Theory, Method, and Social Reproduction in Social Science History: A Short Jeremiad

Let me begin with a simple theme, repentance, and a simple message: repent from complacency in the practice and defense of social science history (SSH). I say this because I do not see social science historians meeting three major challenges that must be overcome if the larger, collective enterprise is to survive with the same vitality it had a decade ago. Those challenges are, first, to bring social theory forcefully back into historical research; second, to take formal methods to a new, higher level; and, third, to seek to train the next generation of social science historians in the theory and methods they will need in the next century.

In making this claim I assume that the combination of social theory and formal methods were, are, and should be the core components of SSH. William Aydelotte (1971), Lee Bensen (1972 [1957]), Samuel Hays (1980), Allan Bogue (1981), Robert Fogel (1975), and Morgan Kousser (1980a, 1980b, 1984) all said this early on, and the idea has survived pretty much intact. Although its methodological and theoretical repertoire may have changed in the past two decades, the basic components of SSH remain social theory and formal methods. In his 1989 survey of social science historians, Kousser (1989: 18) reported that most respondents thought SSH involved employing “specific hypotheses or theory drawn from any other social scientific discipline.” Building on the citation accompanying the 1993 Nobel Prize in economics to Robert Fogel and Douglass North, George Grantham (1997: 353) reiterated that view when he defined cliometrics as “a blending of modern economic theory and econometrics with traditional methods of historical analysis in order to investigate economic change in the long run.” We might well reflect on Grantham’s larger point that combining theory and formal methods in order to understand mass behavior and large-scale social change is what economic history, and much of social science history, is all about. Yet if most social science historians believe this, they do not appear to say it very often. In this respect SSH is in trouble.

I also assume that SSH is a meaningful way to practice professional history and that recovering the vitality it had a decade ago is a desirable goal. Hundreds of professional historians think of themselves as social science historians. However, where Kousser (1989: 17) could comfortably assert in 1989 that SSH was “not about to fade away,” recent declarations about the putative “historic turn” in the social sciences in the 1990s routinely assert the reverse (Appleby et al. 1994; McDonald 1996; Appleby 1998). The tendency to equate SSH with quantification may have faded, but many, if not most, social science historians continue to display a clear propensity to use formal statistical—quantitative—methods and reasoning in their work. John Reynolds (1998), however, found a decline in the use of both elementary and advanced statistics in U.S. history journals since 1985. Although a little less than 30% of all articles in major U.S. history journals (Journal of Social History, William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, Journal of American History, American Historical Review) between 1975 and 1995 could be classified as quantitative, those containing intermediate or advanced statistics declined from nearly 20% in the late 1980s to 15% by 1995. It thus appears that a fair proportion of historians are choosing to count, but not much more. And again, although quantitative methods are not synonymous with SSH, Reynolds’s demonstration of a decline in their use should be somewhat chilling if that decline represents a decline in the use of formal methods.

The decline is all the more troubling because Reynolds contends, on the basis of oral interviews with the editors of the major national and regional U.S. journals he studied, that much less quantitative work is being submitted now than a decade ago. It is not the case that editors and editorial boards are becoming increasingly unreceptive to quantitative social science history, although logically they are becoming increasingly less capable of evaluating it. It is the case that they are not getting that much quantitative history to consider. Whether or not this means that social science history, and specifically professional historical scholarship that explicitly employs social theory and replicable formal methods, is on the decline is another question altogether. Reynolds’s focus was quantitative history, not SSH. We do not know how much of social science history remains quantitative, and to what extent other formal methods of analysis are replacing the easily identifiable statistical methods that marked SSH in its early years. In fact, Kousser may still be right in asserting that SSH is not fading away. It may be only changing. The question really is whether quants have abandoned quantification in favor of other formal methods or whether there are simply fewer quants.

