ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to contribute to a solution of the problem of synthesizing an interest in generalization with proper concern for the uniqueness of particular countries and events. It does this by giving an account of what will be called "contextually limited generalizations." Science seeks order in the world of experience. It searches for commonalities, patterns, invariances, recurrent features in the infinite universe of facts. Part of the reason for the prejudice that the ultimate aim of a mature science is to discover universal laws is that the context described by Newtonian mechanics is so broad as to encompass all of our everyday experience. The task of the explanatory or theoretical social sciences is to discover and explain "the less obvious dependencies in the social sphere." It is well known that the social sciences make use of models or constructs, or ideal types, in their efforts to organize and make sense of the social world.
