Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-20T11:33:25.926Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Revivalism of Narrative: A Response to Recent Criticisms of Quantitative History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

J. Morgan Kousser
J. Morgan Kousser*
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In his presidential address to the Social Science History Association Convention in November 1981, Robert William Fogel declared sanguinely that social scientific historians had won their battle for legitimacy within the historical profession in America, and that we should now stop feeling embattled, spend less effort proselytizing, and calmly go on with our substantive work. While his statistics on the occupational advancement of social scientific historians do indicate a degree of acceptance, and while his advice to worry less and pay attention to business will be followed (as that is what nearly all of us were doing anyway), I am less optimistic than Fogel, read the employment trends differently, and see more signs of a reaction against quantitative social scientific history—or what I like to refer to as QUASSH—than he does (Kousser, 1980). Perhaps Professor Fogel and I differ only temperamentally. As a former Marxist, he still retains a bit of faith in the inevitable triumph of progressive forces; as a former Methodist, I am unable to shake off the pessimism that is the psychological residue of the doctrine of original sin. In any case, whereas Fogel seems to think that most recent criticisms of QUASSH are so obviously flawed as to require no answer, I fear that some people, especially those with substantial investments in “history-as-it-used-to-be-done,” may still be susceptible to false messiahs or, perhaps more precisely, false Jeremiahs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Spring 1984 , pp. 133 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1984 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

fn00

Author’s Note: I would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Stanley L. Engerman, David W. Galenson, and William T. Jones, and to grant anonymity to the many friends and colleagues who urged me, without notable success, to be a bit more reticent and conciliatory in the tone of the article.

References

Aries, P. (1962) Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Bailyn, B. (1982) “The challenge of modern historiography.” American Historical Review 87: 1–24.Google Scholar
Barzun, J. (1974) Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History, and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Beach, W. W. (1980) “A second look: the agenda for ‘Social Science History.‘” Social Science History 4: 357–364.Google Scholar
Blaug, M. (1981) The Methodology of Economics, or How Economists Explain. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Burton, O. V. (forthcoming) In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Cox, G. W. and Kousser, J. M. (1981) “Turnout and rural corruption: New York as a test case.” Amer. J. of Pol. Sci. 25: 646–663.Google Scholar
Davis, L. E. (1971) “Specification, quantification and analysis in economic history,” pp. 106–120 in Taylor, G. R. & Ellsworth, L. F. (eds.) Approaches to American Economic History. Charlottesville, VA: Univ. Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
De Canio, S. J. (1974) Agriculture in the Postbellum South: The Economics of Production and Supply. Cambridge: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Fogel, R. W. (1980) “‘Scientific’ history and traditional history,” pp. 15–61 in Cohen, L. J. et al. (eds.) Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science, 6. Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Fogel, R. W. (1971) “The new economic history: its findings and methods,” pp. 1–12 in Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L. (eds.) The Reinterpretation of American Economic History. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Fogel, R. W. and Engerman, S. L. (1974) Time on the Cross. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Handlin, O. (1979) Truth in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Herlihy, D. (1981) “Numerical and formal analysis in European history.” J. of Interdisciplinary History 12: 115–135.Google Scholar
Hershberg, T., Burstein, A., and Dockhorn, R. (1976) “Record linkage.” Historical Methods Newsletter 9: 137–163.Google Scholar
Hexter, J. H. (1971a) Doing History. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Hexter, J. H. (1971b) The History Primer. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, E. J. (1980) “The revival of narrative: some comments.” Past and Present 86: 3–8.Google Scholar
Honour, H. (1982) “From Alberti to Zoppo.” The New York Review of Books 29, (August 12): 23–24.Google Scholar
Kocka, J. (1982) “Theories and quantification in history.” Presented at the First International Conference on Quantitative History, Washington, D.C., March 5.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. M. (1982) “Restoring politics to political history.” J. of Interdisciplinary History 12: 569–595.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. M. (1981) “History as past sociology in the work of Samuel P. Hays: a review essay.” Historical Methods 14: 181–186.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. M. (1980) “History QU ASSHed: quantitative social scientific history in perspective.” Amer. Behavioral Scientist 23: 885–904.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. M. (1979) “History - Theory = ?” Reviews in Amer. History 7: 157–162.Google Scholar
Kousser, J. M. (1976) “The ‘new political history’: a methodological critique.” Reviews in Amer. History 4: 1–14.Google Scholar
Kuhn, T. S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Laslett, P. (1965) The World We Have Lost. New York: Scribner’s.Google Scholar
Martin, A. (1979) “And it will never be history, either, unless ” Essays in Economic and Business History: 53–59.Google Scholar
Middlekauf, R. (1982) The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
North, D. C. (1981) Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Rabb, T. K. (1981) “Toward the future: coherence, synthesis, and quality in history.” J. of Interdisciplinary History 12: 315–332.Google Scholar
Scheiber, H. (1981) “American constitutional history and the new legal history: complimentary themes in two modes.” J. of Amer. History 68: 337–350.Google Scholar
Stearns, P. N. (1976) “Coming of age.” J. of Social History 10: 246–255.Google Scholar
Stone, L. (1981) “Family history in the 1980s: past achievements and future trends.” J. of Interdisciplinary History 12: 199–205.Google Scholar
Stone, L. (1979) “The revival of narrative: reflections on a new old history.” Past and Present 89: 3–24.Google Scholar
Stone, L. (1977) “History and the social sciences in the twentieth century,” pp. 3–42 in Delzell, C. (ed.) The Future of History. Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Stone, L. (1948) “The anatomy of the Elizabethan aristocracy.” Economic History Rev. 18: 1–53.Google Scholar
Supple, B. (1981) “Old problems and newdirections.” J. of Interdisciplinary History 12: 199–205.Google Scholar
Tilly, C. (1981) As Sociology Meets History. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Trevor-Roper, H. R. (1951) “The Elizabethan aristocracy: an anatomy anatomized.” Economic History Rev. 3: 279–298.Google Scholar
White, H. (1973) Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Wood, G. S. (1982) “Star-Spangled history.” New York Review of Books 29, (August 12): 4–9.Google Scholar
Wrigley, E. A. (1971) Population and History. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S. (1981) The Population History of England, 1541-1871. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Yardley, J. (1982) “The narrowing world of the historian.” AHA Perspectives 20, 6: 21–22.Google Scholar