For half a century, comparative social science has been closely associated with John Stuart Mill’s methods of comparison. However, few social scientists had heard of Mill’s methods in 1970. Within a decade, the methods of agreement and difference had become part of the methodological canon—despite Mill’s objections that these methods should under no circumstances be used in the social sciences. Comparativists continued to overlook the methods that Mill actually proposed for the social sciences, which relied on an analogy with astronomical observations rather than chemistry experiments. Yet Mill’s own empirical research offered substantive findings without dwelling much on methods. Over the past half-century, successful works of comparative social science have pursued all three versions of Millian methods: the comparative methods that he widely associated with; the alternative methods that he proposed for social science; and the actual methods that he pursued, whose success lay in their creativity, not in methodological recipes.

中文翻译：

---

米利安方法在比较社会科学中的奇特生涯


半个世纪以来，比较社会科学一直与约翰·斯图尔特·穆勒 （John Stuart Mill） 的比较方法密切相关。然而，在 1970 年，很少有社会科学家听说过 Mill 的方法。在十年内，一致和差异的方法已成为方法论经典的一部分——尽管 Mill 反对这些方法在任何情况下都不应用于社会科学。比较论者继续忽视穆勒实际上为社会科学提出的方法，这些方法依赖于天文观测的类比，而不是化学实验。然而，穆勒自己的实证研究提供了实质性的发现，而没有过多地关注方法。在过去的半个世纪里，比较社会科学的成功著作追求了米利安方法的所有三个版本：他广泛联系的比较方法;他为社会科学提出的替代方法;以及他所追求的实际方法，其成功在于它们的创造力，而不是方法论的配方。