Political Studies (1991), XXXIX, 479-495

Why Political Science Needs History

DENNIS KAVANAGH*

University of Nottingham
This paper examines the changing relationship between the study of history and the study of political science. It reviews the tensions which produced a divorce between the two subjects, particularly in the United States when behavioural political science was dominant. It then examines five areas in which history has enriched the study of politics: as a source of material; as a demonstration of the links between the present and the past; as a body of knowledge to test theories; as a means of analysing political concepts and as a source of lessons. It concludes that the links between the two subjects today are strong, but that the contribution of history is more as a body of knowledge than as a set of distinctive methods.

Political science, it is often observed, is a borrowing discipline. Outsiders may regard the resultant heterogeneity and eclecticism as a shortcoming; practitioners perforce have to celebrate it. The number of sub-fields is less of a problem; it is a feature shared with many other disciplines and subjects. Expansion of a subject usually results in the proliferation of sub-fields and approaches. Development leads to differentiation, but the sheer variety of approaches - historical, philosophical, economic, sociological, legal and institutional, to name but somecan give the impression of a subject which lacks a core. More seriously, approaches rooted in other disciplines have often resulted in attempts to colonize the subject matter of politics, or at least to insist on the overriding importance of non-pohtical variables. Thus political sociology becomes a sociology of politics or political economy becomes the economics of politics.' Historians have not been free of these tendencies, given their traditional interest in 'high politics' and their frequent dismissal ofthe possibility of serious study of the very recent past. Many historians, particularly British ones, have argued that study of the present or of the recent past is an inherently impossible enterprise because of the lack of complete written records. Indeed, some, committed to ideographic rather than homothetic history, wedded to a mastery of the particular rather than an interest in the general, and reliant on documents, have been rudely dismissive of concepts and insights from the social sciences.^ Another perspective is that of Michael Oakeshott, for example, who
1 wish to thank Dick Geary, Ian Kershaw, J. S. McClelland, David Regan and Richard Rose for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. ' G. Sartori, 'From the sociology of politics to political sociology' in S. Lipset (ed.). Politics and the Social Sciences (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969). ' G. Elton, The Practice of History (London, Fontana, 1969) and J. P. Kenyon, The History Men (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983).

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argues that the academic study of politics should be historical because we need to be aware of the detail of the concrete and to understand political activity as a tradition? The view adopted here is that the study of politics is appropriately regarded not so much as a discipline with a distinctive method but more as a field of study which is amenable to various approaches. In the real world political activity connects with history, law, culture, society and so on. It is necessary to take these phenomena into account in any explanation of politics and to use other approaches, where they can be helpful. To argue for the usefulness of the historical approach does not involve a claim that it is the only or the best approach. This paper suggests that the contribution of history, as the systematic study of the past, to political science has been more as a body of knowledge thati as a set of methods. The concepts and models of sociology and economics are more evident in contemporary political science methods. In considering the advantages of the study of history to political science the paper first explores the factors that led to tensions between the two. It then reviews some of the ways iti which historical approaches have been constructively employed. Finally, it considers some areas which illustrate the fruitfulness of the relationship between history and political science.

Political Science Versus History More than most other fields - history certainly - politics has been preoccupied with its status as a science. As a field of academic study in the late nineteenth century, politics was closely related to history; historians often doubled as authorities on politics and political institutions were often studied as evolving over time. This fashion was challenged in the US in the interwar years. The behaviouralists, inspired by Charles Merriam at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, sought to emulate the developments in other social sciences, particularly psychology. History was dropped, emphatically as a source of methods and partly as a body of knowledge. Being 'scientific' entailed the search for more observable and measurable data, hypothesis testing, model building and, eventually, predictability. There was, understandably, an emphasis on contemporary political behaviour. The early behaviouralists also hoped that the new political science would serve as a tool for encouraging practical problemsolving, civic education, and social and institutional reform. History appeared to have little to offer to the early behaviouraUsts. Another reason for encouraging divorce was that political science was striving to establish its status as a discipline in its own right. One can leave aside the naive view of science which lay behind the original behavioural thrust but acknowledge that the reformers were also fired by an understandable impatience with the chronological, descriptive and formal approach of much legal institutional work. There was an undoubted need for greater rigour in defining concepts and a need for collecting data. Much so-called poUtical theory had degenerated into antiquarianism. Those of a more cautious bent wamed that politics ran the risk of losing touch with history (as well as with philosophy and law) and becoming impoverished in the process. According to one scholar, who is at home in both fields, political
' M. OakeshoU, Political Education (Cambridge, Bowes and Bowes, 1951).

