The social sciences force themselves on each other, each trying to capture society as a whole.
FERNAND BRAUDEL, On History (1969)
Religion and philosophy elevate history’s humanistic qualities, the desire and the ability to know more about ourselves, a collaboration whose roots go back to written history’s inception. But historical knowing has a less yielding side as well, an inclination to scientific rigor. After all, to say that history is a way of knowing this or that is to say that someone is doing research into original or primary sources and finding evidence to assemble into facts. Doing history is piecing together bits of evidence to make facts and then selecting and arraying facts to make arguments about what most likely happened. In the process, the historian makes thousands of little mental leaps: Is this evidence reliable? Is it the best evidence I can have for the story I want to tell? Have I rightly read the evidence? Have I assembled the pieces of evidence in the right way? All of these kinds of technical assessments precede larger conclusions about the significance of events, the motives of people, the causes of movements, and the meaning of the past. All of this resembles the scientific method. One cannot put the past in a test tube or run laboratory measurements on past events, but surely history’s ability to understand the past should be weighed alongside the other social sciences’.1
The collaboration of history and the social sciences is a relatively modern one. The word “historian” became part of standard English only in the late Renaissance and at the time did not distinguish the student of history from the literary inventors of fabulous chronicle. At the outset of the seventeenth century, historians routinely invented speeches, freely incorporated rumor and gossip, included myths and legends, and did not check their sources as they do today. Indeed, the very notion of a historical fact, proven by the critical examination of evidence, was a product of later seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century historical criticism. In its infancy, historical scholarship was no more scientific than any other contemporary intellectual endeavor when it came to judging the past. The producers and the consumers of historical tales were very much alike in the way they processed information.2
For this reason, the most learned man of his age in England had serious doubts about the scientific foundations of a subject like history. Francis Bacon was an Elizabethan and Jacobean English lawyer, judge, member of Parliament, scientist, philosopher, and essayist—in short, a true Renaissance intellectual. Though conventionally religious, he was highly secular in his outlook. Best known as the formulator of the “scientific method” and a practitioner of scientific experiments, he was as skeptical of the broadest claims of science as he was of those of law or religion. Never quite wealthy enough to pay for his expenses or powerful enough to satisfy his ambition, he nevertheless became solicitor general, attorney general, and finally Lord Chancellor under James I of England. He was impeached for corruption in 1621 and found guilty of taking gifts from litigants (a common practice) and other less common acts of immorality. He died in disgrace in 1626, all manner of rumor and accusation swirling about him.3
Bacon had an abiding interest in history and treated it as a subspecies of science—that is, he subjected written histories to the same sort of experimental categorization he imposed on natural or “mechanical” studies. He divided “civil history” into three types—uncompleted, finished, and defaced, likening them to portraits. The uncompleted memorial was a bare recitation of names, dates, and places much like the “CliffsNotes” used in high school classrooms years ago. They lacked analysis of causation and motive, surviving as mere antiquities, quixotic relics of the writers’ own biases and interests. Ironically, much of what we know of Bacon’s life came from Brief Lives, John Aubrey’s late-seventeenth-century antiquary. Aubrey collected salacious gossip, spiced it with his own opinions, and served it in a broth of anecdotes. Bacon would not have liked the dish. Far more to his taste were true “histories,” completed pictures of the “magnitude of actions, and the public faces and deportments” of important persons. But even these had “blanks and spaces” that authors felt free to fill with their own speculations. Of the decayed history, the false depiction—one thinks of the distance between Dorian Gray in person and his portrait—the less said the better.4
Historical writing at the time was prey to the “idols of the mind” Bacon warned against in his Novum Organum (1620). There were four. The idols of the tribe “have their foundation in human nature itself. … [T]he human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.” The second, the idols of the cave, “are the idols of the individual man. For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature; owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature or to his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires.” The third, idols of the marketplace, arise from conversations among those who are not knowledgeable, “on account of the commerce and consort of men there. For it is by discourse that men associate; and words are imposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar.” The last are the idols of the theater, “idols which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration … but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. Nor is it only of the systems now in vogue.”5
