In a Recent Critical review of sociological perspectives on historical problems, Skocpol observed, “Until the 1970s, ‘historical sociology’ was not a phrase one often, if ever, heard in conversations among sociologists in the United States” (Skocpol, 1984: 356). Of course there was a good deal of prior historical work by sociologists, some of which Skocpol herself goes on to cite. Yet, by her phrasing, she has inadvertently raised a question about the place of history in the discipline of sociology. Like almost all sociologists who use historical materials or perspectives, Skocpol sees reason to complain about the failure of sociology to give a larger place to history. But for me, a prior issue, in the spirit of a historically minded sociology, involves discovering what happened to the name “historical sociology.” The naming of an activity, in this case historical sociology, and its performance—historical research and interpretations by sociologists—are quite distinct. The first task is to clarify their relationship.

Over the ten years of its existence, the Social Science History Association has been a meeting place for groups in rebellion against the dominant orthodoxies of their disciplines. Thus it is fitting that an SSHA panel should assess the accomplishments and relationship of “social history” and “historical sociology,” two movements that have grown up as critiques of formerly dominant orientations in (respectively) the disciplines of history and sociology.

A Commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue should not mask the unwieldy complexity of “social science history,” this strange-sounding compound word invented to stress the equality of partners in their joint enterprise. Some of the benefits as well as the difficulties inherent in crossing disciplinary boundaries can be detected, from a historian’s point of view, in Theda Skocpol’s Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984) in which a group of young historical sociologists and two “sociologically acclimated social historians” reassess the work of major figures in the subfield of historical sociology. approached this book with considerable excitement, for at the time of its publication, I had just sent to press the manuscript of Reliving the Past (1985), a volume in which five historians of different regions of the world reappraise the use of social-scientific models in historical analysis, examine the ways in which these models are applicable to different geographic areas and take a fresh look at the place of social history within history. To add to my excitement, Charles Tilly, who contributed an essay on European social history to Reliving the Past, was one of the nine major figures whose work was examined in Vision and Method, a testament to the influential role this scholar has played in the two disciplines of sociology and history.

Social Scientists use historical data. Historians use social science concepts. The intersection of these two disciplines, history and social science, has been a vibrant source of research questions over the last fifteen years but also raises the issue of how they are to be interrelated. The search for an answer to this question has resulted in the publication of Theda Skocpol’s Vision and Method in Historical Sociology and Olivier Zunz’s Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, which juxtapose the two words in different order. In Skocpol (1984) history modifies sociology; in Zunz (1985) social science modifies history. Both books are collections of articles. Skocpol’s volume contains nine reviews of the work of masters in this field along with an introduction and conclusion by the editor. Zunz’s has an introduction which reviews the literature of social history in five areas of the world: Western Europe, the United States, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and China. This review highlights the strength of Skocpol’s method and of Zunz’s commitment to analysis of non-Western societies but argues that both authors, in limiting their definition of the field to studies of production, ignore an equally vital topic for social analysis of the past, reproduction.

There may have been a time when one could characterize the difference between sociology and history in terms of sociological attention to generalization and theory in contrast to historical specificity. A quarter of a century ago, E. H. Carr (1961) was earnestly exorcising the ghost of Ranke from his discipline while C. Wright Mills (1956) was vehemently ranting against the twin devils of abstract empiricism and grand theory. Happily, we now only evoke the distinction between sociological universalism and historical particularism in required graduate classes or in ritualistic self-affirmations at professional meetings. When sociological books include chapters on Marc Bloch or E. P. Thompson and historical books liberally cite Marx, Weber, and Durkheim while urging social historians to seek higher levels of generalization, how do we explain the difference between the two disciplines to our poor confused graduate students?

This essay probes two matters. First, it establishes the extent and pattern of partisan-based dissent on the California Supreme Court during the so-called “party period” of American history, the years from roughly 1840 to 1920 (McCormick, 1979). It concludes that the concept of judicial independence retained great vitality despite a strongly partisan scheme of accountability. Second, it suggests that constitutional arrangements and environmental conditions were important in conditioningjudicial behavior. While these findings are preliminary, they nonetheless constitute an important first step toward unraveling the character of California’s and the nation’s judicial cultures during this extraordinary period of party development (Hall, 1984).

Migration has long been recognized as an important mechanism for allowing populations to adjust to changing economic conditions (Goldstein and Goldstein, 1981; Findley, 1977, 1982). Massive population movements from rural to urban locations were an integral part of the European modernization process, as were movements to hitherto undeveloped frontier regions including ones overseas. Rapid urban growth, due in part to migration, has more recently characterized many of the developing nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.