Too Important to Leave to the Other: History and Political Science in the Study of International Relations

TooImportantto Leave to the Other History and Political Science in the Study of International Relations Historians often complain about the abuse of history by international relations theorists, and international relations theorists often complain about the atheoretical orientation of much historiography.Although both charges are exaggerated, they do raise the question of how the disciplines of history and political science differ in their approach to the study of international relations. This is important because it bears on the question of whether the cumulation of knowledge in the two disciplinescan be mutually reinforcing.In their introductory essayColinElman and Miriam Fendius Elman note many of the ways in which historians are said to differ from political scientists: historians construct narrative-based explanations rather than theory-based explanations; they study the past rather than focus on the present or attempt to make policy-relevantpredictions; they seek to understand single unique events rather than generalize about classes of events; and they prefer complex, multicausal explanations to more parsimonious monocausal explanations. Although each criterion captures general tendencies that distinguish most historians from most political scientists,' the idiographic/nomothetic distinction best reflects the distinct "identities" of the two disciplines and the differences between them.' Historians describe, explain, and interpret individual events or a temporally bounded series of events, whereas political scientists generalize about the relationships between variables and construct lawlike statements about socialbehavior.Thisdifferencein orientation between the two Jack s.Levy Jack S. L a y is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.He is the author of War in the Modern Great Power System, 14951975 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983)and numerous articles on foreign policy decision making and the causes of war. I thank Michael Adas, Lori Gronich, and Irina Solovyeva for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. 1. On the last point, political scientists prefer parsimonious but not necessarily monocausal explanations . 2. The idiographic/nomothetic terminology goes back to Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert in the late nineteenth century. Georg G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography, rev. ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984),p. 81. International Security, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer 1997),pp. 22-33 0 1997by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 22 Too Important to Leave to the Other 1 23 disciplineshas enormousconsequencesfor the nature of their respectiveexplanations , their conceptions of causation, their methodologies for validating explanations, and their criteria for evaluating those explanations. Identifying the distinctive differences between history and political science is extraordinarily difficult, in part because of the wide variation of work in each discipline. We can think of each discipline as being characterized by a distribution of approaches, distributions that differ in central tendency but that substantially overlap. This means that we will always find exceptions in our comparisons of central tendencies. In fact, the variation within each discipline may be as great as the variation between them. Historians and political scientists who study the causes of war, for example, share more in common than do positivists and postmodernists within either discipline. Differences between the two disciplines are not fixed but instead vary over time as a function of trends within each, which further complicates any comparison . In the 1960s leading schools of thought in each discipline were quite confident in the feasibility of “scientific” knowledge of social and political behavior and in the utility of quantitative methods for discovering that knowledge . Today, however, after the ”revival of narrati~e”~ and the “linguisticturn” in history,and after the further spread of quantitative methods and particularly game-theoretic models in political science, the two disciplines have moved further apart. Thus any comparisons between disciplines must be sensitive to questions of timing and historical context. We must also acknowledge the gap that frequently exists between what philosophers say historians or social scientists ought to be doing and what practitioners actually do. Despite these obstacles, there are some clear differencesbetween historians and political scientists.They receive different kinds of graduate training, give different emphasis to questions of methodology and to the value of primary sources in particular,publish in different journals, identify different criteria for good scholarship,and generallyfacedifferent disciplinaryincentives.There are exceptions, to be sure...