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When John Stuart Mill composed his System of Logic, he maintained that valid application of the comparative method to problems in the moral or social sciences is impossible, or, at best, inadmissible, since it must be based on a priori judgments. Mill founded his objection to the use of this method in social science on two essentially interrelated propositions: the uniqueness of each social event, and the multiplicity and variety of causal factors which may be considered as having a determining influence on these events. Although this conception of the special nature of social events has, on the whole, remained unchanged, social scientists have freely applied the comparative method to the analysis of social problems. History has been outstanding among the social sciences in rejecting longest the application of this method. The main argument against its use was derived from the description of history formulated by Ranke and his school, a description which was endowed with a philosophical underpinning by Windelband and Rickert, who classified sciences according to method into a nomothetic and an ideographic group. History was the ideographic science par excellence, and with the strong historical emphasis that was placed in Germany upon other social sciences as well, there was a tendency to return to the viewpoint of Mill and to regard as scientifically suspect generalizations in social science based on the application of the comparative method.

SUMMARY:
Х.-Г. Хаупт исходит из назревшей необходимости переосмыслить содержание, которое историки традиционно вкладывают в концепт "Европы". Он критически пересматривает "синтетический" метод написания европейской истории как механического объединения историй отдельных стран, входивших в достаточно субъективно определяемую "Европу". Хаупт подчеркивает, что любые попытки ограничить европейское пространство "римским наследием" или "христианским Западом" имеют спекулятивную сторону и призваны гомогенизировать историческое разнообразие. Вместо этого он призывает изучать контексты, в которых использовали те или иные определения Европы, а также их политическую направленность на включение или исключение тех или иных регионов. В конечном итоге европейское пространство должно предстать как результат и как проблема европейской истории.

Ключом к новому типу европейской истории автор считает компаративный метод, цель которого – не учет максимально большого количества исторических феноменов, но их осмысление в рамках общей теоретической модели и определение специфики каждого из анализируемых фактов. Сравнительный метод написания европейской истории может реализовываться как в области количественных исследований (сравнительная статистика), которые позволят определить "европейские" процессы и структуры, так и в области структурной компаративистики (выявление структурных особенностей европейского варианта развития). Воображаемая география Европы и история ее самоопределения и самоотмежевания может писаться одновременно в жанре интеллектуальной, политической истории или истории науки.

Транснациональная перспектива (например, изучение миграций на европейском континенте и между Европой и другими континентами), а также имперская компаративистика рассматриваются в статье как вполне легитимные и необходимые аспекты создания новой европейской истории.

AbstractWhile it is necessary to distinguish between analytical and normative statements, the quest for this distinction – and for value-free science – is itself normatively based. Comparative approaches can serve important descriptive and analytical functions. They reduce the danger of methodological nationalism and intellectual parochialism in historical studies. The comparative approach allows to find an acceptable middle ground between the acceptance of basic differences and universalist claims. Method and ethos interact. But a-symmetric comparison shows that scientific productivity and political incorrectness can go together. For this, Max Weber's comparative approach can serve as an example.

'IF YOU WANT QUICK RESULTS, PLANT LETTUCE; ENDURING results take longer.' So said Léon Walras, France's greatest nineteenth-century economist and predecessor at Lausanne of Pareto, whom Sammy Finer wrote about with admiration. Finer's last and greatest work in three volumes and over 1,600 pages will be published in May 1997 by Oxford University Press. Unlike his contemporary political scientists, Sammy Finer had the self-confidence and breadth of vision singlehandedly to take on an immense work and almost bring it to completion before death imposed its own premature conclusion. As a foretaste of its contents, the first Finer Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Keele on 10 May 1995, is published in this journal, with which he had an especially close affinity. It can only suggest, in the most succinct way, what is to come. I am confident that the study of comparative government will never be the same once the whole breathtaking work appears in all its magnitude.

Building upon an introductory discussion on linguistic exchange - the problem of missing words - and the emergence of transnational concepts, this article consists of a comparative study of the history of the concept of civilisation in some major European languages and the concept of beschaving in Dutch, the closest translation to civilisation in that language. According to the author, the particular and independent conceptual evolution of beschaving should be in part explained by the early development of a modern socio-economic structure in Holland.