History and Political Science: Together Again?

There was a period in America when the political science and history disciplines were not that far apart. Both approaches to analyzing civil society had evolved out of an old Anglo-American tradition where these two subjects, along with philosophy and literature, were all considered in relationship to one another. During the formative years of the American research university, which took place at the turn of the twentieth century, both disciplines shared common founding fathers. A classic example was Charles Beard, whose influence spanned both areas of scholarship.¹ Indeed, it was a breakaway faction of the American Historical Association that formed the American Political Science Association.

After the 1920s, the siblings of political science and history remained in close contact. During the 1950s and 1960s, some of the profession's giants, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ellis Hawley, wrote their books in a dialogue with political science scholarship about pluralism and American Exceptionalism. They directly responded to the arguments of David Truman, Robert Dahl, Louis Hartz, and others.² To be sure, there were already political historians by the 1950s, including Richard Hofstadter, who had started to turn their attention toward other disciplines, such as psychology.³ Nonetheless, political historians and political scientists shared a common bond until the 1970s. Even the anti-establishment New Left historians in the 1960s, such as Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein, made pluralism their central target.⁴

During the 1970s, however, the disciplines went their separate ways. Political science became less historical and historians became less interested in politics. Concern with historical analysis had actually started to wane within political science as early as the 1910s.⁵ But the behavioral revolution pushed most mainstream political scientists toward pursuing narrower questions that could be answered through clearly defined data sets. Broad and complex historical problems seemed less appealing to them given that such issues were usually multifaceted and did not lend themselves to the type of precision that political scientists craved. The triumph of the rational choice approach by the 1980s further pushed historical analysis into the background as scholars tried to flatten their portrait of the individual, and to present a model of politics that would work across time and space. Of course, there were exceptions. Martha Derthick, Hugh Heclo, and James Sundquist wrote books and articles that were rich in historical analysis, as did prominent political theorists.⁶ Yet these scholars were not in the mainstream of the profession by the early 1990s.

At the same time that the importance of historical analysis declined among political scientists, historians lost their interest in government institutions and public policy after the 1970s. Social and cultural historians focused on studying American life from the "bottom up." To do so, many of them turned to sociology and anthropology for guidance. In this intellectual climate, Clifford Geertz replaced Louis Hartz as the social scientist who historians loved to quote.⁷ Importantly, the few remaining political historians in the profession during the 1970s and 1980s, most of whom identified themselves as the "new political history," did continue the dialogue with political science. They drew on realignment theory to explore voting behavior in the nineteenth century.⁸ Practitioners of the organizational synthesis, moreover, built on modernization theory, in addition to Parsonian sociology, to explain the rise of national institutions in the twentieth century.⁹ Policy history, a subfield that emerged in the 1970s which aimed to apply historical analysis to contemporary public policy problems, maintained close links to policy analysis scholarship.¹⁰

Regardless, since none of these scholars were in the mainstream of their profession and they were few in numbers, the conversations between political historians and political scientists dwindled. This was evident from American history textbooks that were written after the 1960s. Most authors presented political topics such as the presidency and Congress in a manner that bore little relationship to the theoretical advances that had been made in political science...