Elite and common consumers of history shared all of the idols of the mind. Popular culture and aristocratic culture were distinct only to the extent that the former was still largely oral while the latter was becoming increasingly written. As late as 1644 in England, for example, less than 20 percent of the total adult population could write, though many more could read. But literacy did not deter the educated few from indulging in the superstitions and enjoying the supernatural as much as the ordinary folk did.6
What would free the historical mind from these pitfalls, and elevate history above them? The answer seemed clear to later generations of scholars: associate history with science; or, go further—call history a science. The achievements of the scientific revolution in the period from 1600 to 1700 in western Europe wrought a gradual change in thinking about all phenomena. The experimental method the seventeenth century introduced in biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy was a powerful challenge to intellectuals to rethink old theories of human nature. Perhaps more important, each new discovery in the various scientific disciplines spurred further discoveries. While science was still more demonstration than theory, the old distinction between theories of nature and practical or technological improvement was melting away. The same men who expanded the boundaries of theory, for example the English chemist Robert Boyle, also designed and built experimental models. The old brake on the publication of such findings, the power of the Church to censor books, was still there—witness the suppression of Galileo’s astronomy—but in some locations, particularly England and the Low Countries, scientific publication was almost entirely uncensored. Experimental chemistry and biology were supplanting older notions of natural philosophy, a study of nature mixed with metaphysics, mysticism, and religious doctrine. The persuasive power of the new science, according to S. W. Serjeantson, was “greater than that of natural philosophy had ever been.”7
The long shadow of the new way of knowing fell across the chronicler’s page. Just as eighteenth-century Enlightenment science proposed that experimentation in chemistry and physics uncovered basic laws of nature, so eighteenth-century historians began to propose that politics and society obeyed their own natural laws. They were confident that “Reason would rebuild the world of humanity, arming herself with the prestige of science, which we know from [Isaac] Newton cannot err.” The parallel was not perfect. As the French student of government Montesquieu wrote in his Spirit of the Laws (1752), “The intelligent world is far from being as well governed as the physical world. For, though the intelligent world also has laws that are invariable by their nature, unlike the physical world, it does not follow its laws consistently.” Nevertheless, the self-assigned task of the student of human history became to discover the laws of society and the state, and to explain any deviations from them in history. As the French sociologist Auguste Comte wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century, the study of the laws of society might still be in their infancy, but further research, observation, and compilation would surely raise the study of the past to a more reliable level.8
In the second half of the nineteenth century, when history was making its claim for a place in the new world of graduate schools, historians found the cachet of science almost irresistible. If history were a science, then its practitioners were not mere antiquaries and annalists. The French historian Fustel de Coulanges lectured his colleagues in 1862, “[H]istory is something more than a pastime … it is not pursued merely to entertain our curiosity or to fill the pigeonholes of our memory. History is and should be a science.” J. B. Bury, a professor of history at Cambridge University, taught his students forty years later, “[I]t has not yet become superfluous to insist that history is a science, no less and no more.” The library and the archive were laboratories, and historical evidence rigorously tested and objectively presented could be used to prove, or disprove, hypotheses about the past. In fact, for the first seminar room in the first graduate program in American history at the Johns Hopkins University in 1880, Herbert Baxter Adams adopted the science laboratory as his model.9
In 1927, the English historian and philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood formulated the most sophisticated version of the history-as-science view.
It thus appears that history is not doubtful at all. … [T]he question “what the evidence proves” [as opposed to what really happened] is not doubtful. … That question can be answered by a competent scholar, with no more doubt than what must attend any man’s answer to any questions that can be asked in any department of knowledge. And in the certainty of that answer lies the formal dignity, the logical worth, the scientific value, in the highest sense of that word, of historical studies.10
In tying history to science, the historian solicited the collaboration of the social scientists. In the nineteenth century the technological and mechanical application of the natural sciences transformed industry, commerce, and everyday life. The standard of living improved with advances in public health. Information moved faster following inventions in sound transmission. New kinds of scientists appeared in the academic world—social scientists—to explain how the world worked, and the social scientists’ “new ways of understanding the historical world” claimed possession of a field that historians already cultivated.11