One could adopt a socially reconstructed view of SSH and contend that it is the history that those who call themselves social science historians actually do. This view could well explain both the decline in quantitative submissions that Reynolds documents and the increase in attendance at the annual meetings of the SSHA. This view also nicely skirts the issue of whether there is actually a social science history apart from what social science historians produce, although the issue itself remains. Past presidents of the SSHA, all wiser folk than I, have avoided the probably intractable and potentially divisive question, preferring instead to endorse more inclusive notions of SSH. Donald McCloskey (1990), for example, recast the early tension in the historical profession between the “old” and the “new” histories of the 1960s and 1970s as a distinction between science and the humanities, or quantitative and narrative history, and then pronounced that distinction silly because both shared common rhetorical strategies. Barbara Hanawalt (1991) spoke of her comfort in numbers but also of a desire to better understand texts and past experience not captured by numerical description. Eric Monkkonen (1994) and Susan Cotts Watkins (1995) remained content to chart the course of the SSHA through the intellectual currents of the past quarter century and to marvel, rightly I think, at the benefits that accrue from interdisciplinary conversations. Whatever the content of past SSHA presidential addresses in the 1990s, virtually none failed to recognize that theory and formal methods from all the social sciences have defined the character of the organization and the work of a majority of its members.

SSH is now competing with cultural approaches to studying the past that are informed by postmodern theories of social realities and social relations that are decidedly unscientific, at least in the sense that they regard verification as neither desirable nor, by some accounts, possible (Novick 1988; Appleby et al. 1994). Although some might debate the threat that cultural history poses to SSH, I personally think SSH is in deep trouble, considering that Joyce Appleby, in her presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1998, boldly announced that social history, which surely includes SSH, had run its course and that the profession should now devote its collective attention to pursuing the implications of what theoretically informed postmodernist historians have accomplished. Specifically—in her words—they have conducted “investigations of ideologies and paradigms . . . [that] plumbed the depths of society’s shaping hand in organizing human consciousness through models, discourses, and languages’ insinuating codes” (1998: 14).

In her portrayal of the development of SSH, Appleby (1998) plays fast and loose with evidence despite her warning that “we cannot abandon intellectual rigor or devalue accuracy” (12). She initially claims that social history “raised consciousness” within the profession about the existence of those groups historians had previously ignored (4). While in the 1970s SSH “delivered the goods—lots of them” (5), by the late 1970s “social history had settled into middle age, its disruptive potential spent” (6). However much Kousser’s 1989 survey contradicts Appleby’s view, she unabashedly continues. In the wake of the “spent” SSH emerged “a more profound historical inquiry that began with the assertion that our sense of reality is socially constructed.” Enter Michel Foucault to elaborate “a new theory of historical development that replaced the cherished modern mover, the autonomous man, with the postmodern specter of omniscient society exercising a diffuse and pervasive power through discourse” (7). Implicitly, it would seem, once having established the size, composition, and behavior of all those groups—women, workers, slaves, sailors, immigrants, migrants, and the upwardly and downwardly mobile, to name only a few—social science historians handed over the reigns of intellectual leadership to those historians who were better theoretically informed and pursued new, more important questions. In short, we did our work and should all go home.

If Joyce Appleby had not said this as the president of the AHA, and if her tale of SSH’s brief usefulness was not part of her presidential address, all this might seem pretty humorous. But she was the president of the AHA, and this was her presidential judgment on what professional historians ought to be doing. If the reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated, then I think we ought to say so. Social science historians ignore challenges such as Appleby’s to their detriment. We need to challenge accounts of our irrelevance and to reassert the intellectual foundations of SSH and their continued relevance to the enterprise.

So how do we repent from complacency? I can think of four steps social science historians can take.

First, we must reassert the value of SSH in comprehending historical developments that ordinary people did not often, if ever, understand. Repeat the arguments about SSH’s advantages that our progenitors made and that so profoundly affected many of us. Cultural historians are far more concerned with meaning than with central tendency or cause and effect. Explaining central tendencies and how they came to be has been a hallmark of SSH and is one of which social science historians should be proud. To walk away and say our work is done, as Appleby recommends, would be to admit that social science historians had recovered a sufficiently truthful account of past behavior by the late 1980s to serve cultural historians: an admission that every practicing social science historian knows would be false. Recall accomplishments. Update the history of SSH and demonstrate its vitality. More than a decade ago, Charles Tilly (1985: 31) suggested that the real task of social history lay in “(1) documenting large structural changes, (2) reconstructing the experiences of ordinary people in the course of those changes, and (3) connecting the two.” Tilly’s challenge remains as vital today as ever, and social science history is the best way to meet it.