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science 'abandoned the study and use of history until what began as a cognate field had become as distant as astrophysics'.* More recently, Nevil Johnson, representing a typical strand of the British approach, has mourned the separation of political science and history. History, he claims, is now rarely used except as 'dignified background', as students have pursued a misconceived quest for science.' I do not think that this is a fair assessment of British political science and at present it is probably less true of the work of Americans than at any time in the post-war period. In adopting so-called scientific approaches (largely defined in terms of the behaviourahsm in the US) Britain and Western Europe lagged behind the US, As a university subject in Britain, politics was until the mid-twentieth century taught largely by historians and philosophers. As late as 1966 a third of the 400 or so university teachers of the subject had still taken a first degree in history,' and in Germany and France the links with law were even more secure. In no West European country were the links of political science with sociology and psychology and its status as a social science as strong as in the US, The reaction to behaviourahsm (post-behaviouralism) in the 1970s included calls for work to be relevant to practical problems, rejection of the extreme 'methodism' borrowed from the natural sciences and reaction against the uncritical acceptance of pluralist democratic values. The decline of scientism and doubts about how 'rational' and disinterested the research methods of the natural sciences actually were, undermined the scientific pretensions of the behaviouralists.' The demand for the study of politics to be seen as part of the humanities has helped the revival of history and political theory.* Types of History There are, of course, different historical approaches. Many (perhaps most) historians would claim that their task is to advance understanding of past events and behaviour, primarily through study of original documents. Historians, according to J. H. Hexter, describe, narrate and deal 'not with why-questions at all but what-questions (and also, one might add, parenthetically who-, when-, and where-questions)'.' Such history contributes to an understanding of particular events, rather than producing hard scientific statements of relationships between variables or law-like generahzations. For Ranke, if the historian was guided at all times by his sources then the truth would emerge from a serious study of all the documents. No room here for mass opinion surveys, conceptual frameworks, log-linear analysis or elite interviews! In fact, much
' R. Jenson, 'History and the political scientist", in S. Lipset (ed.). Politics and the Social Sciences (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 1. " N. Johnson, The Limits of Political Science (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989), Ch. 2. ' D. Kavanagh and R. Rose (eds). New Trends in British Politics (London, Sage, 1977), Ch. 1 and B. Crick, 'The tendencies of political studies". New Society, (3 Nov. 1966). ' T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2nd edn, i'^72). " D. Easton, 'The new revolution in political science", American Political Science Review, 63: 4 ^69), 1051-61 and S. Wolin, 'Political theory as a vocation", American Political Science, 63:4 'h9), 1062-82. ' J. H. Hexter, 'Historiography: the rhetoric of history", in D. Sills (ed). International Encyclopaedia of Social Science (New York, Macmillan, 1968), p. 391.

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history has gone beyond Ranke. The French Armales School reacted against what it regarded as an excessive interest in I'histoire evenementielle', particularly political and constitutional history. In studying 'total history' and turning to social and economic factors, it embraced social science methods, stressed the influence of such durable forces as climate and geography. It studied 'forgotten' subjects like marriage, childhood or death. The 'macro' philosophies of history, with their universal theories of progress and decline, are perhaps the nearest to 'scientific' history. Such historians perceived phenomena being interconnected in a seamless web and history as unfolding in a particular direction. It was claimed that in the past certain principles of universal validity could be detected which enabled one to make predictions about the future. Popper's attack on historicism discredited such philosophies of history: An approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is achieved by discovering 'the rhythms', or 'the patterns', or 'the laws', or 'the trends' that underline the revolution of history.'" Despite different conceptions of history, for present purposes we understand an historical approach to politics to be studies which systematically describe and analyse phenomena that have occurred in the past and which explain contemporary political phenomena with reference to past events. The emphasis is on explanation and understanding, not on formulating laws. By contrast, political science uses generic concepts to study patterns of relations, which are assumed to recur over time and across place, between, for example, institutions, groups, individuals, events and states. The distinction is not a sharp one. Some historians increasingly use generic concepts (such as feudalism, totalitarianism, liberahsm and fascism) and the work of, for example, Michael Mann," Perry Anderson" or Ferdinand Braudel," formulates propositions about the past. Much political science is concerned more with description and analysis than developing 'laws'. But as a general statement the claim here is that there is a basic preoccupation with the particular in history and with the general in political science.

