Musings on How to Do Comparative History...

So what do we do when we study comparative history? Comparative historians explore similarities, for example, American and Russian notions of choseness, American and Russian messianism, American and Russian notions that they are on a mission to change the world, American and Russian conquests of frontiers and their brutalisation of indigenous peoples on those frontiers, American and Russian modern bureaucracies, and American and Russian oligarchies. Comparative historians also explore differences. The US is, for instance, a settler society, a society that originated out of European colonisation. Russia is not a settler society.

So let's take an empirical and scientific example to flesh the comparative history of the US and Russia. It is a descriptive fact that in many ways self proclaimed "democracies" are fake democracies given that they are bureaucratic in nature and hence oligarchic. As Max Weber and Robert Michels noted almost a hundred years ago, bureaucracies are inherently inequalitarian and unequal. How so? Because bureaucracies, as Weber and Michels note, are hierararchical. The few at the top have more power and authority (and make more money) than those in the middle and those at the bottom. This should be pretty obvious to anyone who has gone to high school, one of America's educational and socialising bureaucracies.Is America characterised by modern rational means-end hierarchical bureaucracies? Yes. Is Russia? Yes. Is Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Ukraine? Yes. So, if Weber and Michels are correct, then the US is not a democracy in the strict sense of the term. I assume no one wants to argue that Russia is a democracy so that issue is moot.

If one wants to critique the arguments of Weber and Michels it would be wise, of course, if we want to be scientific, to actually critique the arguments of Weber and Michels, two social scientific giants, empirically. One might, for instance, argue that Weber and Michels are right but that there are multiple bureaucracies in the US, unlike in Russia where the political bureaucracy is dominant, and that economic, political, and cultural bureaucracies are engaged in a struggle for power and hegemony in the US, a struggle that opens up spaces for something like the New Deal and Great Society, both of which brought a greater degree of equality to the US. On the other hand, one might argue that the New Deal to Great Society was an anomaly in American history (as was the notion that America was characterised by a consensus from the Great Depression to Nixon) and that economic oligarchs have controlled and still dominate and control the economic, political, and cultural bureaucracies of the US. One might go on to argue, in descriptive mode, that such control makes these elites, thanks to the authority and power (not to mention monies and wealth) that comes and accrues, in large part, from one's position in hierarchical bureaucracies, the ones who really control the US and dominate it economically, politically, and culturally. One might go on to argue that the social and cultural capital that accrues from one's bureaucratic position replicates oligarchic power in "democratic" oligarchies like the US. One can conclude, as a consequence, that the US is an oligarchy that is not really that different from oligarchic Russia.

Feel free to disagree. If you do, however, please be empirical and please respond to the empirical arguments made. Pithy and empirically challenged statements of the nationalist civil religion faith drawn from the nationalist civil religion catechism do not do anything for me. No religion does. They should not do anything for anyone who wants their analysis to be emprical and scientific.