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Cuban planters that populations of color, mobilized to drive out Spanish colonialists,
would not return later to positions of subservience.
It seems like Anderson’s general explanatory project breaks down in Cuba. In
fact, provided with greater historical detail, we can understand why events were different
in Cuba and how Anderson’s analytical mechanisms, when fitted into the particular
narrative of Cuban experience, still have explanatory power.
It is helpful for social analysts to understand how history constructs the contextual
setting in which mechanisms produce outcomes. This links the use of social mechanisms
approaches to methods of analysis that respect the contribution of historical description.
Social mechanisms theorists have dropped crumbs that might lead to this approach, even
if they haven’t straightforwardly championed the value of history. Elster has spoken
about the importance of telling a “casual story,” or “fine-grained stories,” that permit us
to make use in our explanatory project of “the traces left by the past” (Elster 1998, 49, 59,
and 68). The hope is that we can move beyond noting covariance, to open up the black
box to understand more precisely how economic modernization or elite preferences shape
nationalist projects.
As I view it, the goal is to create an analytical method that can capture the role of
historical processes and cultural institutions in shaping preferences and the strategic
arena, while seeking to identify causal mechanisms that produce specific outcomes within
this social space. Historical processes determine how actors understand the tools
available to them, the strategic value of these tools, and the likely responses of other
actors. History both opens certain opportunities for strategic action and closes-off others
while also providing lessons which shape how actors understand the world.
Convention