the current environmental situation and independent of the historical path. She embraces instead a limited view of path dependence, acknowledges that the past is important for understanding contemporary configurations, that our interpretations of the present may vary, and that knowledge of the past cannot and should not be used to predict.⁸ Path dependency in terms of strict causality should be abandoned altogether; path dependency in terms of causal understanding is the best we can do. And this is not a second best option; rather it is the more challenging one.

A powerful motive for any type of research, and certainly for comparative work, is to set the record straight. In recent years various studies have reminded us of the important if not decisive role that extended families, settlement women, and mothers played in shaping the early American society and social welfare state. Skocpol's 1992 study is especially remarkable if one considers the European development in this area. In terms of welfare development, America was generally considered the 'laggard', developing social welfare programs decades after they had emerged in Europe. Skocpol showed how, instead, America initially developed a social policy along a maternalist angle (i.e., support of civil war veterans, mothers, and children) while in Europe social policy was much more paternalist by nature (i.e., protection of working men through disability and unemployment support). Not only is her work and that of others completing our understanding of the past, it is also reviving the common knowledge around the turn of the century that women were a political force to be reckoned with.

In our time, comparative studies are more important than ever before, for international as well as domestic reasons. It is important to understand the impact of an international global economy, to understand the nature of contemporary international relations, and to learn from social developments elsewhere. The international arena has increasingly become the context in which the domestic arena is shaped. Comparative research can help to identify what transnational linkages exist and what the role has been/can be of transnational diffusion of ideas. Meanwhile, the biggest challenge in the domestic polities of the western world is the recasting of the welfare state. We have never done anything like that, for such a large and interventionist government is quite recent from a historical point of view. Cross-time research is then a necessity for we are likely to learn less from the reform experience in other countries (in view of the different pasts) than from the particular route that shaping the social welfare state has taken in our own country. What we can learn from cross-national comparison is how social structure and state capacity developed and influenced success or failure of socioeconomic intervention by the state.⁹

Do our students benefit from the increase of comparative studies? Given the international and domestic need for comparative education, it is astonishing to see how few programs in public administration and political science have a comparative class as a standard and mandatory element, and then mostly in doctoral programs. Undergraduate and master programs would benefit as much. If we are really serious about the desire to improve the adaptive capacities of government, we should start now with the education of our students, since from among their ranks the public servants of the future are recruited. What is learned early is learned well.
 
 

The social sciences have had a hard time when trying to emulate the natural science way of knowledge development in order to become more 'scientific'. In the (useless!) effort to show relevance to society at large and government in particular, promises have been made about usable knowledge that really have not come through. The continuous challenge has been to provide usable knowledge, and the struggle has focused on how to translate understanding into actual policy. Usable knowledge thus understood is extremely limited. Given her support to a limited conception path dependency, it will not come as a surprise that Skocpol warns against promises of policy relevance and believes that ". . . excellent historical sociology can actually speak more meaningfully to real-life concerns than narrowly focused empiricist studies that pride themselves on their "policy relevance."¹⁰ Hence, knowing the path(s) is important, but much more so for the present than for the future. A present- and future-oriented scholarly pursuit negates civilization and literally cuts us away from our geographical and historical origins. It would also have us believe that solutions adopted from elsewhere will work out just fine in a different context. However, at the level of day-to-day politics it would be very unwise not to consider the cultural embeddedness of policies, structures, procedures, and actions of governments.

For those that we could not educate (i.e. all public servants at present) we can only hope that they listen to advice, especially if that advice is not the clear-cut, short-term perspective so often employed in the face of complex policy problems. The shorter the individual time horizons, the greater the risk of weakened support for institutions, norms, and values. By way of example, the concept of 'civil society' is often used in a paternalist connotation and a short-term time horizon. In order to improve the division of labor between government and citizen, public policy should set out to 'coerce' the citizen into participation. Work-welfare programs are not just testimony to the American appreciation of 'handouts' and the American conceptualization of 'welfare' (they are used in Britain, for instance), they are also testimony to a rather simplistic way of thinking. Do we really believe that work-welfare programs will help to create a new civil society? Civil society should be rooted in a sense of community, or as a woman in 1910 remarked: "Home is not within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery."¹¹

We are now in a period when the late eighteenth century Antifederalist and late nineteenth century early Progressivist appreciation for local self-government and government by association and community is reviving. In the context of Skocpol's recent work, it appears that the dominant conceptualization of civil society is paternalist and thus incomplete. It is interesting that the later Progressivists (i.e., 1900s-1920s) turned to a 'harder' and more masculine approach to public sector reform for fear that otherwise reform would be considered too 'soft' and sentimental and thus fail. Late progressivism partially coincided with the time that the nationwide women's movement became internally divided and disintegrated into professionally defined groups. Mary Parker Follett's ideas about government by association which represent a much more complete concept of civil society, were already 'outdated' at the time of their publication. Since that time, a masculine approach to the study of public administration and to government has dominated, and the awareness of the degree to which gender determines perspective and interpretation is only recently increasing, and slowly it goes.

