Insufficiently abstract

If a researcher only ever studies one political context, then the horizons of explanation are constrained because of selection bias. If one only studies the United States, without comparison to other countries, then this leads to a sample selection bias where one cannot answer why the United States has comparatively high poverty. To paraphrase [sociologist and political scientist, Seymour Martin Lipset], poverty scholars who only know one country, know no country.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10446494/

For a time, my reading centered on histories of ideas, like those of progress, improvement and the Enlightenment. Once I started reading Isaiah Berlin, there was no going back. That was the pull side of being attracted to abstractions.

Being pushed to abstractions has been a different matter. Discussions about all those varieties of capitalism, realpolitik, and modernities, to name just three entangled constellations, are unsatisfactory for me, when they stop short of recording the actually-existing practices on the ground. So I am pushed further by being compelled to contextualize these abstractions.

To put it differently, what is “insufficiently abstract” for me is the weird undifferentiation that comes with the comparative absence of histories of the highly various and contingent practices at stake when filling in the details.

Note: “comparative” absence of details, not “total” absence. For an example of the kind of history of ideas that goes further by identifying and comparing practices associated with those ideas, I can think of no more formidable book than the recent: Michael Sonenscher (2023). After Kant The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought. Princeton University Press.