The Peculiarities of Comparison

In the early 21^st century, comparison pervades humanistic and social scientific research. Yet the tasks and terms of comparative historical research remain highly contentious. On the one hand, the wide-spread discrediting of the comparative frameworks associated, for instance, with modernization theory, orthodox Marxism, and positivist sociological schemas have strained the credulity of once taken-for-granted models of comparison across disciplinary and regional divides. Indeed, this interdisciplinary crisis of comparison has led many historians and historically-minded social scientists to call into question the possibility of grasping systemic transformations of social life. Comparison is increasingly posed in terms of negation and crisis, as exemplified by the proliferation of such notions as ‘the specter of comparison’ (Anderson), the unequal ‘terms of comparison’, and such  competing claims as an “alternative” (Gaonkar, Appadurai) or “singular” (Jameson) modernity or “multiple” (Beck) and incommensurable (Chakrabarty) modernities. On the other hand, the large-scale transformations associated with neoliberal market rule---deepening inequality across and within regions, the imperilment of livelihoods and habitats, the hard-scrabble politics of dispossession---have made comparability less a “pure” object of scholarly debate than a live and open-ended concern of everyday political practice. What would a post-Eurocentric practice of comparison look like? If our historical present is marked by global immanence, then how might we think anew the objects and units of comparison? Summoning the spirit of Blackbourn and Eley’s programmatic intervention in German historical debates, I shall explore these questions about the historicity of comparison in relation to debates about capitalism and populism in post-socialist India.