Abstract
This paper reviews the achievements and problems of quantitative historical sociology and considers its prospects. Although the mainstream in historical sociology in the U. S. has been characterized as attempting to understand or draw causal inference about historical issues based on qualitative data, there have been accumulating achievements that may be called quantitative historical sociology. Among examples are the works of C. Ragin and of C. Tilly who share topics with mainstream historical sociology, focusing on macro-level political and social issues such as the relationship between collective behaviors and social structures, but use quantitative or mathematical methods. However, here we primarily focus on a stream derived from historical demography and family history in France and England. This stream, once it attracted scholars in the U.S., has been developed into family history using multivariate models stimulated by the application of advanced statistical methods such as'event history analysis' in sociology and demography. Quantitative approaches to the history of the family taking advantage of computers to process and analyse large data sets have been in progress also in Japan. One example of these is shown in this paper. Quantitative historical sociology still has many problems to solve in such aspects as the collection and processing of data, methods of analysis, and compatibility between individual-level analyses and interests in macro-level social change. If we cope with these problems properly, this discipline can form an important stream in historical sociology, or even sociology in general.
