The Wonderland of the Political Scientist

Political Scientist do not read history have to go into business as water diviners or, like economists , as prophets who wait patiently for the future to prove them wrong. The past in which political scientists who do read history claim to test their ideas is often unrecognizable, however, to historians. It resembles Alice’s Wonderland in which the more one thinks one recognizes, the bigger are the surprises in store. And the past serves a different purpose for each discipline. Whereas the past shows the political scientiststanding in the present the way to a future already planned, the historian standing in the past is content to look around him and is supposed not to know ahead of time what may turn up next. False Distinctions Three distinctions political scientists often draw between their discipline and history are false. The first distinction is between the political scientist’sinterest in generally applicable propositions and the historian’s interest in particular instances. Rarely do historians who write about politics and international relations deal with particular instances (and they are forbidden by E.H. Carr to touch the unique):’ even microhistorians claim to see the entire world in their grains of sand. Historians, who read lives to learn about times and are less interested in decision makers than in their decisions, undertake to represent classes or categories of things. They are naturally unwilling to leave the formulation of general principles entirely to others. Second, the distinction between the political scientist’s theory-based analysis and the historian’s evidence-based description is false. The historian’s description is a form of analysis (it explains);likewise, narrative (which has nothing to do with chronology ) is applied theory, an analytical test of a proposition: each presupposes the other and, without the other, neither can be carried out. Third, the distinction between the political scientist’s parsimony and the historian’s complexity Edward Ingram is Professor of Imperial History at Simon Fraser Universityand Editor of The International History Review.His most recent work is a collection of essays on Empire-building and Empire-builders (London: CASS, 1995). ~~ 1. E.H. Cam, What Is History? (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1961), chap. 1. International Security, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer 1997),pp. 5 3 4 3 0 1997by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 53 International Security 22:1 I 54 is false: it disappears on close reading. The political scientist’s maximizing leverage is equivalent to the historian’s proposition that accounts for most of the evidence. True Distinctions Six other distinctions,however, are true and must be acknowledged by political scientistsand historians when reading one another’swork. They are: approach, perspective, evidence, time, stance, and subject. APPROACH Political scientists are distinguished from historians by how they approach their subject: they do not mean the same thing when they talk of international relations. Political and diplomatic historians often look at the political systems that political scientists study, especially the international system, the way they look at individual lives: as vehicles or signifiers, opportunities to explain something else. Diplomatic history is as much a technique of inquiry as the study of past international relations. The foreign policy of the East India Company’s government in India at the turn of the eighteenth century, for example, is best treated either as a form of rhetoric or as an expression of cultural values. The events that took place in Hyderabad and Poona bear no relation to the reports of them in Calcutta or Bombay, which reveal more about what the British thought went on in Imperial Rome than what was going on in post-Mogul India.2 PERSPECTIVE Political scientists also are distinguished from historians by their perspective on the past. Firmly footed in their contemporary world and hoping, by looking about them, to foretell the future, political scientists are interested in the past only as it affects the present. The past interests historians for itself. Before they can go forward, historians must first leap backward into another country where everything is done differently. Although leaping is required of historians, they will not succeed in making a landing, because they cannot turn themselves...