The first recorded use of the term “social science” linked it to its intellectual forebear, “moral philosophy.” In 1824, William Thompson wrote that “Social science, the science of morals … requires not only of what is technically called morals, and political economy, but of the outlines of all that is known.” Thompson cited Bacon’s quest for universal knowledge as the goal of social science. For him and his fellow social scientists, knowledge of society could be illuminated “with scientific accuracy.”12
The academics of the Gilded Age universities, a new phenomenon in themselves, welcomed the rise of “social science,” and in their hands it probed the workings of politics, society, culture, and economics. Economists were the first to form a professional organization, in 1885, followed in 1902 by anthropology, 1903 by political science, and 1905 by sociology. Political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, and economists trained in the new graduate departments of universities like Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Wisconsin, and Chicago and published their findings in scholarly journals and the publications of university presses created for that purpose. Experts in these disciplines found jobs in government and colleges, and they tutored the next generation of social scientists. Although they had different subject matter, all of the social sciences focused on method and sought regularities and uniformities, much like the hard sciences of biology and chemistry, rather than the historians’ focus on singular events and leading figures’ actions. Social scientists moved away from religious explanations and moral judgments toward what they saw as more objective secular explanations of human behavior. The Social Science Research Council that these social scientists created in 1923 fostered and funded this approach to the study of human behavior and to the methods of science as well. At its core, “the devotion to science [was] … a high calling.”13
By the middle of the twentieth century, the collaboration between social scientist and historical scholar proved to be a fruitful one in skilled hands. In two remarkable but now little-known and infrequently cited essays originally published in 1948 and 1956, respectively, Thomas Cochran, an economic historian, and Richard Hofstadter, an intellectual historian, made the connection between history and social science even more sophisticated. Cochran warned against too simple a narrative technique that mistook the surface account of events for their causes. A “lack of communication” had prevented historians from using social scientists’ findings on deeper trends. The surfeit of documentary evidence might conceal as much as it revealed of these forces of change. Theories and hypotheses on groups, periods, and other general phenomena would integrate the individual story into more powerful explanatory statements of major shifts and events. Hofstadter added a more personal note about the importance of interdisciplinary studies. Social psychology in particular interested him, as it gave him another window in the minds and motives of American leaders. It afforded him “a fresh store of ideas” and that in turn permitted an “analytical” revision of conventional intellectual biography. Use of these did not transform the historian into a social scientist but made history richer and allowed the historian to better approximate the multiplicity of motives in real life.14
The ideal is a mutual respect—historians using social science theory to inform their research, social scientists relying on historians’ findings to test and polish theory. But social scientists did not always follow the rules laid down by historians for using historical scholarship. Sometimes social scientists’ dogged adherence to particular theories dictated results and proponents of the theory “mined” the sources to find evidence for their arguments. As Eric Wolf wrote in his People Without History (1982), “This severance of social relations from the economic, political and ideological contexts in which they are embedded” was coincident with the founding of the social sciences. Each of them “parcel out the subject [of human behavior] among themselves. Each then proceeds to set up a model” that supposedly explains objectively, but which is (we know from studying their history) “an ideologically loaded scheme.” Wolf’s warning is sound, but surely the remedy was more and better social science history. Insofar as they study human conduct in the past, social scientists must be guided by the historians’ canon, but as the following accounts suggest, the social scientist is a very selective borrower from history.15
The most comfortable of all these partnerships, and the oldest, is that between history and geography. Geography is the science of the earth’s surface, a subject of abiding interest to premodern mathematicians. The best known of these early geographers was Ptolemy, a second-century Roman who piled into his Geographia just about everything known in the early Roman Empire, to which he added his own ideas about the size and shape of the earth (he knew it was a sphere) and included his still-valuable instructions on how to draw maps. Ptolemy’s contribution was equaled by that of the eleventh-century Persian Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni, who first calculated latitude and longitude. But the geography of Ptolemy and Al-Biruni was more than a calculating science. Ptolemy intended his work to guide travelers, and Al-Biruni put his ideas to work drawing maps of cities and regions. Their example reminds us that geography’s great fascination for people is its practical utility. Thus it is wrong to regard geography as a pure science, and most universities locate their geography departments in the division of social sciences.
