I was inspired to pursue political science by the comparative historical studies that promised answers to big questions of dictatorship and democracy, revolution and reaction, and wealth and poverty. The methods underpinning the study of those big questions mostly centered on reading and looking for patterns. The routine of a political scientist was to spend a couple of years reading great books, criticize them in graduate seminars, and emerge proclaiming to have found a better way. Today, the approach has changed significantly. Now it is a field full of smaller questions, lots of data, solid causal identification, and cleaner answers. I myself have mostly stopped teaching the comparative historical classics. Why? Graduate students find themselves drowned in statistics and warned off the big, messy questions. History is now a mere repository of “data points.”
If comparative historical analysis (CHA) is ever to re-enter the mainstream, it needs a “grammar,” Marcus Kreuzer contends; that is, a good description of what it is, its various components, and what makes it distinctive from its rivals in purely quantitative social science. In his ambitious and deeply learned book The Grammar of Time (2023), he sets out to do this.
Kreuzer’s central contribution lies in his reframing of CHA as a way of doing social scientific research that oscillates between historical specificity and theoretical generalization. He introduces the concept of “unfreezing” history and geography, encouraging scholars to treat time and space as dynamic rather than static categories. This approach helps researchers move beyond reductionist frameworks and engage with the fluidity of historical processes. By emphasizing the need to contextualize events without losing sight of broader patterns, Kreuzer assembles a toolkit that is at once flexible and theoretically robust.
One particularly noteworthy feature of the book is its exploration of how CHA serves two purposes: hypothesis generation (exploration) and hypothesis evaluation/testing (assessment). Kreuzer argues that the dynamic nature of history requires that researchers continuously update their research questions and frameworks, making CHA an inherently iterative methodology.
Kreuzer tells us that we need to think more broadly about research design and move beyond a narrow focus on the technical and confirmatory parts of methodology. “This broadening recognizes that focusing exclusively on causal inference techniques diverts attention from the research tasks required to identify interesting macro-historical question.” (p. 140) The strength of CHA refocuses the scholar’s attention on investigating, exploring, identifying patterns, developing concepts, “and conjecturing about possible explanations.” Only in this way will social science be able to formulate new and theoretically vital research questions, specify concepts, avoid boredom, and pay close attention to nonlinear causal processes. No doubt, this process is messier than what he labels “variable-based analysis.” To his credit, Kreuzer sorts through how CHA is done and labels its parts—what else could a grammar do?
Another strength of the book is its interdisciplinary scope. By integrating insights from political science, history, psychology, biology, and sociology, Kreuzer bridges disciplinary divides, making the book a valuable resource for a broad group of scholars. His emphasis on methodological pluralism is particularly noteworthy, as it invites researchers to combine qualitative and quantitative approaches while remaining sensitive to the nuances of historical context.
Kreuzer also includes online resources, an annotated bibliography, quizzes, and advanced exercises that enhance the book’s value for teaching. These tools make it an exceptionally useful resource for graduate students and instructors teaching courses on comparative historical methods. Historians might not appreciate its methodological and philosophical deep dives, and statistical purists might find it too mushy, but that is unavoidable in such a spirited defense of CHA. It must be emphasized that the author is not a mushy thinker. He avoids cheap shots against purely statistical and static models, cleverly pointing to the advantages of CHA and what good comparative historical researchers actually do that makes their work indispensable.
At various points in the book, Kreuzer illustrates his “grammar” through an extended discussion of the history of the adoption of proportional representation electoral systems. He does the same with the literature on populism. The pairing of concepts and methods with examples is very effective, and the reader is left wishing he had done this more frequently. The examples provide necessary touchstones when the discussion tends to abstraction—a “toolbox” should be a bit more user-friendly.
Indeed, my only criticism deals with the book’s “user-friendliness.” This ambitious text is a “grammar,” meaning it attaches names and labels to the various components and techniques of CHA even where the original authors do not. That is fair and perhaps unavoidable when trying to pin down a methodology that has thus far evaded definition, but it can sometimes overwhelm the reader. At times, there are so many new terms that it runs the risk of a long Russian novel, mired down in a plethora of names and patronymics that make the story all the harder to follow. I was also reminded of Perry Anderson’s criticism of Jean-Paul Sartre with his “‘hermetic and unrelenting maze of neologisms.” This is high-octane stuff, to be sure, and the payoff for reading Kreuzer is well worth the effort. Nevertheless, more concrete examples would have better guided the reader through the maze of methodological concepts. Even so, having made it through, I emerged enlightened and energized.
Most of us are consumers rather than producers of social scientific methodology. Works of methodology, in fact, are at their best when they inspire us to do our own work with more enthusiasm and precision, and to reassure us we are not alone. Markus Kreuzer has performed a very important service to the field by having written a book that accomplishes exactly that.
