Practical considerations on comparison

The final task of the research group on the history of professionalisation was to embed the history of professions in the international context. As a first step, the aim was to discuss readings on possible ways of comparison. Having read the texts proposed for discussion, I got the impression that they were too theoretical for my own ideas about comparisons. (Obviously, the question of comparison is different for a historian trained in hermeneutics and a sociologist or economist who thinks of himself as a " quanti ", but the basics are common.)

I thought it would not be useless to consider when and how I have encountered the problems of comparison in my career.

1.

My first time as an economics student, in a lecture on economic history. Interestingly, the historian Pál Zsigmond Pach kept mentioning (and obviously to impress his audience) the Latin term ceteris paribus (alongside the German zweite Leibeigenschaft and the other Latin term mutatis mutandis). The point was that in comparisons, everything else except the aspect being compared should be considered unchanged. At the time, I had not thought about the applicability of this requirement in historical research.

My answer today is that it is not. Everything else cannot be ignored. In my economic history TDK course, I often wondered why Russian farmers were not as market-oriented as the Dutch, English, French, etc. Many things were put forward as explanations (mentality, state barriers, landlord power, etc.). I myself would have believed anything. Anyway, historians hold that geography, being immutable, cannot be the cause of historical facts.

Then, years later, at the beginning of the so-called perestroika, we travelled by car and family in a single train from Brest (the Polish-Soviet border) to Moscow. From then on I knew the answer. Geography may not be a reason, but distance is. Even by car, we covered huge stretches of road without seeing any sign of human settlement. At that time, we had already learned Thünen circles, the spatial organisation of transport costs, from economic geography, so it clicked: if those Eastern European farmers had gone to market, they would not have had time to produce. They would have starved to death. From their own selfish point of view, they were right not to go to market. We have to be very careful if we want to treat everything we do not examine as unchanging.

2.

Beyond the lack of historical laboratories, there is another problem. It is very rare that a historian knows two situations equally well. If we were expected to make a comparison at the factual level, we would fail here.

There is a way out, however, and those who have been to Gyula Benda's classes may have come across the solution in Alan Macfarlane's book on English individualism[1]. The speaker of the text (who is not the civilian who, as the author of the book, receives the royalties from the publisher, but his celestial counterpart, the spirit-world that hermeneutically unfolds from the text) begins by saying that he wants to bring the English mentality into collision with the continental, and within that partly with the Eastern European, mindset. To the expected accusation that he does not know enough about Eastern Europe, he says that he does not need to.

It is enough for him that the experts on the subject have written this and that on the issue. He takes as a basis the image offered by others. You can call this an ideal image or a straw man created for the sake of argument, but the point is that on one side of the comparison there is a figure, but it can be worked with. The implication of Macfarlane's procedure is that anyone from Eastern Europe who thinks that the figure is unflattering should make the comparison in the other direction, and thus indirectly even a British-Eastern European comparison can be made.

Macfarlane's trick is based on the Max Weberian idealtype. An intellectual object that can create a relationship between author and recipient. For example: how can we make the reader think the same as the author when talking about the feudal agrarian product in terms of the concept of the "serf". The legal category of the serf is elusive, it tells us nothing about the lives of those who fall under it, we don't know what they have, only what they don't have: they don't have a quarter of a plot. (A good example of this is Edit Kerecsényi's study of the earliest documented ancestors of one of our politician's former advisers, the investment banker William de Gelsey, who died in 2021, during the reform era.)[2] The fact is that they do not own land in the proper legal condition to qualify as serfs.

In such cases, tradition and common knowledge can help. Over time, the idea that the serf is poor - he may have a bogey, he may walk, his house may be putri-like - has become ingrained in history teaching. The idea will not necessarily be supported by specific, archived facts, but that's fine. If the historian wants to win the attention of his reader, almost any popular idea can be used to compare it with the concrete facts of the past, mined from the sources. The ghost paint will behave like a multidimensional measuring rod. We will put the individuals that emerge from the sources (or rather, put them together on the basis of the sources) next to each other and determine whether or not they have a hock, whether they walk or ride an omnibus, whether the Heviz is one way, the Bereg another, the Moson another, etc.

3.

The question of comparison came next in statistics lessons in the form of index numbers. What we had to learn here was the issue of benchmarking. (Here beckons the ceteris paribus mentioned earlier.) One thing at a time is worth comparing. If we know how much of what (kg, pcs, litres, etc.) was consumed in a country in a year and how much money was paid for each item (Ft/kg, Ft/db, etc.), we can try to determine whether, overall, more or less money was paid for the goods consumed. To achieve this, we have to make a trade-off. We must pretend that the same amount of each item was consumed in one year as in another (or the same amount in both as in an arbitrary third).

