Philosophy of History/Comparative History of Major Developments

This is the fifth in a series of articles in which the historians of the Bradley Commission elaborate on the meaning of the six vital themes; Gordon A. Craig discusses the theme: Comparative History of Major Developments.” Comparison is a particularly useful tool of analysis, and, it is hoped, will become a “habit of the mind.”

As these lines are being written, one of the most remarkable developments since the end of the Second World War is taking place, the transformation of Eastern Europe, as the various Warsaw Pact nations turn from totalitarian government to reform regimes and democratic socialism. The future historians of this process will depend heavily upon the comparative method to explain it, for it will be by means of careful description of the various totalitarian governments and a careful assessment of similarities and differences between them that they will be able to weigh the importance of such things as the role of nationality , bureaucratic structure, economic performance and vulnerability, ideological conviction, generational attitudes, and external influences (Western television, for example, or perestroika) in determining their relative susceptibility to pressure for reform and the reasons why the ruling party in Hungary, for example, reacted differently from that in East Germany.

Comparison is a useful tool of analysis for both political scientists and historians, although they tend to use it differently. Political scientists are more interested in the similarities that it reveals than the differences, and have demonstrated, by the use of structured comparative analysis of similar phenomena, that correlations between variables may have causal significance or predictive value. Historians are apt to be more interested in differences. They are willing to admit that revolutions in history have so many common factors that one may speak, somewhat loosely to be sure, of there being an anatomy of a revolution. But they are still interested in asking why, despite their similarities, the French Revolution issued in a military dictatorship and the Russian Revolution did not, and why the American Revolution was so different from either of the others, and to what extent this was true because its leaders were taking as their model the English Revolution of the seventeenth century.

Comparison is a highly effective means of restoring precise meaning to terms that have lost it through slipshod usage. One has a clearer understanding, for example, of the course of international affairs in the nineteenth century and the coming of the First World War if one realizes that between the Congress of Vienna and 1914 the nature of the European balance of power was not constant but variable, moving from a flexible system of interpenetrating combinations of lightly armed powers, to a complicated network of secret alliances controlled by the manipulations of a single power (the Bismarck system), to a polarized but highly unstable system of armed coalitions that was constantly threatening to collapse and finally did. Comparison of the relative weight of armamaments, military systems, economic competition, and nationalist feeling and ideological zeal in the three different systems also throws light on the progressive weakening of the supports of peace.

Comparison is no less important in illuminating aspects of social, economic and cultural history. It is well known that the extension of education to the masses was one of the great achievements of nineteenth century liberalism, but it is nevertheless instructive o compare the record of the liberal paries of Switzerland, France and Great Britain in this respect and to note the relative foot-dragging that took place in the last case and the different arguments that were put forward for education bills in the three countries, for this tells us a good deal about their values, their economic requirements in the industrial age, and even their systems of social stratification. Similarly, a comparison of the emergence of the social welfare state in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States raises the interesting question of why the most democratic of these three societies has been most reluctant to grant social security to its citizens, also a cultural question but one, in addition, that involves analysis of the relationship between the state and the individual in the three countries.

It is because comparative history raises provocative questions of this nature that it is such an admirable tool of classroom instruction, constantly inviting students not merely to accept the past but to engage actively in the process of seeking to understand it.