Students of comparative politics have long faced a vexing dilemma: how can social scientists draw broad, applicable principles of political order from specific historical examples? In this text, five senior scholars offer an ambitious methodological response to this question. By employing rational-choice and game theory, the authors propose a way of extracting empirically-testable, general hypotheses from particular cases. The result is both a methodological manifesto and an applied handbook. The individual essays demonstrate the concept of the analytic narrative - a rational choice approach to explain political outcomes - in case studies. They highlight the economic role of political organizations, the rise and deterioration of political communities, and the role of coercion, especially warfare, in political life.