Uses of History to Political Science In the real world of scholarship, the distinction between the work of professional historians and political scientists often breaks down. Apart from sjjecialists in history and in political science, there are political scientists who write history or draw on the work of historians (for example, W. D. Burnham, Kenneth Wald, Sammy Finer and S. M. Lipset) as well as historians who do political science (such as Charles Tilly and Lee Benson). The sheer amount of work which uses the past as a body of knowledge on which to ground theories about politics is
" K. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 3. For a good discussion of the different meanings of historicism see G. C. Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middleton, CT, Wesley University Press, 1968), pp. 287-9. " M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol I (Cambridge University Press, 1986). " P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, New Left Books, 1974). " F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (London, Collins, 1972).

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impressive. Much of it can properly be termed interdisciplinary. The historical approach to the study of pohtics is many-sided. In an attempt to order the relevant material I have considered it under nve headings: history as a source of material or data; as an aid to understanding the links between the present and past; as a body of knowledge within which to test theories and frameworks; as a means of analysing political ideas and texts; and as a source of lessons.

History as Source of Material All of the material used by political scientists is derived from the past, distant or immediate. We rely on historians to tell us about the causes, events and immediate effects of the French Revolution, of the 1832 Reform Act, of the 191418 war and so on, but we also rely on them to give meaning to the past. In so far as we have collective memories of the past, they are largely shaped by historians and attempts to impose pattems and typologies on political phenomena will rely on that work, I have in mind as examples Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism,'* Linz and Stephan's The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes,'^ Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies,''' Lipset's The First New Nation,'^ or the works of Ian Kershaw on Nazi Germany.'* Few would doubt that such work shows significant gains from combining the approaches of poUtical science and history, but the use of history does raise both methodological and substantive problems. One concerns the status of contemporary history, the other concems the attempt to 'break' history into relevant and not so relevant periods. In Britain, simply because of the 30-year mle limiting access to govemment documents, one tends to think of contemporary history as covering events which have occurred within the last 30 years. Pending the release of official documents one makes do with biographies and memoirs of key participants, media coverage, or oral history. Historians can be dismissive of such sources, as they can be about newspap)er accounts of politics. A more serious point is that the passage of time, apart from releasing more official documentation, also allows a perspective on the present to develop and for the longer-range outcomes of events to be perceived, the historicisation of experience as it were. Thus, if the Labour Party returns to office in the 1990s, then the 1980s and the years of Thatcherite hegemony may look very different from how they looked in 1989. The retum of 30 Labour MPs in 1906 looked more significant after 1918 than it did before. There may be different 'rational' approaches to contemporary history. In Germany, the term applies to history post-1914. In France, whereas the term was for long applied to all history since the outbreak of the French Revolution, there has - despite the 50-year rule - been a strong emphasis recently upon twentiethcentury history," In the US, recent events are widely regarded as suitable for
' K. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven, CT, "Vale University Press, 1957). Linz and Stepan, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, S. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT. Yale University Press, ".8). S. Lipset, The First New Nation (London, Heinemann, 1963). I Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship (London, Arnold, 1985) and Popular Opinion and Political ^ent in the Third Reich (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983). This point emerged strongly in discussion at the workshop.

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fVhy Political Science Needs History

either history or political science. There is no 30-year rule to contend with and they have written many rigorous studies of post-1945 events and Presidencies,^" In Britain more historians object to contemporary history, but the objections are not confirmed to historians, Johnson has complained about 'the fallacy of misplaced history', in which the present 'passing show' of actors and activities is described and analysed by political scientists without a full understanding of the outcome. We may, for example, study the premierships of Gladstone or Lloyd George but not that of Mrs Thatcher. We may study the decline of the Liberal Party between 1914 and 1931 but not that of the Labour Party in the 1980s, The events and practices concerning, say, Lloyd George, have been completed and settled, but this is not so for Mrs Thatcher. We should not study a topic 'when the actor is still at work, nor even when the events or circumstances in which he or she played a part lie in the recent past, and therefore, project themselves into the present',^' One can agree with such reservations only up to a point. The passage of time may cultivate a more detached outlook and an awareness of how events evolve over the long term, but there is no final verdict. All history is a product of its owti time. This is usefully illustrated in the keen debate among historians (mainly, but not exclusively, German) about the collapse of the Weimar Republic," Early post-1945 histories of Weimar were dominated by the rise of Nazism and the revulsion against the Third Reich. A number of historians traced the continuity of authoritarianism back to Bismarck, Frederick the Great and Martin Luther. However, the fact that democratic government has now survived in the Federal Republic for over 40 years (lasting three times longer than the Third Reich) has gradually altered historical perspectives. This has been reflected in the more recent literature which treats the fate of Weimar as representative of the problems of a welfare state in economic depression. Needless to say, this perspective has itself been influenced by the crisis of welfarism in the 1970s and i980s.-' If historians and political scientists vacate the field then, outside academe, political actors and commentators are ready to grind their axes. Much of the rise of Thatcherism and of Bennery in the Labour Party, rested on a selective view of post-1951 British history. Increasingly, a flood of self-serving memoirs bears witness to the attempts by participants to manage political history. Above all, to wait for some national 'final word' of the historians would mean that, in the case of post-war Britain, one would be ignoring such significant events as Britain's relations with the European Community, the changing fortunes of the Labour Party, the country's loss of great power status and relative economic decline. It is also worth adding a cautionary note about public and other ofiScial papers. Not all significant activities are recorded or filed, the telephone has almost certainly reduced the importance of letter-writing and some sensitive documents are held back, A Public Record Office archivist notes that British governments today annually produce over a hundred miles of documents, of which only a mile
^ For example, see F. Greenstein, The Hidden Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (New York, Basic Books, 1982). ^' Johnson, The Limits of Political Science, p. 45. " On this debate see Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, Ch. I, " See I. Kershaw (ed), Weimar: the Failure of German Democracy (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990), D. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: a Crisis of Classical Modernity (London, Penguin, 1992) and R. Evans and D. Geary (eds). The German Unemployed (London, Croom Helm, 1987),