Historically speaking, even this placement is suspect, for the history of geography demonstrates how closely tied it was to history. The first works of history that survived, like Herodotus’s, were also storehouses of geographical information. As the historians’ knowledge of the world expanded, so did the information on geography they included in their works. This tradition, of embedding geographical facts in historical accounts, remains strong. One cannot write the history of Europe, for example, without taking into account the effects of human endeavor on the landscape and the reciprocal impact on human activity of climate, soil, topography, and other geographical features. “These physical conditions are of profound human importance. They influence every facet of life from styles of clothing and of architecture to the practice of agriculture.”16
The partnership worked both ways. Contemporary maps and descriptions of geographical features are vital sources for historians. They exhibit the worldviews and information available to navigators and travelers. Cartographers catered to the expectations and needs of those who used or purchased the maps. For example, for maps of the sea lanes ship captains wanted accuracy, possible when latitude and compass readings could be added to drawings of coastlines. But maps of land masses often had a different purpose, claiming the land for a company or a sovereign, as well as showing distances, place landmarks, and survey boundaries. Chinese map makers of the premodern period were especially adept at this kind of map, introducing concepts of scale (with square grids) and direction and including topographical and economic detail. As Chinese trade and influence spread throughout Asia, the maps included more and more informative texts, themselves drawn from earlier archival materials. They “alerted the Chinese to external conditions that might affect the country’s trade and security.” This process of incorporation and transformation of information from outside China’s borders continued well into the modern era.17
There are a number of geographical theories of history, theories in which geography determines who rules, how people think, and the utilization of natural resources. Sometimes called environmental determinism, the theories have something of the malodor of Eurocentrism. That is, they were designed to be or have been deployed as justifications for people from temperate zones (particularly northern Europe) to take control of and expropriate the natural resources and labor of people from subtropical or tropical geographic zones. Notable at the turn of the twentieth century were the ideas of Yale Professor Ellsworth Huntington that temperate climates promoted energy and higher levels of reasoning, while warmer, wetter climates induced torpor and servility and supported the racism of Latin American and African imperial ventures. Huntington had visited the Middle East and taught in Turkey before World War I and concluded, “The tropical climate of Africa and South America causes their living creatures to differ greatly from those of temperate regions.” Characteristic of these regions, “The people, too, were found to have little in common with other races, and to be the most backward in the world.” It would be best, then, according to Huntington, if “the more tropical portions” of these lands “would to-day be better governed, more prosperous and more peaceful than at present if they were held by an enlightened colonial power.”18
The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, a contemporary of Huntington’s, was also an advocate of geographic theories of historical development. Turner was convinced that the vast expanse of relatively free land in North America during the early years of the new nation contributed to the individualistic and democratic character of its people. His so-called frontier theory of American history explicitly tied geography to political culture: “[T]he facts of geography were more compelling than arbitrary colonial boundaries.” The land beckoned, and turning a wilderness into settlements stripped the European of his old cultural garments and clothed him in American homespun. As the frontier moved west, so did the democracy, creating new kinds of leaders and policies. “We have had to deal with the connections of geography, industrial growth, politics, and government. … American history is chiefly concerned with social forces, shaping and reshaping under the conditions of a nation changing as it adjusts to its environment. And this environment progressively reveals new aspects of itself, exerts new influences, and calls out new social organs and functions.”19
But Turner, like Huntington, saw geography through the refracting prism of race. The true frontiersman was not Spanish-speaking, or dusky in color, or native to the land. He was an Anglo-Saxon, the highest form of northern European manhood. Turner effusively praised Theodore Roosevelt for his pro–Anglo-Saxon views in the latter’s Winning of the West and himself shared these, publicly and privately. Roosevelt had prefaced his work with “We of this generation were but carrying to completion the work of our fathers and of our fathers’ fathers. It is moreover a matter for just pride that while there was no falling off in the vigor and prowess shown by our fighting men, there was a marked change for the better in the spirit with which the deed was done.” Turner saw himself and his America in the same light: The history of the west was the story of “Anglo-Saxon occupation.” In his later years, Turner conceded that the melting pot of many peoples had its part in shaping American values, but he never disavowed his racialist bias.20
Theories like Huntington’s and Turner’s are still fashionable in some quarters, but historical geography has gone far beyond (and above) crude racism of this sort. The very best historical geographies are multi-perspective in nature, incorporating epidemiology (the study of epidemic diseases), linguistics, and the cultural history of cartography, as well as more conventional historical findings. Only “a wider lens and a shift in stance” allows the historical geographer the right perspective on the movement of peoples over the land. For example, Alfred Crosby’s work on the Columbian Exchange (a term he introduced in 1972) is a superb antidote to Huntington’s crude posturing. Crosby explained how the European portmanteau “biota”—the diseases, insects, animals, and pollens that Europeans brought with them to the Americas—were as important in the success of the imperial venture as armor and firearms. “These killers came to the New World with the explorers and the conquistadors.” Native peoples who had no acquired immunities to pestilence that Europeans had lived with for millennia succumbed by the millions. European rats, cockroaches, weeds, pigs, and cattle despoiled native crops and paved the way for the colonization of the Americas.21
The second-oldest of the social sciences, today called political science, goes all the way back to Thucydides of ancient Athens. His History of the Peloponnesian War was as much about the politics of the Greek city-states as about the diplomacy and campaigns of the war. It introduced a clear-eyed (no gods waging war on one another through human agents; no miraculous events) analysis of the causes and effects of the conflict. The path from Thucydides to the American Political Science Association, founded in 1903, is remarkably straight. Its aim was his: to foster the more precise study of the state in all its manifestations; as the first president of the APSA, Frank Goodnow, put it, “the practical and concrete” facts of state power.22
Historians like William Dunning, Woodrow Wilson, and Albert Bushnell Hart were early presidents of the APSA. Modern political scientists write history all the time, borrowing from historians’ works for background and using primary sources of past events like legislative records, election returns, contemporary comment, diplomatic correspondence, interviews and oral history, and public speeches. Insofar as the political scientist uses the source material of history, the quality of the historical materials in his or her work depends upon the extent to which the political scientist accepts and employs the canons of historical scholarship.
