Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were convinced that their meeting represented the last great chance to save the Union from dismemberment.See, for example, the following observations by George Washington, Elbridge Gerry, and Edmund Randolph, respectively:That something is necessary, none will deny; for the situation of the general government, if it can be called a government, is shaken to its foundation, and liable to be overturned by every blast. In a word, it is at an end; and, unless a remedy is soon applied, anarchy and confusion, will inevitably ensue. (Letter of George Washington to Thomas Jefferson, May 30, 1787, repr. in Max Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, rev. ed., 4 vols. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937] 3:31)The object of this Meeting is very important in my Mind unless a System of Government is adopted by Compact, Force I expect will plant the Standard: for such an anarchy as now exists cannot last long. (Letter of Elbridge Gerry to James Monroe, June 11, 1787, ibid., 45)Are we not on the eve of war, which is only prevented by the hopes from this convention. (Opening remarks of Edmund Randolph as recorded by James McHenry of Maryland, May 29, 1787, ibid., 1:26. By the same token, they recognized that the constitution they were to draft would determine the fate of the states composing the Union. In a letter to Edmund Randolph in advance of the Convention, James Madison highlighted the dichotomous nature of the task confronting the delegates intent on strengthening the national government without eliminating the states as political entities.

In the decade following the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a spate of significant advancements in civil rights provided new hope and opportunity for African Americans. On December 5, 1946, in an unprecedented move, President Harry Truman created a civil rights committee “to study and report on the problem of federally secured civil rights, with a view to making recommendations to Congress.” In little less than a year, the committee drafted and submitted a report more sweeping than Truman had likely expected. Entitled To Secure These Rights, the report called for no less than an outright “elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life.” To achieve this goal, the committee stressed that the federal government would have to assume much greater responsibility in the protection of civil rights. It recommended both an ever more vigilant Justice Department and the enactment of comprehensive national legislation. On February 2, 1948, the president called on the Congress to endorse his ten-point civil rights program in order to “correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy.”Truman's 1947 State of the Union address, January 6, 1947, Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1947 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1962), 9; The President's Committee on Civil Rights, (PCCR) To Secure These Rights (New York: Simon and Schuster, October 26, 1947), 166; Truman's Special Message to the Congress on Civil Rights, February 2, 1948, Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1948 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1964), 126. On July 26, 1948, acting alone, Truman issued two executive orders; one designed to end racial discrimination in federal employment, the other barring segregation in the armed forces.

In 1997, Ira Katznelson contributed to the ongoing discussion among social scientists and historians about how to analyze class formation and the development of the American state. He was particularly interested in tying this research to the history of liberalism in an effort to both historicize the generalizations of Louis Hartz and address the question of American exceptionalism. Evaluating the body of research, Katznelson argued that authors had too frequently abstracted the state from its context and then used it to explain the very phenomena that helped define the state's character in the first place. In part to imbed the state more concretely in its environment, he suggested “a shift in angle of vision away from the state as such to the character of the rules and institutions that govern the transactions between the state and civil society.” This shift would also contribute to the study of America's prevailing liberalism, which has shaped the environment of the working class and the state, even while its own particular character has been the subject of some of the most profound divisions in American public life. Using J. David Greenstone's work, Katznelson defined liberalism as a “boundary condition,” that is, “‘a set of relatively permanent features of a particular context that affect causal relationships within it' even as it remains subject to dispute.” In times of crisis, conflicts over liberalism's “grammar of rules,” or it's “bundle of institutions and norms,” spill across the line between state and civil society, because they involve redefining the relation between the two.Ira Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation and American Exceptionalism, Yet Again,” in American Exceptionalism? US Working-Class Formation in an International Context, ed. Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 36–55, quotations on 40 and 42.