We can also turn the question around and ask about changes in the size of consumption. In this case, the prices of the items should be considered unchanged, using one of the former methods, since, as we know, goods are not directly comparable with each other (apple to apple). It can be seen that the problem, apart from the arithmetical toolbox, is similar to the one already described. Formally, a comparison can be made by taking both variables into account at the same time (value index), but this is difficult to interpret. To my knowledge, it is not used.

There is, however, another issue, the so-called Laspeyres vs. Paasche problem (for details, see Scott M. Eddie's little book).[3] The point: what should be the basis of comparison? The present (Paasche) or a selected moment in the past (Laspeyres). The Laspeyres vs. Paasche question is usually focused on the temporal comparison, but it can also be applied to the spatial one. I will explain the essence of the problem in terms of time (diachronic comparison), and then apply it to space.

The price level in a given year (within an economy) does not tell us anything on its own, but only when comparing two or more years (if you have twice as much money at one moment and everything costs twice as much, you are at the same place). Therefore, it is worth making a series of comparisons. However, it is not always the same what the baseline is. If our yardstick were the present, we should take the consumption structure of the present and assign the prices of the previous period to it. This has one major drawback: the base has to be updated every year. (Fortunately, historians do not have to rewrite history every year, but only at each turn of the century.) We cannot construct a comparable set of ratios. The other solution is to assign a past base. With this, serial comparison is established, but the base becomes more and more unrealistic over time. In the old days, you needed a kapa and you didn't have a mobile phone; today, the price of the former is meaningless, the price of the latter is very important. Again, it is worth noting that there is a formal mathematical solution to the problem (Fischer's formula), but it is not used because the result is incomprehensible to common sense.

This brings us to the spatial application. Comparing related areas is easy. The problems are with the distant ones. For North American consumers, the price of liquid fuels may be important; for the consumption basket of Amazonian Indians, this item is not. For them, the price of a shovel stick and a bow or a blowpipe may be important, and in their case this obviously has a more serious relative value compared to, for example, food. If the comparison is based on the 'West', then the comparison will favour the 'West'. If the comparison is made from the point of view of the 'East' (whoever they are) (i.e. their consumption structure is the base), then their situation will be better.

4.

Already as a civil servant researcher in one of my jobs,[4] I was faced with the following problem of comparison. My colleagues from the Centre for Central and Eastern European Studies, Polonist, Bohemian, etc., were doing Polish, Czech, etc. - Hungarian comparisons. The problem, which came up again and again, was the question of the independence of the comparators. For example, could the events of Polish history be independent of those of Hungarian history. If it is not possible, that is, if Polish and Hungarian history not only run in parallel, but even influence each other, then there is a methodological problem, because we are taking apart elements of a living system and want to look at them separately, even though they might not function separately. Statisticians have different methods to avoid this, but they work with large numbers of elements and are therefore in a much easier position than historians.

However, the big lesson of the years in the research group was not this negative, but that it is worth doing comparative experiments and that it is very important to look at the experiments, because the discussions can reveal previously hidden effects and serve as a basis for deeper understanding.

5.

Leaving the aforementioned research group (where perhaps more of the founders of the István Hajnal Circle of social historians were working in one place than anywhere else at the time), I was studying a large European comparative social history survey in Bielefeld and was struck by the following curiosity. Jürgen Kocka, who organised the research, said in retrospect that if the language of the debate (i.e. instead of German) had been English, it would have been a different research.[5] In a sense, the problem of the base mentioned above comes back to me, but also the great philosophical question of the nature of language: is language just a neutral tool, or does it have a spirit that bends our thinking?

Kocka implicitly chose the latter, although he did not necessarily assert this insight in the course of the research itself. And the participants in the project - with respect to the exception - accepted that - to use a profanity - he who pays for the music, orders the music. The difficulty of making a conceptual comparison has, incidentally, already been written about in detail by Kálmán Benda, in a surprising way and place, i.e. in his review of István Györffy's Chronicle of Nagykunság.[6]

6.

Finally: outlook. Comparison is a somewhat alien body of traditional historical research. One reason for this is that the historian starts from the uniqueness of the object of his study, and if he interprets this strictly, everything else is just "what if." But there is another problem. The historian, if he does his job well, interprets. He translates into the "language of the sources" the questions of those who are interested in the anomalies of their own world, both small and large, but who no longer understand the artifacts (objects, writings) that represent the past, and he tells the answers of the sources in a way that is understandable to the present man. If, as times change, the man of the present begins to see his own world as bizarre, the translation changes too. There is no definitive dictionary. There are no definitions.[7]

But the comparison is not entirely direct. We need the means to make comparisons, whether they are mental (e.g. the concept of the less-larger relationship, names, categories, definitions, numbers, ideal types) or material (measuring instruments, experimental equipment). In other words: you have to measure. Comparison: measurement. Historians measure too, they just don't do it consciously. I hope this brief account of my experience will help to bring the understanding (hermeneutic) and measuring sciences closer together.

Budapest, 31.01.2023.