Take, for example, the political scientist James MacGregor Burns’s biographies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The Lion and the Fox (1956) and Roosevelt the Soldier of Freedom (1970). Both won major history prizes because Burns acted like a historian, seeking complexity and depth, weighing and balancing admiration and criticism, amassing factual material, and adding insights into personal and political motives, rather than just using episodes and words to make points about political systems. But at heart, Burns remained a political scientist in the old sense, a moral philosopher. As he wrote in his 2004 edition of Transforming Leadership, “I believe leadership is not only a descriptive term, but a prescriptive one, embracing a moral, even a passionate, dimension.” One cannot speak of Gandhi or Roosevelt as leaders in the same way one would speak of Hitler as a leader. A leader is measured “by the supreme public values that themselves are the profoundest expressions of human wants: liberty and equality, justice and opportunity, the pursuit of happiness.” Weighed in this scale, Hitler would not move the balance a fraction of an inch. While political scientists continue to make value judgments and look to the future (activities historians find unnerving), the two disciplines have a long and relatively comfortable relationship.23
Modern political science is no longer confined to the descriptive. Its quantitative face, for example, inspires historical studies of legislative and judicial behavior, electoral blocs, and public official behavior. Behavioral research itself has formulated models of great utility to historians. But the collaboration remained two-sided. Even when behavioral research is faulted in the political science academy for failing to reach deeply into the motives of public and private actors, political scientists have found historical records and analysis useful correlatives and correctives to empirical research methods. Typical is the “new institutionalism” school, revisiting the old political history with new insights into how governmental institutions gain lives of their own. Perhaps the best evidence of this continuing cross-fertilization, however, lies in the field of “state-building.” Here historians like Brian Balogh and Williamjames Hoffer have built on the insights of political scientists like Stephen Skowronek to trace how the modern bureaucratic state evolved. It is hard to imagine a future for political science scholarship that does not continue its close ties with historical research and writing, and almost as hard to conceive of a political history that does not find use in political science findings.24
The origin of cultural anthropology lies in historical scholarship. David Hume, eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, historian, and (though the term did not yet exist) social scientist, was the first cultural anthropologist. His “Of National Characters,” part of his Essays, Moral and Political (1741), may seem antiquarian to modern eyes, but in it he attempted a science of cultural traits. It offers the same skeptical view of how culture works as his more famous philosophical tracts and the same common-sense observations as one finds in his histories. For example, consider his explanation of the origins of prejudice: “The vulgar are apt to carry all national characters to extremes, and, having once established it as a principle that any people are knavish, cowardly, or ignorant, they will admit of no exception, but comprehend every individual under the same censure. Men of sense condemn this undistinguishing judgment.” Hume did not, however, revert to the older idea of the uniformity of human nature. Instead, he thought that political and social experience, added to natural circumstances, shaped “the peculiar set of manners” of peoples.25
The roots of cultural anthropology in the United States lie in the nineteenth-century study of Native American ethnic groups (called “ethnology”). North American Indians did not have a written culture, so students of their ways developed the technique of “upstreaming,” learning about the Indian past by working with informants and focusing on oral culture. Modern cultural anthropology, the descendant of these first efforts, is still closely tied to history.26
Alas, there are some notable occasions when a preoccupation with a particular result caused a cultural anthropologist to misuse historical information. Nineteenth-century American cultural anthropologists found what they believed to be scientific evidence of the inferiority of African slaves and distorted the history of ancient peoples to try to prove the point. Mobile, Alabama, surgeon Josiah Nott found the racial theory of human descent compelling, and with the American Egyptologist George Giddon wrote the massive Types of Mankind (1854) to prove the point. For both men, the history of ancient Egypt was crucial, but they ignored, denied, and fudged evidence that for at least part of that history, Africans ruled the Egyptian empire. They concluded instead that the “lower races of mankind” (the lowest of which were sub-Saharan Negroes) were inferior in intellect, moral perception, and emotional maturity, “all history, as well as anatomy and physiognomy prove this”—convenient findings for those who argued that slavery could only improve the condition of African Americans.27
The cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict was well known and much respected among cultural anthropologists for her Patterns of Culture (1934), a sweeping synthetic comparison of the leading traits of a number of cultures. Influenced by her mentor Franz Boas, she did not look down upon Native Americans or African Americans as inherently inferior. But her analysis of Japanese society in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) misread Japanese history profoundly, out of a profound misunderstanding of how research in history worked. To be fair, she was working under the constraints of a war against a Japan that evinced Japanese indifference to the suffering of its own and other nations’ civilian populations. But she was not a Japanese speaker or reader, nor did she delve into Japanese primary sources. To write “A Japanese who writes about Japan passes over really crucial things which are as familiar to him as the air he breathes” not only oversimplifies Japanese culture, it ignores the basic canons of historical research. Unable to read