Comparative and Historical Sociology of Women’s Careers: an Introduction

Various hypotheses have been used to examine gender inequality in careers, while at the same time comparative and historical sociology has developed around certain areas of interest. This introduction clarifies that there is a need for a comparative and historical sociology specifically related to women’s careers. It presents the rationale for this special issue, which gathers articles opening gateways to further research in this vein.

Max Weber and Comparison

This paper reconsiders Max Weber’s method of comparison focusing on the changes between 1904 and 1920. The method employed in this study involves the comparison of two texts of his main works: the old and new manuscripts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, and the old and new versions of Die Protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus. The results reveal that the “comparison” of Max Weber gradually moved from “thick comparisons” based on descriptions of causal attribution in psychological or legal sense and elective affinity in Goethe’s sense to “broad comparisons” related to causal explanation through interpretive understanding and that only the latter has been adopted by various works in comparative and historical sociology.

Moral Purity and Persecution in History. By Barrington Moore, Jr. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 158p. $19.95.

From time out of mind, people have killed, maimed, and oppressed one another in two sorts of conflicts: over material interests (real estate, slave labor, agricultural surplus, war booty, and so on) and over what Max Weber would have termed "ideal interests" (conflicts over ultimate meanings, salvation, principles of justice, definitions of social order). Barrington Moore's classical and landmark study, Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), explored the first mode of conflict in the making of modern nation-states. All social scientists are forever in his debt for that effort. It ranks as one of the most important contributions to the fields of comparative and historical sociology.