Paper Abstract
This is a 6 page paper discussing Skocpol’s use of Mill’s methods of agreement and difference in her studies of social revolutions. In Theda Skocpol’s “States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China”, she uses John Stuart Mills’ methods of agreement and difference to appropriate logical causes of social revolutions in her comparative historical analyses. Stanley Lieberson, on the other hand, disagreed with Skocpol’s application of Mill’s methods when applied to small-N situations in sociological inquiry and this application of Mill by Skocpol “does not allow for probabilistic theories, interaction effects, measurement errors, or even the presence of more than one cause”. Despite this argument, most social researchers, including Skocpol agree that Mill’s methods can be used in social comparative research as long as the causes discussed are only generalized to those cases studied. In Skocpol’s study, the cause of social revolutions in France, Russia and China were based largely on the organized peasant revolts and the breakdown of the monarchical state administrations. Bibliography lists 6 sources.
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