We discuss how three social science disciplines, economics, sociology, and political science approach history and we contrast them to history as practiced by historians. We find that the drive to identify broadly generalizable causal effects, driven by the desire to predict and shape the future (the “Delphi syndrome”), frequently prompts social scientists to use history in a way that neglects the historians’ valuable insights. At the same time, the recent methodological developments in econometric techniques that have spread through the three disciplines place enormous, often unrealistic, historical demands on social scientists. We illustrate these issues by discussing several examples and we conclude by arguing that a way ahead consists in approaching the relation between idiographic and nomothetic research principles as one that approximates a continuum rather than a dichotomy.

Among the social sciences, the discipline of anthropology displays perhaps the greatest affinity for the methods and assumptions of historical enquiry. Anthropology’s turn to history began as early as the 1950s, but the relationship between the two fields was cemented a generation later. Yet because it is now disciplinary folklore, the precise character of anthropology’s turn to history is less well understood than it should be. In this chapter, I seek to explain why the methods of historical enquiry became so attractive to a generation of anthropologists. I make two major claims: first, that it was the problem of the origins and persistence of institutions that drew social and cultural anthropologists toward history; second, that this concern with institutional reproduction was part of anthropology’s long struggle to offer an alternative to a post-Hobbesian state-centred politics. In defending these claims, I examine in particular the writings of Émile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Clifford Geertz.

This view of the relationship between philosophy and history has been remarkably enduring. It flourished in the early-modern period, as I show in the case of Spinoza; but it also retained an influence within analytical philosophy, as some of Russell’s early work illustrates. I propose that contemporary advocates of the Separation Thesis remain motivated by the exclusive image of philosophy embodied in the Classical Conception, and the concomitant desire for a transcendent form of knowledge. As long as this is so, the relationship between history and philosophy will remain uneasy.

The chapter begins by tracing the rise of the so-called ‘historicist’ approach to the study of texts in political philosophy. The example of Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy is discussed in such a way as to illustrate what is distinctive about the historicist approach. The chapter then turns to consider two objections frequently raised against this approach. One claims that ‘a tyranny of history’ has been allowed to develop, which has had the effect of cutting off the study of legal and political philosophy from a usable part. The other maintains that historicists fail to appreciate that some claims about political phenomena are transhistorical and universal in scope. After considering and largely rejecting these arguments, the chapter ends by examining the more recent objection that the history of political philosophy as currently written is an unduly parochial discipline, which now needs to concentrate on developing a more global approach. The chapter concludes with an assessment of this so-called global turn.

John Rawls offers an instructive case study in how we have come to think about the relationship between historical conditions and moral standards in political philosophy. He is commonly taken to have rejuvenated political theory, though it makes more sense to see his work as an important development within ethics which was subsequently presented as the rebirth of political philosophy. The essence of Rawls’s thought is to be found in his construction of ideal values for whose practical viability he then argues. The venture, he claimed, was ‘realistically utopian’. But his emphasis fell on the theoretical justification of the construction rather than on the conditions of its practical viability. This parallels certain tendencies within economic theory where abstract modelling takes on a life of its own. But the nearest precedent for this procedure in the history of moral thought is Kant’s practical philosophy. Rawls saw the Kantian moral commonwealth – or kingdom of ends – as the structural equivalent of his own commitment to true democratic justice. The divergence, however, between their ideas is at least as significant as any appearance of overlap. Kant was profoundly sceptical about the moral capacities of human beings and projected his ideal as a goal to be actualised in the remotest future of a protracted world historical process. Moreover, forward momentum towards this end was to be driven by selfishness and competition rather than by an abiding devotion to the principles of justice. Rawls’s project is radically distinct from this vision. While paying scant attention to the historical conditions that might favour justice as fairness, he thought that a just regime would be realised through moral striving. Moreover, he claimed that progress since the Reformation had brought this outcome within reach.

This book explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Specifically, it examines the role of historical study in eight distinct subject areas: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches withing these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, this dependence was reduced under the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences. Statistical, analytical and scientistic approaches secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. Functionalism, structuralism, logical positivism, formalist criticism, behaviourism and economic formalism challenged context-specific forms of inquiry. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.

Paul Krugman is one of the most influential commentators in twenty-first-century America. His authority rests on his status as a Nobel prize-winning economist, but his appeal to millions of American readers derives from his ability to narrate the crises of contemporary American liberalism as dramatic history. By his own account Krugman as a young person was fascinated by the idea of a total social science inspired by the science fiction of Isaac Asimov. As he discovered as a College student in the early 1970s that synthesis of historical and social knowledge does not exist. Krugman became an economist out of disappointment with history. That disappointment was both intellectual – history’s failure to provide succinct causal explanations - and political – history’s tendency towards overdetermined fatalism as opposed to pragmatic simplification. It might be said that in his writings as a public intellectual Krugman has been reaching for the overview that eluded him as a young man. Economics, politics and history mingle freely in his work. This, however, has not led to a stable synthesis. As Krugman has become more deeply engaged in politics, it is the framing assumptions of his economics, the neoclassical synthesis forged at MIT after World War II, that have been put in question.

