Abstract

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The modern comparative method emerged when a new generation of writers, historians, and naturalists developed fresh ways to explore the analogies drawn between specimens and documents, between natural groups and societies—part of the wider realignment, noted by Foucault and many others, around the problem of social history and the history of biological life.2 Two alignments were crucial to this transformation. First, early nineteenth-century scholarship is marked by an interdisciplinary recognition that distinct comparative fields might draw productively on each other for models of comparative analysis (see, for example, B. Ricardo Brown’s recent study of the importance of historical linguistics as a model for early nineteenth-century geology, anatomy, and sociology).3 The second major shift was the recognition that previously distinct modes of analysis—marked by the distinction between “comparison” and “analogy”—might be usefully combined in the comparative method. James Turner, in his wide-ranging study of philology and the history of the humanities, argues that the “use of comparison to highlight similarities and differences in objects of study is ancient and perhaps universal.”4 Rens Bod, in his expansive history of the humanities in its longue durée, also observes that “there has been a continuous humanistic tradition from Antiquity to the present day that focuses on the quest for patterns and rules (with alongside it a parallel tradition that concentrates on the rejection of patterns).”5

As Bod suggests, while study of similarity necessarily brushes into contrast, and vice versa, they have not always been practiced together. In fact, the use of “comparison” to denominate both is largely a modern phenomenon. Before 1800, “comparison” was generally used as a rhetorical device that underlined differences.6 “Analogy,” on the other hand, was used primarily to study the similarity between distinct systems, especially in Christian metaphysics and philosophy.7 The nineteenth century saw a new and extensive overlap in the use of both “analogy” and “comparison” in nineteenth-century English writing on the comparative method, as well as in French and German texts (as “analogie”/“comparaison” and “Analogie”/“Vergleich”). The interlinking of these vocabularies in the nineteenth century both demonstrates an enhanced focus on analyzing both the similarities and differences in common patterns and can help make sense of the complicated differentiation of the comparative method within specific academic disciplines.8 While practitioners of the comparative method used the terms “analogy” and “comparison” interchangeably in the early nineteenth century, by the close of the century “comparison” became dominant, while “analogy” meant either loose speculation or took on a precise and considerably narrower disciplinary meaning (as in linguistics). This story of separation establishes a pattern of procedural differentiation that I will explore in later sections.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/693325#d10316254e1

Philology and Linguistics

Comparative anatomy and comparative philology deserve equal billing as the fields of enquiry that raised the comparative method to prominence in the nineteenth century and explored its key features. Both fields drew liberally from the success of the other as evidence that comparativism worked. Friedrich Schlegel, in formulating the new field he termed “comparative grammar,” argued that it “will give us entirely new information on the genealogy of languages, in exactly the same way in which comparative anatomy has thrown light on natural history.”9 And as evidence mounted that Schlegel was right, Charles Darwin—who honed his interest in evolutionary genealogy through extensive comparative studies of barnacle physiology—explained that studying the genealogy of species was like the study of linguistic history: “The various degrees of difference in the languages from the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and modern, by the closest affinities.”10 Insofar as comparative anatomy and comparative philology were essentially coeval and mutually influential, I have argued that it makes more sense to talk about Romantic comparativism as a single movement with differentiated issues, rather than an independent invention of various fields of inquiry.11 I will focus on comparative philology over anatomy here for two key reasons. First, comparative philology (a subdiscipline of philology that emerged in the nineteenth century) was generally more important in providing a model for the comparative humanities in general. And second, it can be argued that comparative philology, in seeking to demonstrate the consistent pattern of human (rather than natural) history, had to clear a substantially higher bar than anatomy. In contrast to the natural world, many theorists of comparativism believed that the social world was too complex, too riddled with the idiosyncrasies of chance events and individual caprice, to provide grounds for strong inductive generalizations. Even John Stuart Mill, who is still considered by comparatists in many fields to be the foremost nineteenth-century theorist of the method, worried that human society was too intricate for the controlled study and crossed validation that allow strong empirical generalization.12 Hence, when Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm uncovered the “sound laws” that explained the phonological shifts that transformed the ancestral European language (eventually named Proto-Indo-European or PIE) into German, they demonstrated not only a sound basis for the reconstruction of common ancestral languages, but far more important, showed how the comparative method could adduce deep, lawlike features beneath the complexity of human society. In doing so, they validated the comparative method as a powerful and truly empirical approach to humanist study.13

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/693325#_i1

Conclusion

Recently, Natalie Melas, a scholar of comparative literature, has argued that comparativism often plays out along distinct qualitative and quantitative axes: while the former poses questions of similarity, she argues, the latter tends to introduce questions of ranking and differentiation.82 In light of the foregoing study, this insight has much wider application. To put it simply: the grounds of similarity and the grounds of difference in comparative study do not need to be the same (and in modern comparativism, they generally are not). A few examples: nineteenth-century linguistics sought to distinguish between systematic phonological sound shifts and modification “by analogy” (when the modification of one set of terms is used as a model for the modification of another).83 The former was understood to produce difference between languages (and hence, was key to reconstructing common ancestral languages), while the latter was seen as cross-contaminating languages, introducing patterns of similarity within languages that tended to obscure true genealogical relations.84 Hence genealogical differentiation and analogical similarity were at cross-purposes and were located within different scales of operation (one systematic, the other idiosyncratic). Similarly, in modern evolutionary biology, one often compares specimens to consider the genealogical grounds of difference between superficially similar organisms and the adaptive or contextual grounds of similarity—their convergent adaptation to similar conditions.85 So also does classical textual stemmatics, generally known as the “Lachmann method,” distinguish errata—introduced by specific scribes, typesetters, or other copyists—and the “Urtext” or “archetype”—the common ancestor indicated by shared features and distinctions.86

Not only do we need to look between the disciplines, we must look beyond them. In particular, the history of comparativism in the humanities would benefit from a greater investment in popular forms that may have had as much to do with the cultivation of a new and more relativized consideration of the past. For example, we need to consider not only how the study of something like “literature” was reimagined but how literature (like other popular forms) forged new imaginative ways to think about comparativism and relationality, and especially our relation to the past and to other societies.87 Similarly, we still have much work to do in considering the contribution of various religious and spiritual traditions to the comparative method, for instance, in shaping the German “higher critics” and comparative mythology. Theology and Christian philosophy clearly impacted the formation of the humanities beyond source criticism and hermeneutics, and we should recognize secularization (recognized as an uneven and indeterminate process) as also a name for the process by which religious modes of affective engagement, belief, social organization, and study are sometimes disentangled from their religious framework and rearticulated in secular institutions and practices. The modern university is the most obvious example.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/693325#_i4