and understand spoken Japanese, unable to go to Japan in wartime, she relied upon Japanese who lived in the United States as informants. Just as the nonparticipant observer trying to understand a native society is dependent, so Benedict was confidently dependent on others, ignoring the ways in which contact with American culture, and the desire to please and influence her, would shape what her informants said. Again, Benedict’s task was not an open-ended one. As part of the Office of War Information’s effort to plan for the postwar period, she was to determine when a conquered and occupied Japan could become a trusted democratic ally. Predictably, she found that the Japanese, properly respected, would accommodate American postwar needs. “When the Japanese believe themselves humiliated, revenge is a virtue. No matter how strongly Western ethics condemn such a tenet,” the occupation forces must make every effort not to rub the defeat in the Japanese faces. For the Japanese were “a people of extreme situational ethics.” After the catastrophic defeat planned for them, the Japanese would surely know their place in an American-supervised world order.28
At its best the discipline of cultural anthropology requires a kind of poetic imagination similar to idealistic history. The observer must be free to make leaps of empathy into the lives and beliefs of other people based on evidence not every historian would accept. Clifford Geertz, the foremost cultural anthropologist of the second half of the twentieth century, explained this poetic imagination thusly: using informants to tell stories about what happened in the past and then decoding the behaviors in the stories. Making actions and words into signs and then translating the signs as they fit into a pattern was what he called “thick description.” The cultural anthropologist laid out “a multiplicity of complex, conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular and inexplicit” and then “rendered” them intelligible to someone not from that time and place. But Geertz cautioned social scientists that cultural history, in their hands at least, was still “refractory” and “retarded.” It was a challenge to do more with history and a recognition that history was vital to understanding cultures.29
The other three social sciences most associated with history—sociology, economics, and psychology—are less inherently historical, but all three import historical evidence and write about historical subjects. Certain parts of sociology, the study of group behavior, roles, and relationships, may be entirely ahistorical, based on a series of cross-sectional observations or questionnaires. But even they have found a place in academic historical writing.
Indeed, the very founders of sociology as an academic field in the United States, in particular William Graham Sumner and Edward A. Ross, put history to use to defend their general theories of society. While it may be true that no historian or sociologist today would take Sumner as a model of method, he did introduce the first course in sociology, at Yale, and he continued to lecture on society and politics until his death in 1914. He introduced terms still in use like “ethnocentrism” and “the forgotten man.” One must concede that he was one of the Gilded Age’s foremost public intellectuals.30
Sumner’s classic work Folkways argued that a people’s customs evolved over the entire history of that people and could not easily be changed. At least, that is what history taught him. “The analysis and definition above given show that in the mores we must recognize a dominating force in history.” In history, “folkways become coercive, all are forced to conform, and the folkways dominate the societal life. … Thence are produced faiths, ideas, doctrines, religions, and philosophies, according to the stage of civilization and the fashions of reflection and generalization.” Profoundly conservative, believing that government could never change the nature of men and that laws could never improve a situation, no matter how dire, Sumner opposed progressive government, particularly attempts to relieve economic suffering. “The history of financial distress in this country” was full of such schemes for reform, and “no scheme ever devised” by reformers brought anything but “turmoil, risk, and ruin.” At the same time, special interests, including those of capital, had proved equally corrupting to government and society.31
Ross, as influential in his day as Sumner, saw in the tie of sociology to history proof of the value and necessity of reform from above and below. In Ross’s massive Foundations of Society (1905) that tie was central. For “social evolution” was in fact historical evolution, and history, instead of some vast eternal plan, was actually the accumulated acts that became “the sorted materials ready to the hand of the inductive sociologist.” The sociologist’s job, then, was to see in the myriad details the larger patterns of social relationships. “History is not, as many suppose, the quarry to which sociologists resort for their material. The records of the past … are common quarry for both historian and sociologist. The former explores them for events … the latter prizes most the humble facts of repetition … of domestic life, manners, industry, law, or religion.” This was exactly what Sumner assayed, but Ross, tackling the same project, came up with very different results. Reform was as natural and as needed as the conservation of older mores. For example, the reform of divorce law “lay to the opening of doors to a feminine career and the relaxation of old beliefs which constrained woman to bear unmurmuring her yoke.” Or the end of slavery, “the peace movement, the reform of punishment [for crimes against property], the rise of socialism,” all of which were as natural as the ills they sought to alleviate.32
Ross shared a key concept with Sumner. They both believed in the dangers of race suicide, the degradation of the Anglo-Saxon peoples by infusions of inferior “blood.” Ross was a founding member of the American Eugenics movement, an opponent of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and an advocate of breeding of the “superior races.” As he wrote to a fellow Eugenicist in 1927, “an interest in Eugenics is almost a perfect index of one’s breadth of outlook and unselfish concern for the future of our race.”33