This chapter argues for the need for both history and law to recommit to the broad tradition of social theory, in order for either to make progress on its own, let alone for one to plausibly reorient the other. From the perspective of this argument for common need rather than crossdisciplinary largesse, it is not going to be good enough to suppose that contemporary historiography is already well-positioned for relevance to other fields. In the last fifty years, it has lost touch with the tradition of social theory, thanks to the linguistic and cultural turns and a certain fetishization of contingent outcomes that have been emphasized in critical and genealogical sorts of history. The chapter proceeds to map three ongoing quandaries in social theory, since it is only within the discussion of each that the relationship of history to law takes on its significance. These are the 1) the dilemma of representations versus practices; 2) the reconciliation of contingency and determination; 3) and the assessment of the normative and the political, both as something to explain in diverse past settings but also what might motivate and orient present inquiry in the first place.

This chapter considers the widely hypothesized antithesis between economics and history, and argues that the two disciplines are not substitutes but complements. It develops its argument through demonstration, by exploring how economics and history together provide complementary approaches to analyzing a specific historical institution: serfdom. To draw out general implications of such disciplinary complementarities, it scrutinizes three scholarly controversies about serfdom – how it shaped peasant choices, how it constrained these choices, and how it affected entire societies. To resolve these controversies, it shows, economics and history each brings special expertise, which have proven most productive when used jointly. The essay uses these debates about serfdom in particular to draw implications concerning the mutually reinforcing capacities of economics and history in general. It concludes that by working together, economics and history have improved our understanding of pre-modern society to a much greater extent than either discipline could have achieved in isolation.

This chapter begins by exploring the problems of defining ‘literature’ and establishes the capacious and intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of its study. The body of the essay argues for the long-standing proximity of history and literature and the difficulties, and even undesirability, of disaggregating their underpinning skills and techniques. It focuses primarily on examples from the late sixteenth century: a period when ‘literature’ meant not ‘fiction’ or ‘creative writing’ but a more general ‘familiarity with letters or books’ and the ‘knowledge acquired from reading or studying them’ (OED), and a time when notions of both poetry and history were fluid. If the former skirts close to rhetoric (as in Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (c.1582)), the latter frequently connotes ‘story’, rather sequence of ‘factual’ events, as in Thomas Lodge’s often fantastical ‘history’ of ‘Robert, second duke of Normandy’ (1591). Even when endeavouring to adhere to the historical record, early modern, humanistically-trained historians – following their classical forebears – adopt fictive techniques, especially prosopopoeia: a ‘figure […] that to stirre and moove affection, attributeth speech to dead men, or to wals & such like’. School-room exercises drilled sixteenth-century pupils in this practice of personation, teaching them to ventriloquise the dead. As the essay goes on to demonstrate, prosopopoeia is particular useful when giving voice to those ‘overskipped’ by history, as seen from its centrality to The Mirror for Magistrates (William Baldwin et al.; editions from 1559) – a work which reflects self-consciously on the partiality of the historical record – and its use (alongside other fictive devices) by twenty-first-century historians and biographers seeking to restore voices lost or marginalised for reasons of race, class, or gender. The final section of the essay looks at how texts are shaped by their historical context (and vice versa) and the challenges of reading texts historically.

Philosophy, particularly in the analytic form that still dominates the discipline in anglophone universities, is avowedly ahistorical, sometimes anti-historical. Abstracted from time and place, it applies the clear eye of universalised reason to certain perennial concepts and fundamental problems. History, by contrast, at least in its current, broadly cultural incarnation, insists on the contingency and practical embeddedness of ideas, and on the concomitant plurality, partiality, and opacity of human understanding.

I argue that feminism develops a historicist critique of philosophy from within philosophy. Feminist thinkers bring to bear both history and historicist sensibilities to reveal concepts as constructs of power rather than given in nature, and reason as fractured, weaponised, and thickly situated in political structures. They thereby take aim at both philosophy and – relatedly – patriarchy. But feminists are not immune from the lure of conceptual analysis, from wanting to fix, to get right, the terms of their campaign – nor indeed from wanting themselves to claim a transcendent vantage point of truth. This chapter is about the gulf between history and philosophy, and the feminist bridge between them.

Although many historians of philosophy work co-operatively with their ahistorical colleagues and vice versa, some tension between the two groups remains. This is most obvious among defenders of what I call the Separation Thesis – the view that the history of philosophy is separate from, and subordinate to, philosophy proper. Since the Separation Thesis is vulnerable to a range of powerful criticisms, several of which I discuss in the chapter, it is not immediately clear why philosophers continue to defend it. To understand what makes it appealing, I argue, we need to examine the historical context from which it has habitually arisen.

Do lawyers and historians think differently about history? Claims have recently been made, in the context of debates on the history of international law, that the way that lawyers treat historical texts is quite different from the way historians treat them. According to this argument, while historians think about concepts in their historical contexts, lawyers turn to history to understand the nature of present concepts and obligations. Questioning whether there is such a distinct historical method, this chapter suggests that lawyers turning to history should apply the methods of the contextual historian, just as historians examining legal matters should draw on the conceptual insights of jurists. When lawyers attempt to use a distinct lawyerly version of history, the results may not only be anachronistic but also unsatisfactory for explaining law. At the same time, the methods of history can be fruitfully drawn on by jurists, both in testing and rethinking modern juristic concepts, and in explaining the genealogy and nature of doctrines built on long precedents. For the historian, the tools of legal analysis can help identify what past societies considered to be ‘law’ and to understand the specialist languages associated with matters of governance, property and family.