Toward the Scientific View of History: Selected Essays (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Toward the Scientific View of History: Selected Essays. By Lee Benson. (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1972. Pp. xi, 352. $8.75.) Advocates of "scientific history" have had difficulty agreeing on the meaning of the term. While to late nineteenth century historians trained in the German tradition it implied relating past events impartially , after extensive research in primary documents, to Marxist-Leninists it meant (and means) using the principles of dialectical materialism to analyze class relationships. Now Lee Benson, in this collection of eight essays, all but one of which have previously been published, has issued a new call for historians to practice scientific history. Curiously, he never really defines the term. At one point he approvingly cites Ernest Nagel's assertion that science seeks " 'to provide systematic and responsibly supported explanations' " through use of something called the "scientific method." At another he suggests that scientific history should enable the historian to generalize, but most often he implies that scientific history is simply history that offers convincing explanations supported by evidence. Benson leaves it to the reader to piece together the nature of scientific history "impressionistically," in the course of reading these essays. In the first four essays, originally published between 1957 and 1967, Benson argues for a more rigorous use of election analysis and a more comprehensive collection of statistical data. After criticizing other historians for basing their interpretations on assumptions rather than on verifiable facts, he suggests that historians devote more time to answering the key question, "who voted for whom, when." Few would argue with Benson's contention that it can be useful for historians to analyze voting patterns, or that many historians have used sloppy logic. It is not clear, however, what these four cumbersome essays have to offer to the reader aside from the vague warning to avoid making unsubstantiated assertions and the even vaguer suggestion that historians should be scientific in their approach to the past. While such generalities arc well meant, the reader is not likely to leam much from them that would enable him to become a better historian. That Benson's approach does not necessarily result in more objective history becomes evident in his last two, most recent, essays which, unlike the others, contain not only methodological calls to action but also an interpretation of the coming of the Civil War. (Lack of space precludes discussion of the fifth essay, an involved attempt to produce a 179 180CIVIL WAR HISTORY model for classifying political systems, and the sixth, a heavy-handed attack on Turner's frontier thesis.) After "refuting" the works of Barrington Moore, Jr., Eugene Genovese, David Donald, and Eric Foncr in an analysis filled with ad hominem remarks and distortions of their interpretations, Benson offers his own "tentative" interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. In the process he makes numerous assumptions for which there is little or no evidence. Hc asks us to accept on faith, for example, because "the assumption seems reasonable," the propositions that "Southern society tended to develop individuals with authoritarian personality traits" and that "no such thing exists as an initate human instinct for aggression, hostility or violence." More to the point, Benson offers no convincing reason why anyone should accept his interpretation , which contains an unscientific combination of the plausible , the obvious, and the unlikely, and portions of which strongly resemble —despite the forbidding language—portions of other well known interpretations. Insisting that the Civil War should be understood as a "separatist internal war" waged by a "territorial culture group" rather than a social revolution (couldn't it have been both?), he blames the "radically defective political system" created by the American Constitution , especially the overly strong presidency, for producing an environment conducive to civil war. But the real question, Benson insists, is not what caused the war, but who caused the war. (Why the allocation of personal responsibility is the most important question Benson fails to explain.) Rejecting his own distorted version of Barrington Moore's position, that northerners caused the war, Benson insists that the blame be placed squarely on the shoulders of southern extremists. "The Southern Nationalists," he concludes, "caused" the Civil War "by working unyieldingly, intensively...