Today, sociological concepts and terms like “role orientation” and “group orientation theory” are commonplace in historical analysis. In fact, a new kind of historical pedagogy based on roleplaying has become very popular. Using materials prepared for the classroom, history teachers ask students to take on the roles of important historical figures in a particular case, for example the trial of Anne Hutchinson for seditious libel. Using dialogue from actual historical records, the student players re-create the historical event. The re-creation is scripted in the sense that the students must act as though they actually are the historical personages. Although the purpose is to help students understand what the past was like, the exercise depends implicitly on the sociological concept that social structures limit and define the roles that people can play in any real-life situation.34
Economics, particularly modern theoretical economics, often pointedly ignores history. This tradition goes back to the Enlightenment agitation of Adam Smith in Scotland and the French physiocrats for an end to government impositions on free trade. For these theorists, economic study had a historical component, but the laws of economics, like the laws of physics, were supposed to be outside of time and place. The same faith in the iron laws of economics influenced the first American economic theorists. The most important of these in the first half of the nineteenth century, Francis Wayland, influenced politicians and jurists as well as other economic thinkers. He believed not only that laissez-faire was the best economic policy, but any interference with the operation of free markets was immoral. “The individual right to property and the profits earned from it are grounded in morality as much as economics.”35
But there were academics who regarded history as more important to economics and derived from it a different lesson from Wayland’s. Late-nineteenth-century economists like Richard T. Ely, a reformer like Ross, saw in the historical study of economics, particularly the relationship between labor and capital, a basis for reform. In Ely’s The Social Law of Service (1906), history taught that economic ills like poverty were not the result of individual sin but of the failings of the economic system, and that the welfare of the people had always been the aim of all moral systems. “When the rich oppress the poor, and the strong make a prey of the feeble, then the nation is led away into captivity.” The ill effects of unregulated capitalism had thrown its shadow over all the Western nations, but “the past generation has witnessed a marvelous growth of a feeling of brotherhood among the wage earners of modern industrial nations. Possibly when the history of the nineteenth century comes to be written … this will be regarded as the most marvelous feature of the second half of the century.”36
Though Ely’s prediction was wrong—the industrial unionization and welfare state policies promoted by reformers in the late nineteenth century did not bear fruit until the 1930s—his belief in the close ties between economic thinking and history was reasserted in the 1970s. In that decade, economic history practiced by economists blossomed. The result was a spate of books and articles using quantitative methods, like Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s much-read Time on the Cross (1974). The quality that makes any and all of these forays into social science good history and elevates their reading of the past is the way their authors adopted the historical method. As Fogel and Engerman opened their epic study of the economics of slavery, “what is not generally known is that the traditional interpretation view of slavery [that it was unprofitable and that slaves were more poorly housed, fed, and clothed than free workers] has been under intensive critical review for almost a decade and a half by historians and economists who are trained in the application of quantitative methods to historical problems.” It was the collaboration of the historian and the economist that allowed masses of data to be organized for the first time, and for the data to be subjected to computer analysis.37
Fogel and Engerman’s findings were the subject of a decade-long debate among economic historians and historians of slavery. The contestants met in panels and gave talks at professional meetings. Paul David, Peter Temin, Richard Sutch, and Herbert Gutman published a collection of essays, Reckoning with Slavery, to rebut every substantive claim, along with many of the statistical conclusions, that Fogel and Engerman reached. Gutman and Sutch concluded somewhat uncharitably that Fogel and Engerman’s most important contribution was a proof of “the failure of quantitative methods to provide historical evidence when divorced from the qualitative methods of history.” In the collection, and in a separate work, Gutman, a student of the slave family, raised both moral and psychological questions. For example, even if whipping was not so common, what was the impact on the slave of the master’s untrammeled power to use corporal punishment? Whatever the shortcomings of their pioneering effort, Fogel and Engerman had forced the historians to look more closely at the aggregate data, to make comparisons between slave and wage labor, to model micro- and macroeconomies’ dependence on slavery.38
Economic history, a cross-breed of the two disciplines, is taught in both history departments and business schools. It has its own journals, its own jargon, and its own following among scholars. The Journal of Economic History, for example, publishes articles on “money and banking, trade, manufacturing, technology, transportation, industrial organisation, labour, agriculture, servitude, demography, education, economic growth, and the role of government and regulation,” and Economic History Review “aims at broad coverage of themes of economic and social change, including the intellectual, political and cultural implications of these changes.” Ironically, a discipline that boasts of its breadth is divided between those who believe in free-market laws and those who believe in the struggle between labor and capital—a throwback to the nineteenth-century debates between laissez-faire advocates and Marxists. Some economic historians insist on inductive reasoning from case studies. Others believe that general laws of economic growth permit deductive reasoning. No social science is so riven by ideological quarrels as economic history, but the field itself flourishes.
