The Issue

The crux of skepticism about comparative historical analysis is the “small-N problem” – the combination of many factors assumed to be causally relevant with evidence from only a small number of comparable cases. Exploring the impact of a large number of relevant factors and conditions in only a few cases seems to run into insuperable obstacles for learning anything that is theoretically relevant. In this essay, I will turn a skeptical eye on these skeptical objections. I go deliberately to the extreme and ask what can be learned theoretically from the study of a single historical case and from comparative analyses of two or very few more cases, a kind of research that permits close attention to the complexities of historical developments.

I begin with two opposite positions that I consider problematic and in their starkest form mistaken. One of these is the most conventional view, taught in countless classes on the methodology of social research. It holds that studying a single case yields only one reasonable theoretical outcome, the generation of hypotheses that may be tested in other, more numerous cases. And conventional methodological wisdom holds the same for single comparisons unless they offer by near-miraculous chance a naturally occurring experiment.

The other position is implied in innumerable assertive historical explanations of singular processes. E. P. Thompson's essay “The Poverty of Theory” offers sophisticated, explicit formulations of such views, though I will argue that its overall argument must be understood in a less historicist way than it at first appears.