Heat, Stones and Eggs: A Methodological Approach for Analyzing Capitalism as a Complex World-Historical Social System

Beverly Silver, Johns Hopkins University

The recent widening/deepening of global crises has prompted a resurgence of social scientific interest in the study of capitalism as a complex global social system that constrains local actors and outcomes. The main methodological approaches in the comparative-historical toolkit tend to either focus on relations across space while reducing time to a static variable (comparative approaches), or focus on change over time while reducing space to a static variable (narrative approaches). While these are effective strategies for reducing the complexity of research designs, they are inadequate strategies for analyzing capitalism as a complex global and historical system that unfolds through dynamic space-time. This paper elaborates methodological principles and strategies designed for the study of world-historical capitalism. These include conceptualizing historical capitalism as a set of systemic processes or a totality (structure) that is more and different than the sum of its parts, and which shapes/constrains local actors (agency). These systemic processes, however, do not act like a steamroller, transforming social relations at the local level along a theoretically predetermined path. Instead, geography and prior history matter. In making this point, the paper draws on Mao’s metaphor of “heat, stones, and eggs”. The paper then flips perspective to focus on methods for explaining past (and predicting future) system-level transformations, arguing that under certain conditions (e.g., world hegemonic crises), the causal relationship between “parts” and “wholes” inverts, such that local agency can transform the structure of the system itself. Finally, the paper discusses the respective roles of quantitative and narrative analysis, as well as the importance of the interconnected triad—theory, methods and empirical research—undergirding the power (including the predictive power) of this approach. The key points in the paper are made more concrete by drawing on exemplary texts and via an analysis of the current historical conjuncture.

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 Presented in Session 22. Structure and Space in Historical Causality