ABSTRACT
Comparative studies are moving into a stage where the technology of research can be fitted together with the more abstract components of research design and applied to case materials. When such a fit is more secure it will be possible to treat many cases and classes of events diachronically and synchronically. This represents a change from an earlier period when individual monographic studies were essential for the gathering of materials on exotic cultures and social systems in order to show how the parts of each made up a functioning system. Today, the research techniques and analytical constructs developed in industrial societies can not only be utilized by modernizing societies but can also be employed by historians for comparative purposes. Although the use of history, particularly in developmental analysis, has been a commonplace since Karl Marx, and Max Weber brought analytical historical comparisons to the status of a high art, most historians remain wary of sweeping historical generalizations and of the efforts of contemporary social science to be methodologically novel.