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finds its way to the PRO," For example, the Suez archives in January 1987 revealed very little that forced contemporary historians to revise their earlier accounts. The future historian will have an enormous amount of material to work with, much of it not in the form of oflicial documents. Oral history, or interviews with key participants, while events are still relatively fresh in their minds, has often been found useful for recapturing atmosphere, a quality which no amount of documentation can convey." There have been revealing broadcasting documentaries with key figures in recent history. The Institute of Contemporary British History has managed to persuade key participants in major events to talk on the record about their roles. Biographies, autobiographies and memoirs continue to supply essential materials for studies ofthe recruitment, p)ersonalities and motives of politicians, as well as their styles of work. They may also contain material about events which is never officially recorded. But to the historians, biographies suffer from abstracting the politicians from much else that is happening; other politicians and events enter the frame only in so far as they touch on the biographer's subject. What one also gains from the better studies, however, is an attention to micro politics: the importance of political coalitionbuilding, issue preferences of key political actors as well as their motivations and personalities. Detailed studies of high politics (drawing on diaries, memoirs and private papers of participants and observers), such as the downfall of Asquith in 1916, or Lloyd George in 1922, are good examples ofthe interaction of history and politics. The diaries - private and published - of key political figures merit some comment, not least because in recent years there has been a tendency for them to be published within a few years ofthe events described. Diaries may be kept for different purposes - as an aid to writers of memoirs (such as Harold Macmillan), as a source for a biographer (for example, the R. A. Butler, Hugh Dalton and Macmillan biographies), or a source for writing a major study. Crossman's original intention was to use his diary entries as the raw material from which to write a twentieth-century version of Bagehot's English Constitution, disclosing the inner workings of government. Diaries have to be handled with care and checked against other sources, including other diaries. One also needs to know how soon after the events the entries were dictated (the closer in time, presumably, the more accurate) and what subsequent editing took place. Crossman's diaries were dictated daily and sometimes weekly. The published diaries of Crossman, Castle and Benn will not be the last word on the Wilson years but they will be an important source of data, above all, perhaps, for showing the mood and atmosphere ofthe 'high politics' ofthe day. These diaries are all remarkably self-absorbed - whether the diarist is 'up' or 'down' in the estimates ofthe public, colleagues and the Prime Minister - and, inevitably, the perspective is highly partial. Enoch Powell compared the Crossman Diaries to Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu in their meticulous self-observation and sheer volume. He had no doubts about their authenticity: 'Any politician who
'' N. Cox 'Public records', in A. Seldon (ed). Contemporary History: Practice and Method Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988). ' As stated by the official biographers of Harold Macmillan and Winston Churchill. See A. Home, Harold Macmillan, 1957-1986 Vol. II (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989), Preface, and M. "Ibert, Winston Churchill, 1945-65. Vol. K///(London, Heinemann, 1988), Preface.

