My friend Jae has posted an interesting entry, which includes a quote which I believe comes from a book he is reading called Bridges and Boundaries. I have yet to read this so I shouldn’t comment much on it, but the quote is quite intriguing:
“the primary goal of historians is to describe, understand and interpret individual events or a temporarily and spatially bounded series of events, whereas the primary goal of political scientists is to generalize about the relationships between variables and, to the extent possible, construct law-like propositions about social behaviour.”
This is a very nice and concise division. I imagine that this distinction would not meet with objection from many historians.
Unfortunately, the distinction horribly underestimates the ambitions of both historians and political scientists…
First of all, let us look at the description of the historian in this quote. What is the object of study? Events. Historians study events. This is a very outdated view of the work of historians. They are portrayed here as chroniclers of sorts, collecting details about events and “describing” them. There is no doubt that my own walls and the shelves of history sections in bookstores around the world are indeed full of works which are about events, or a series of events but this is horribly misrepresentative of the goals and essence of work in history today. Historians today have an incredibly diverse range of objects for their study. A single work might have several, and they can less than forthcoming about what exactly they have chosen for a target. Sovereignty, national identity, gender, labor, class, totalitarianism – these are just to name a few that come to my mind. Of course they use events in history to talk about these things but so too do political scientists.
If historians do not “generalize” about these subjects (and in fact, there are many that do) to propose “law-like” propositions about them, this is hardly because they consider it to be “outside” their discipline. Social and economic history has a long tradition of trying to make science out of history.
However, the quote also says that historians “interpret” which immediately blurs the lines between political science and history. If historians are interpreting events, so are political scientists. If historians do not generalize from the causal relationships they are often tempted to establish, they are anything but the running sniffer dogs whose only task is to produce the “data” for the political scientist to extract laws from.
No, whether we condemn or laud them for it, historians and political scientists often have very similar goals. The political scientists are presumably making propositions about social behavior in order to influence future policy making or a society’s view of certain social phenomena. With the exception of those historians who believe that collecting empirical facts about the past has some value in and of itself, they all define the value of their work in terms of the impact it will have on something or someone. It is not entirely unusual for this someone or something to be the opinions and policies of a society. This is not something limited to marxist historians bent on revolution, or nationalists who tell of a glorious past.
It is certainly true that political science often attempts to use the mechanical tools of scientific reasoning to back their conclusions. This helps generate legitimacy.
However, you cannot so simply distinguish the two fields by relegating one to an innocent grunt work, and the other to the discovery of general laws.
Historians, like political scientists, cannot escape the occasional glance towards the future. Historians also make claims based on the work they have done, the events they have described, and the social behavior they have analyzed. They have their own tools of legitimacy, and whether these are the statistics, charts, and tables of the social sciences, or the more literary flavor of personal accounts, archival materials, etc. they contest any monopoly that political science might claim over the realm of the political.
The quote (and I say only the quote because I have not read the rest of the book it comes from) is also belittling of political scientists, because it authenticates only the brand of political scientists which seeks to produce law-like generalizations. Where does that put the work of someone like Gerald Curtis, a renowned political scientist in the field of Japanese Politics? In his work The Logic of Japanese Politics he admits that actors are constrained by a particular context but he emphasizes that, “Decisions made by individuals…are the direct cause of what happens in politics.” (4) There is a generalization here, to be sure, but it is that no general law (or presumably a law-like proposition) is sufficient to predict the outcome in politics – that the role of the individual politician is central, even if her behavior is constrained. Well, this so-called political scientist might as well step down and join the history department! Or if he thinks individual behavior is so important, perhaps Curtis should hang out with the psychology department?
This is simply unfair. In fact, political scientists are doing all sorts of research and only one strain of it is attempting to claim ultimate legitimacy for the kind of work which dabbles in general laws.
Not even political theory, which last time I checked is a sub field of political science, is necessarily trying to generalize on the relationship between variables. Many of their laws are completely abstracted from the world of social behavior and is closely related to ethics and political philosophy.
In short this quote and many other attempts to divide academic disciplines fail to acknowledge the diversity of research within each field, and by doing so magnifies Ockham’s fine razor into a divisive chain saw. The result, unfortunately, can lead to less multi-disciplinary work and inter-disciplinary dialogue by making one of the two following flawed assumptions, “Your language is different from mine so there is no point in wasting my time explaining anything to you.” or, as in this case, “What you are doing is completely different from what I’m doing, so I’ll let you be if you let me be.”