Formal psychological theory plays a small role in most historical studies. Psychology’s first trained practitioners, called “alienists,” were not major players in social science until the twentieth century. Still, pioneers of psychology like the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud did not hesitate to plunge into historical studies, and one of his last students, Erik Erikson, contributed a classic if somewhat impressionistic account of Martin Luther to the historical corpus.39
Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1937) boldly explained the origins of ethics and religion in the psychoanalytic needs of the id, the ego, and the superego. For “Ethics … means restriction of instinctual gratification. The [Jewish] Prophets did not tire of maintaining that God demands nothing else from his people but a just and virtuous life—that is to say, abstention from the gratification of all impulses that, according to our present-day moral standards, are to be condemned as vicious.” For Freud, the history of religion, at least that of monotheism, recapitulated the history of the maturing individual, as instinctual id drives for gratification bowed to the moral authority of the parent. “Here also it is the parents’ authority—essentially that of the all-powerful father, who wields the power of punishment—that demands instinctual renunciation on the part of the child and determines what … the child calls ‘good’ or ‘naughty.’” The history of the race was the history of the developing ego of the child.40
Erikson’s Young Man Luther is at once a psychoanalytic study of Luther’s conversion experience and his later theological ideas and a tribute to Freud’s earlier work. “When Luther challenged the rock bottom of his own prayer, he could not know that he would find the fundament for a new theology. Nor did Freud know that he would find the principles of a new psychology when he took radical chances with himself in a new kind of introspective analysis.” For Erikson, student of Luther and Freud, “applied to Luther, the first Protestant at the end of the age of absolute faith, insights developed by Freud, the first psychoanalyst at the end of the era of absolute reason.”41
Although some critics of a psychologically infused historical scholarship think psychoanalysis is the only kind of “psychohistory” and demean it as a latter-day version of “phrenology” (in which character is said to be deduced from cranial features), that criticism is certainly too broad. As Philip Greven has wisely written, “Historians can learn much from students of the human psyche, especially by becoming sensitive to the recurrent themes and patterns of feeling and thought that emerge from the discrete and confusing details of ordinary existence.” Peter Gay, who has written both psychoanalytically inspired history and more conventional intellectual history, reminds us that psychoanalytic psychohistory is “an orientation rather than a specialty … not a handbook of recipes but a style of seeing the past. … Nor need it be reductionist. History is more than a monologue of the unconscious, more than a dance of symptoms.”42
There are a great many more strands to psychology than psychoanalysis and thus a great many more possibilities for a fruitful union of history and psychology. There is, for example, cognitive psychology, with its emphasis on the way in which we process the report of our senses. Cognitive psychology teaches that we privilege the impressions that fit preexisting notions in our minds and dismiss or reformat perceptions that do not fit our preexisting notions. Our desire for cognitive fit has led us to misperceive the intentions and acts of our diplomatic partners and our foreign enemies. The study of personality and its companion, trait psychology, can also inform historical accounts. “This approach to the total study of the individual has come to develop a distinctive philosophy of human nature; that is, man’s psychological attributes may be quantified.” While such measurements usually take place in present time (protocols or inventories filled out by applicants for a job or volunteers in a study), analogous forms of measurement can be applied to individuals in the past.43
Social science asks the historian for rigorous empiricism. Historians cannot reproduce the past in a laboratory, but we can insist that any sound judgment be replicated by other scholars. Social science asks that conclusions be based on evidence. We can ask the same of historians—that they be well trained, do research in the appropriate fashion, and submit their methods, findings, and account to the scrutiny of other scholars in the same field. So a scientific frame of mind, setting out hypotheses without bias, is a quality that every student of the past needs in order to make judgments that deserve credence.