Response to Ledford and Sperber

OVER the last decade, historians have made steady inroads into the fre? quently static social sciences as they are trying to understand the changing post-Cold War order and the even more rapidly changing global and domestic political economies. Such softening of discipHnary bound? aries is also observable in the other direction. Jonathan Sperber's work on nine? teenth-century electoral politics and Kenneth Ledford's study on German lawyers offer two examples among many of historians borrowing concepts and methods from the social sciences.1 Yet, these encouraging signs of discipHnary trespassing cannot mask the fact that these two disciplines continue only infrequently to publish in each others' journals, intelligently review each others' works, or jointly reflect on the payoffs of interdisciplinary scholarship. Given this limited dialogue, it is a particular pleasure to reply to two such thoughtful and constructive respondents. In subtly tackling the problems inherent in comparing, Kenneth Ledford ventures into the disciplinary borderlands of history and the social sciences while Jonathan Sperber stays more closely in the historical corner and ? to use Ledford's apt characterization of his coUeagues ? "picks cautionary holes in the appHcability" of comparisons. Let me begin with the issue of comparison since it is Ledford's central theme and Sperber aUudes to it on two occasions. Ledford nicely explicates the pro? fessional disincentives and epistemological qualms underlying the historians' reluctance to compare. I think Ledford is correct with respect to cross-national comparisons but I wonder whether he is not selling historians short, given their frequent comparisons across multiple points in time. Such so-caUed longitudinal comparisons structure Sperber's analysis of quadrennial voting choices in Imperial Germany, Ledford's study of the German bar associations in Imperial and Weimar Germany, and many other historical studies. The question there? fore is not whether one discipline compares while the other does not; but