The New Historical Sociology: Transcending Modernization Theory

In 1976, Gareth Stedman Jones lamented that while historians borrowed from social science, the methods they adopted were often fundamentally unhistorical. He memorably compared sociologists’ attempts to historicize their concepts to “the grating noise which accompanies the driver's attempt to find first gear in a motor which had only been designed to run in neutral.” He urged a collaborative effort against positivism in both disciplines. E. P. Thompson similarly contended that social scientists failed to grasp historical change or class conflict. However, neither sociology nor anthropology were monolithic, and even as these critiques were penned, the disciplines were undergoing significant renewal.

A key development was the effort to ‘deparsonize’ classical theory, revealing greater common ground between Marxist and non-Marxist thought regarding property and class. Simultaneously, anthropologists critiqued functionalism and symbolic anthropology for neglecting human agency, often citing Thompson approvingly. This period saw the emergence of several influential theoretical frameworks that sought to move beyond earlier paradigms. First, Pierre Bourdieu’s complex sociology reworked key canonical features, introducing core concepts like ‘field’, ‘habitus’, and forms of ‘capital’. While emphasizing how actors unconsciously internalize and use social rules, Bourdieu’s theory allowed for change through conflict and the introduction of new capital, yet it retained a dichotomy between elite reasoning and mass imitation.

Second, Frank Parkin’s development of Weber’s theory of social closure provided a dynamic model of conflict. In closure theory, groups use criteria like property, race, or gender to monopolize advantages, while subordinate groups attempt to usurp them. This framework identifies conflict over scarce resources as the engine of change, without reducing it solely to property relations or predetermining outcomes. Third, Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration directly engaged with the agency-structure problem, arguing that structures both constrain and enable agency, with their relationship varying historically. Giddens developed this in explicit dialogue with Thompson’s work, seeking to reconcile it with structuralist critiques.

Fourth, Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan Turner (1981) re-examined the concept of ‘norms’ and the ‘dominant ideology’. They argued that the subjection of the masses relied not on the internalization of ruling ideas but on the perceived costs of rebellion. Elites, they contended, were the primary consumers of dominant ideology, which reinforced their ‘immanent morale’. This converged with anthropologist James C. Scott’s concept of the ‘hidden transcript’, describing how subaltern groups outwardly comply while privately rejecting dominant discourses.

Informed by these developments, a new wave of historical sociology emerged. Theda Skocpol’s landmark work presented social structure as situated in time and space, though her comparative method often retained national frameworks and search for models. A more decisive break came from Immanuel Wallerstein’s ‘world-systems analysis’, which attacked modernization theory and national models. He charted a single capitalist world-system with a core exploiting a periphery, though critics noted his residual use of organic metaphors and a national framework.

Michael Mann’s ambitious The Sources of Social Power explicitly refuted teleological models, arguing that humans live in overlapping “multiple, loose social networks” rather than bounded societies. He proposed four sources of social power—ideological, economic, military, and political—whose changing organizational configurations explain historical outcomes. While groundbreaking, critics charge Mann with a top-down perspective that underestimates the role of unorganized, everyday struggle, as highlighted in Robert Brenner’s work or studies of women’s resistance to natalist policies.

Despite these advances, few historians engaged deeply with the new sociology. Lawrence Stone and Peter Burke urged rejecting grand theory in favor of limited concepts, yet Stone’s own work on the family often reinstated modernisation narratives with revised chronologies. A rare exception was S. H. Rigby, who explicitly applied Parkin’s closure theory to late medieval England, concluding it was a “class society with orders” lacking a coherent dominant ideology, as the Church lacked the means to enforce one and faced peasant skepticism.

(References: Skocpol (ed.), Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984); Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (1974-1989); Mann, The Sources of Social Power (1986-); Abercrombie, Hill, & Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis (1980); Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages (1995).)