The Debate on Historical Sociology: Rational Choice Theory and Its Critics

Abstract

In the past two decades, many sociologists have denied the use‐fulness of general theories in favor of more particularistic ap‐proaches to historical explanation, which makes it difficult to specify both the causal relations and the causal mechanisms that account for social outcomes. This article offers some philosophical and theo‐retical justifications for the use of general theory in historical analy‐sis and contends that general theory guides the selection of facts, provides a source of generalizable causal mechanisms, facilitates the cumulation of knowledge across substantive domains, reveals anom‐alies that lead to new questions, and creates the conditions under which existing theories can be supplanted by superior ones. The au‐thors further outline the concrete research practices that flow from their approach and discuss several empirical studies that exemplify these five advantages.