방법 비교

	Conjunctural History	Path Dependence Analysis
분야	Economic History	Historical Institutionalism
계열	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
기원 연도	1944	2000
창시자	Ernest Labrousse	Paul Pierson
유형	analytical-framework	causal-framework
원전	Labrousse, E. (1944). La crise de l'economie francaise a la fin de l'Ancien Regime et au debut de la Revolution. Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN: 9782130436201	Pierson, P. (2000). Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics. American Political Science Review, 94(2), 251-267.
별칭	Conjoncture analysis, Cyclical economic history, Price-history of cycles, Labroussian conjunctural method	Increasing-returns analysis, Self-reinforcing sequence analysis, Institutional lock-in analysis, Historical lock-in study
관련	3	3
요약	Conjunctural history studies the medium-term cyclical movements, the conjoncture, that occupy the middle layer of Braudel's tripartite time scheme, between the near-immobile longue duree and the rapid surface of events. Pioneered by Ernest Labrousse in his studies of eighteenth-century French prices, the method reconstructs decade-scale fluctuations in prices, wages, harvests, and production, then asks how these economic rhythms reverberate through society and politics. Labrousse showed that interlocking cycles of grain prices and agricultural revenue could converge into acute crises that strained the social order, contributing to the conditions for revolution. The conjoncture is thus neither the slow structure nor the fleeting event but the oscillating economic mood of a period. By charting these waves with quantitative series and linking their peaks and troughs to social tension, popular unrest, and political rupture, conjunctural history offers a bridge between economic measurement and the explanation of historical change.	Path dependence analysis explains why history matters by showing how early, sometimes accidental events set in motion self-reinforcing processes that lock in particular institutional or policy trajectories. Drawing on the economics of increasing returns and elaborated for political science by Paul Pierson and for comparative-historical sociology by James Mahoney, the approach holds that once a society starts down a track, the relative costs of reversal rise over time, so that the same initial conditions could have produced very different stable outcomes. Small contingent choices at a formative moment become amplified by positive feedback, learning effects, coordination, adaptive expectations, and sunk investments, until alternatives that were once feasible become prohibitively expensive. The method directs analysts to identify the contingent origin, specify the concrete mechanisms of reproduction, and demonstrate the increasing returns that make a path durable. It thereby converts the loose intuition that the past constrains the present into a disciplined account of temporally ordered, self-reinforcing causation.