Many perceive the clash between those advocating rational choice theory and their critics to be the dominant cleavage in contemporary political science. At least as fundamental, if much less widely discussed, is the divide over the role of historical analysis (or the investigation of temporal processes). Most social scientists take a “snapshot” view of political life. How does the distribution of public opinion affect policy outcomes? How do individual social characteristics influence propensities to vote? How do electoral rules affect the structure of party systems? Disputes among competing theories center on which factors (“variables”) in the current environment generate important political outcomes. Variable-centered analy- ses are based, however, on some questionable assump- tions about how the social world works.For useful discussions see Andrew Abbott, “Transcending General Linear Reality,” Sociological Theory 6 (1988): 169–86; John C. Harsanyi, “Explanation and Comparative Dynamics in the Social Sciences,” Behavioral Science 5 (1960): 136–45; and Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). The significance of such variables is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. There is often a strong case to be made for shifting from snapshots to moving pictures. Placing politics in time systematically situating particular moments (including the present) in a temporal sequence of events and processes can greatly enrich our understanding of complex social dynamics.

Political science is notoriously divided into subfields. In parallel, most journals are restricted to one or another part of the discipline and most faculty teach only within their specializations and have little time to read outside of it. We then tend to lose sight of the fact that all of us are studying politics of one form or another and so perspectives that span the divisions are particularly valuable.

Paul Pierson's “Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes” is a fitting centerpiece for this symposium. The article takes up themes that have occupied students of comparative politics for some time now and moves the debate decisively forward.For earlier efforts to assess the role of sequencing and timing in politics, see for example, Harsanyi's discussion of “static” and “dynamic” explanation (J. Harsanyi, “Explanation and Comparative Dynamics in Social Science,” Behavioral Science 5 (1960): 136–45); also Verba's early attempts within the context of modernization theory to specify more precisely a “sequential model” that linked outcomes within particular countries to the sequence in which they encountered a set of putatively common challenges (Sidney Verba, “Sequences and Development,” in Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971], 283–316). Tilly has dealt with related issues of temporality and ordering; see Charles Tilly, “Future History,” Theory and Society 17 (1988): 703–12; Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984); and Tilly, “The Time of States,” Social Research 61 (1994): 269–95. Schmitter and Santiso have also addressed these topics (Philippe C. Schmitter and Javier Santiso, “Three Temporal Dimensions to the Consolidation of Democracy,” International Political Science Review 19 (1998): 69–92). And of course, Pierson's agenda picks up on themes long advocated by the editors of this journal to take temporality seriously (Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Beyond the Iconography of Order: Notes for a ‘New' Institutionalism,” in The Dynamics of American Politics, eds. Lawrence C. Dodd and Calvin Jillson (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994). Pierson's overall message is that social phenomena are often better captured in “moving pictures” that situate a given outcome within a broader temporal framework than in “snapshots” based on cross-sectional data. He constructs a convincing case for this proposition and along the way he also makes progress in rendering the ubiquitous but vague concept of path dependence more useful.For other treatments of this issue see Stephen D. Krasner, “Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective,” Comparative Political Studies 21 (1988): 66–94; Timur Kuran, “The Tenacious Past: Theories of Personal and Collective Conservatism,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 10 (1988): 143–71; Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and James Mahoney, “Uses of Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,” unpubl. ms., Brown University, 1999.

Paul Pierson has undertaken an important theoretical venture for comparative politics, and for social science more broadly. Recognizing the historical turn in the social sciences, and taken with the theoretical power of path dependence, Pierson hopes to generate “portable” mid-range theoretical constructs to align history and social science more closely. Were we to have an armament of arguable hypotheses about timing, sequence, and “temporal processes” our understanding of politics and political development would be much advanced. This is a tempting prospect.

Taken as a group, the three commentaries reveal many of the difficult challenges, as well as opportunities, that confront social scientists exploring issues of temporality. Although the three authors take quite different stances, each highlights important issues for further work sensitive to historical process. Here I begin with Amy Bridges's more critical commentary before turning to the responses of Jervis and Thelen.