Problematizing Comparative Historical Studies

Abstract

In this text I am going to argue that unless it opens itself to discussions that dominate contemporary social and human sciences, and unless protection of the specificity of historical research is undertaken, there is a real risk that history might be reduced to the status of an auxiliary science of other human and social sciences that have thus far been more successful in interpreting contemporary events and phenomena which have traditionally been consigned to the field of history. I claim that the weak points of contemporary historical studies are methodology and theory separated from empirical research in such a way that they are unable to capture complex phenomena which have emerged with the advent of modernity. In order to link practice and theory, I propose to appropriate for historical research what has been called ”grounded theory”-theory developed out of data, and which uses comparative approaches and case studies as its main methods. The text contains two parts: in part one, I indicate ways in which theories in contemporary human and social science have failed to deal with historical change and in part two, I sketch a methodology of grounded theory.