Second, we must reassert the centrality of social theory to the larger enterprise of social science history. In 1981 Bogue argued that most social science historians were theory users, explaining the past in a post hoc manner with social theory. SSH has come a long way since then, but the time has come for more social science historians to join the ranks of Bogue’s theory builders, who modify social theory in the laboratory of the past (Bogue 1981). Because Appleby’s brand of cultural history relies on postmodern theory, we must engage theory ourselves, and plenty of theory exists to engage. In the past two decades, for example, social network analysis (SNA) has become a major analytical paradigm in sociology, and it now occupies a strategic place in disciplinary debates on a wide variety of issues, including the increasingly popular idea of social capital (Wellman 1988; Mizruchi 1994; Emirbayer 1997; Roy 1997; Lin 1999). Although historians have been slow to adopt the approach, SNA possess real potential for historical analysis and comes with a full complement of formal methods (Watkins 1995; Bearman 1993; Wetherell 1998; Wasserman and Faust 1994).

Third, we need to take method to the next level of sophistication. Although advances in log-linear and hazard modeling have significantly enhanced multivariate analyses, even more promising methods exist. Structural equation modeling (SEM), the predominant analytical tool in sociology and psychology, represents yet another level of statistical force. Designed to model latent variables, often in elaborate constructs changing over time, SEM would lead social science historians to develop better measures and to test causal models and relationships in new and, I suggest, more convincing ways. Gary King’s (1997) recent solution to the problem of ecological inference may also prompt wholesale reevaluation of interpretations based on aggregate data. Indeed, King’s work may be the most significant new methodological advance in social science research in decades. Finally, there are nonlinear methods that challenge both basic assumptions and basic analytical strategies of historical analysis (Roth 1992). Methodologically, nonlinear methods can help to model social changes—a foundational goal of SSH—that were prompted by the small, particular events so attractive to cultural historians.

Fourth and finally, we must renew efforts to expose graduate students to the larger agenda of social science history. Only then, I believe, will they acquire the commitment to pursue the rigorous training necessary to practice SSH. Here I echo an old call, one that Bogue (1981) and Kousser (1980a, 1980b) repeatedly made. How do we ensure the social reproduction of social science history? I have no easy answers.

Practically, the greater intellectual buy-in necessary today to master contemporary social theory and the latest formal quantitative and qualitative methods may be more responsible for the decline in SSH than any philosophical currents. Graduate students must invest more time to acquire theoretical and methodological training. New software does not make new techniques easy to master, only easier to use. Learning to apply different techniques on different kinds of data remains essential to social analysis in any discipline. That learning simply takes longer than it did even a decade ago. This adds additional time to graduate training in a discipline in which cultural history of the edges of past human experience is becoming more and more fashionable. The marginal cost of social science history is therefore extremely high.

To recruit and retain young social science historians, we must devise ways to cover this marginal cost. We must, at the very least, seek special funding from our institutions to support the additional time a graduate education in SSH actually takes. Additionally, we might well seek to establish an endowment within the SSHA to support dissertation research, possibly on a matching basis. How much would each of us be willing to pay for a means to help ensure the future of SSH?

We cannot assume that young people entering graduate school today will be exposed to the debate that established SSH and sustains it today. To preserve SSH, I believe that we must reassert the old arguments and construct new ones to deal with postmodernist theory. In short, I believe that we are going to have to mount a concerted campaign to reassert the value of the larger enterprise in both practical (Monkkonen 1984) and philosophic terms (Novick 1988). If every generation of historians re-creates its own past, as Carl Becker (1934) long ago insisted, then every generation of social science historians needs to re-create its own claim of the practice of history as well. Failure to do so may lead to the demise of the enterprise we all so dearly value.