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This is a 6 page paper discussing Skocpol’s use of Mill’s methods of agreement and difference in her studies of social revolutions. In Theda Skocpol’s “States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China”, she uses John Stuart Mills’ methods of agreement and difference to appropriate logical causes of social revolutions in her comparative historical analyses. Stanley Lieberson, on the other hand, disagreed with Skocpol’s application of Mill’s methods when applied to small-N situations in sociological inquiry and this application of Mill by Skocpol “does not allow for probabilistic theories, interaction effects, measurement errors, or even the presence of more than one cause”. Despite this argument, most social researchers, including Skocpol agree that Mill’s methods can be used in social comparative research as long as the causes discussed are only generalized to those cases studied. In Skocpol’s study, the cause of social revolutions in France, Russia and China were based largely on the organized peasant revolts and the breakdown of the monarchical state administrations.
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6 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_TJTheda1.rtf
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Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China", she uses John Stuart Mills methods of agreement and difference to appropriate logical causes of social revolutions in her comparative historical
analyses. Stanley Lieberson, on the other hand, disagreed with Skocpols application of Mills methods when applied to small-N situations in sociological inquiry and this application of Mill by Skocpol "does
not allow for probabilistic theories, interaction effects, measurement errors, or even the presence of more than one cause". Despite this argument, most social researchers, including Skocpol agree that Mills methods
can be used in social comparative research as long as the causes discussed are only generalized to those cases studied. In Skocpols study, the cause of social revolutions in France,
Russia and China were based largely on the organized peasant revolts and the breakdown of the monarchical state administrations. Mill uses the methods
of agreement and difference in "A System of Logic" when explaining inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is a process where researchers infer what they know is true in a particular case
or number of cases will also be true when applied to other cases which resemble the first cases in certain aspects. Induction is a reasonable process which proceeds from the
known to the unknown and from "facts observed to facts unobserved" (Mill). Induction theory also rests upon the invariable antecedent which is the cause and the invariable consequence the effect.
When establishing causation, Mill uses four canons or experimental principles. The first canon, also known as the "method of agreement" states that "if two or more instances of the phenomenon
under investigation have only one circumstance in common, the circumstance in which alone all the instances agree is the cause (or effect) of the given phenomenon" (Mill). The second canon,
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