Greed and Contingency: State Fiscal Crises and Imperial Failure in Early Modern Europe

The Causes and Mechanisms of the Ukrainian Crisis of 2014: A Structural–Demographic Approach

“…The social sciences have not generated many general theories to explain the sources and mechanisms of political crises. Some of these theories (like rational choice theory and fiscal-military theory) have failed to predict different outcomes in the same conditions (Lachmann 2009); others (like failed-state theory) have a fragile basis (Dingli 2011). Thus, to choose an appropriate theory, we need to lean on those that have been tested in a variety of cases and have a clear background.…”

Aiming for Excellence: Reflections on the Advanced Institute of Management Research and its Elite

“…Through their control of resources and relations, elites are able to construct worlds that are disconnected from the mainstream (Khan, ). The deliberate creation of an AIM elite to benefit UK management research was always a bold venture in that elites and their self‐dealing can impede institutional development (Lachman, ). The AIM looked to its elite to build democratic, collaborative research networks, which is not the sort of behaviour normally associated with elites (Bowman et al ., ; Frank and Cook, ; Savage and Williams, ).…”

Thinking Counterfactual Sequentially: A Processual View of Counterfactual in Historical Sociology

“…This sequential view of historical causation is explicitly or tacitly assumed in the explanations of the rise of capitalism from recurrent processes (Goldstone, ), the decline of historic empires as everlasting elite conflicts (Lachmann, ), and democratization or democratic breakdown as open‐ended, reversible interactions (Ermakoff, ; Przeworski, ), to name a few examples.…”

“…For this reason, I limit my discussion within the field of comparative historical sociology.3 The two examples given in Gould's article-tax reduction and economic growth in California, and the New Deal labor legislation and unemployment reduction-exactly demonstrates the trade-off between counterfactual analysis and comparison.4 Here I follow Paul Veyne who divided causes into three types: material causes, chances, and freedom(Veyne, 1970, p. 95-97; see also: Aron, 1961;Ricoeur, 1984) and John R. Hall who differentiated conjunctural causations, chance, and agency(Hall, 1999; see also: Ermakoff, 2015).5 Even in the causal complex, each single causal condition is at most an INUS condition: i.e., an Insufficient and Non-redundant part of a complex that is an Unnecessary but Sufficient cause for the outcome in question(Mackie, 1974, p. 62). As such, there are several combinations of conditions that may produce the same emergent phenomenon or the same change, even if the temporal nature of these causal conditions is not considered.6 The idea of simultaneous causation directly contradicts the Humean and Durkheimian causality-which views causes and effects as two separate stages and grants causes temporal priority over effects(Mandelbaum, 1977;Salmon, 1984;Scriven, 1962).7 This sequential view of historical causation is explicitly or tacitly assumed in the explanations of the rise of capitalism from recurrent processes(Goldstone, 2002), the decline of historic empires as everlasting elite conflicts(Lachmann, 2009), and democratization or democratic breakdown as open-ended, reversible interactions(Ermakoff, 2008;Przeworski, 1988), to name a few examples.8 The classical example is the death of a traveler in the desert by either poison or thirst: s/he would still die even if s/he were not poisoned or possessed enough water, so a counterfactual analysis is unable to confirm or exclude either of the two causes of the death(Mackie, 1974, p. 44; Psillos, 2003, p. 85-87).9 Practitioners have summarized a few rules for counterfactual speculation: 1) plausible-counterfactual rule; 2) minimalrewrite rule; 3) the ceteris paribus rule; and 4) short-term speculation rule(Tetlock & Parker, 2006).10 …”