>I would suggest to _start_ with the
>most abstract level, and while qualifying that _never_ letting it
>disappear from view: the united states is a male-supremacist social
>order.
You sound like a bourgeois econometrician! Peter Kennedy, from his econometrics text:
>The first and most important ingredient in such a search is economic
>theory. If economic theory cannot defend the use of a variable as an
>explanatory variable, it should not be included in the set of
>potential independent variables. Such theorizing should take place
>before any empirical testing of the appropriateness of potential
>independent variables; this guards against the adoption of an
>independent variable just because it happens to 'explain' a
>significant portion of the variation in the dependent variable in
>the particular sample at hand.
I.e., start with what you just *know* to be true, and everything else will flow neatly from that. Which is how we just *know* it's 1890 all over again, right? So much easier now that we can use Lenin's Imperialism as a template - even if the world isn't already divided into territorial empires, even if there are substantial portions of the U.S. ruling class that's not hot for war, etc. etc. Those are mere ephemera, which theory tells us we must be on guard against.
Doug