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as colonial subjects. Why didn’t a sustained drive for national autonomy emerge among
Cuba’s property-owning class? I’ve laid-out the basic outline of my claim—that Cuban
planters assessed the risks of independence and found the prospective costs to be too
great—and I will return to comment further.
NARRATIVE APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF SOCIAL MECHANISMS
A recent development in social modeling is the interest in the use of what has
become called "social mechanisms." As Jon Elster has said, "mechanisms are frequently
occurring and easily recognizable causal patterns that are triggered under generally
unknown conditions or with indeterminate consequences" (Elster 1998, 45). In other
words, social mechanisms are causal factors or relationships that produce observable
consequences, but we cannot know a priori under what circumstances the causal
instrument will generate the expected outcome, nor even what the specific outcome will
be. Elster does not want social scientists to put aside the search for general explanatory
laws, instead, he wants to provide an optional analytical structure, one that replaces the
standard "if A then B," with a less satisfying (but still enlightening) “if A then sometimes
B (but under other circumstances C or D)” (Elster 1998, 49). Elster's goal is to provide
analysts with a next-best option when lawlike explanations fail (as, he correctly points
out, they so frequently do).
Nationalism, a field of social scientific debate populated with a number of
analytical approaches and offering notably few law-like explanations, appears to be an
ideal venue for exploring the value of social mechanisms as analytical tools. In several
Convention