What, then, is the civilizing consequence of comparison for the world of consultancy and advice? First, it is to show that distinctions such as hard and soft, masculine and feminine, simply will not do if approached one-sidedly and dichotomously. Rather, they are complementary and lead to a fuller understanding of the basis upon which the intertwinement of government and society can and (on a more normative note) should rest. Second, comparison is civilizing when not departing from analogies.

Training in and learning about a comparative perspective is certainly meaningful for civil servants and will have consequences for policy making. After all, civil servants not only need to assess potential policy scenarios in terms of political feasibility but also in terms of path dependency. We should therefore increase special programs targeting (higher) civil servants that are focused on developing their sensitivity to time and context, to the fact that understanding the past means understanding that each era is characterized by the simultaneous occurrence of continuity, diversity, and change, in different degrees, but always.

I like to think that a comparative perspective also has meaning for politics, but I am less convinced that it will have consequences for politics. To develop a popular progressive politics is a worthy cause and it is undeniably helpful that cross-national and cross-time research, for instance, shows that Americans need not look elsewhere but can tap into their own rich past and traditions when seeking to strengthen family security.¹² This is indeed what academics can do for their governments: provide deep understanding. Contemporary politicians, though, may/will/can not take the time to be educated. The electoral cycle is short and the electorate (so it is believed) desires clear-cut solutions and instant gratification.My hope for a substantive strengthening of American politics and politicians lies therefore with education from early on.

How does Skocpol's work compare to that of other comparativists? There are scores of comparativists (at least in public administration) whose work can be characterized as a compare-to-compile approach for classroom purposes. There are many other comparativists (more so in political science) who produce theoretical and methodogically solid empirical work motivated by the compare-to-correlate approach for 'hard science' hopes. My appreciation of Skocpol's work is for the accumulative quality and thrust of her compare-to-civilize approach. Her work is accumulative in terms of approach for it has come to include all four types of comparison; it is accumulative in terms of theme for slowly expanding the scope of her comparative analysis; and it is, finally, also accumulative in terms of ambition level, moving from pure academically driven research to policy concerns and even political advice.

The thrust of her work comes from the genuine desire for scholarship, evidenced in (a) her memory of how Barrington Moore set an example to follow¹³, (b) her explicit hope that real scholarly research will make a difference, (c) the 'discovery' of how our perspective on reality can be gender-related, and (d) the need to understand America's uniqueness.

What, then, is civilizing about comparative research? First, comparison leads us to go beyond one-sided judgment and appreciate other perspectives in their own right. We are civilized not when we have reached a particular stage of development (as evolutionist social scientists of the nineteenth century would have us believe) but when we are open-minded. Second, we are civilized as scholars if we show restraint in terms of personal judgment and are willing to correct our own perspectives, if we are courteous and fair in our criticism toward colleagues, and if we have the courage to explicit our approach toward others. Third, there is the nature of our civilization that requires consideration. Can we really understand our own time, our own civilization, and the civilizing process without comparison? In general the answer is no, of course. More specifically, say with an eye on public servants, the answer is also a denial. More than fifty years ago Waldo and Dahl, among others, argued in favor of more comparative research and it is amazing to see how it is continuously necessary to remind people of that. Time and again Skocpol sets an excellent example, not yet emulated in the public administration literature. That her compare-to-civilize approach is relevant for the study of public administration is without question: it would elevate the study beyond technocratic and static principles and masculine perspectives that so have dominated the twentieth century.
 

1.  Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 304.

2.  Guy B. Peters, Comparing Public Bureaucracies: Problems of Theory and Method (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), 2-8.

3.  Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass./London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 527-528.

4.  Kenneth Finegold and Theda Skocpol, State and Party in America's New Deal (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 228.

5. Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 362-375.

6.   Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World, 336.

7.  Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 38-39, 289.

8.  Finegold and Skocpol, State and Party in America's New Deal, 224.

9.  Peter R. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 358.

10.  Skocpol, Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, 5.

11.  Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political origins of Social Policy in the United States, 331.

12.  Theda Skocpol, "A Partnership with American Families," in Stanley B. Greenberg and Theda Skocpol, The New Majority: Toward a Popular Progressive Politics (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1997), 109-110.

13.  Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World, 332; Theda Skocpol, ed., Democracy, Revolution, and History (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1998), x.