Comparative social science: characteristic problems and changing problem solutions

The article-which also serves as Editorial-seeks to trace some of the fundamental problems that the comparative social and cultural sciences have had to cope with since their emergence and gradual consolidation, in the course of the nineteenth century. To this end, the article adopts a historical line of analysis, which is meant to throw into relief the very succession of constitutive problems, alternative problem solutions, resultant follow-up problems, and the corresponding present-day debates, as reflected in the articles of this issue. Two lines of problem developments are highlighted in greater detail. These include, on the one hand, the issue of how to break down analytically a socio-historical information base that may be expanded to virtually global dimensions so as to yield systematic knowledge, i.e. knowledge pertinent to theory building and explanation, as is generally expected from the comparative approach. On the other hand, the analysis focuses on the research-framing issue of whether the units of analysis to be studied-national societies, political systems, legal families, or religio-cultural settings-are to be conceptualized in terms of mutually independent, quasi autarkic, and to that extent comparable entities, or in terms of intertwined elements of relations of trans-societal, and ultimately world-historical, interconnection.