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has served in a ministry or sat in a Cabinet will testify to the authenticity of the Diaries. As page succeeds page, one recalls: "This is exactly how it was".^* A further problem concerns the point at which what happened in the past is considered to have marked a decisive change. Some history may be neglected because it is too far away in time or circumstances have changed too much. Identifying the point is a matter of dispute and will vary from case to case. From one perspective Germany shows great continuity in the twentieth century, but from another 1945 is a turning point. One might regard either the early seventeenth century or 1912 as the key turning points for understanding presentday Northern Ireland. History as an Aid to Understanding A knowledge of history provides opportunities for deepening our understanding of contemporary politics by acquiring a greater awareness of the context in which individual and group political behaviour occurs; helping us to perceive the immediate and medium-term consequences of actions and events; and providing a salutory warning against gross generalizations, as well as assisting in the formulation of more qualified generalizations. Many country-centred political studies, for example, when covering the political culture, party system, constitution and ideology, are often strongly historical. Studies of institutions are perhaps best regarded as the study of patterns of behaviour built up over time. In attempting to describe and analyse one looks for regularities in, for example, political practices or roles which are created over time. A particularly useful application of the comparative historical approach is Lipset and Rokkan's Party Systems and Voting Alignments.^^ The study demonstrates how voters until recently have been faced with 'packages' - of parties, programmes and social groupings attached to political parties - which have been produced by such major events as the Reformation, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. These, in turn, generated conflicts between religions and between church and state, between rural and urban interests, between territorial and cultural groups, and in this framework politics enters via the historical reconstruction. What has been lacking so far, however, is study of how and why some cleavages have been translated into party systems and others have not. In other words, the translation of cleavages is not automatic; it requires the choices of elites to achieve this.^' Studies of right-wing extremism in the US show how persistent the phenomenon has been." The Moral Majority of the 1980s and 1990s follows in the footsteps of earlier Protestant crusades against slavery, alcohol and Catholic immigration; such movements have found more support among centre-bright
* E. Powell, in Books and Bookmen (April 1976). There is a risk of diaries written close to the events being described being written in the heat of the moment, but this may only add to their value. Home, for example, regarded Macmillan's diaries as a 'treasure trove' and thought they were particularly useful for conveying 'the mood and the colour of the times and what Macmillan himself was then thinking, without the influence of self-justifying hindsight'; see Home, Harold Macmillan. Vol. II, p. xiv. " S. Lipset and S. Rokkan, Party Systems and Voting Alignments (New York, Free Press, 1967). " Sartori, 'From the sociology of politics to political sociology', pp. 88-89. * S. Lipset and E. Raab, The Politics of Unreason (London, Heinemann, 1971).

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parties - Federalists, Whigs and Republicans - than the left. In contemporary France, attitudes to central-local govemment relations often fall into a Girondin or Jacobin mould. The currents on the French political right can be traced back to the three 'rights' that emerged between 1778 and 1815 - Bonapartist, counterrevolutionary and parliamentary.'" In comparative history much is also to be learnt, for example, about the different strengths of socialism cross-nationally," why there is no socialism in the US" or the role of a fragment of European culture in the US and other new states." For Lipset, experiences predating 1914 determined whether or not workers formed class-based parties and, where they did, whether they were revolutionary or reformist. For Hartz, the emigration of groups from seventeenth-century England to North America became immobile, once the fragment or part of the culture was removed from the 'whole' in the original country and nourished the American liberal tradition. The work of Rokkan has emphasized the historical features that have shaped the electoral systems in force today in West European states. With the expansion of the suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites made crucial choices about how to translate popular votes into seats in the legislature. Systems of proportional representation were first adopted to protect minorities and subsequently to limit the power of working-class parties.'^ One might put this more strongly and say that explanations for many significant present-day political features are located so far back in time that we depend on historians for much of our materials. In the so-called consociational democracies of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria, traditions of pluralism and political accommodation are deeply rooted in the past. All four states lay within the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire and escaped the centralization that was occurring in other states between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. In so far as conciliar practices prevented deep subcultural cleavages from causing the breakdown of the the system, an explanation of why and how the practices emerged is crucial. If one tries to explain why political parties of the right in Northem Europe have so often fragmented into religious, agrarian and conservative groups, and why in central and southern Europe they have been closely linked to the Catholic Church, or why the divisions in Ulster today are so intense, then one has to go back to the Reformation and the faultlines left within and between European states. The literature on pohtical development, as state and nation building, has been enriched by what might be called the return of history. Study of the political development of non-westem societies (and area studies) was largely inspired by the creation of new states in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of the early work was cross-sectional, with data collected at one point in time,'' largely attitudinal and
" R. Remond, La droite en France (Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1969). " See, for example, G. Marks, Unions and Politics: Britain, Germany and the United States in the 19th and early 20th Centuries (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989) and R. McKibbin, 'Why was there no Marxism in Britain?', English Historical Review, XCIX: 391 (1984), 299-331. '' S. Lipset, 'Radicalism or reformism: the sources of working class polities', American Political Science Review, 11:\ (1983), 1-18. " L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955) and L. Hartz (ed.). The Founding of New Societies (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964). " S. Rokkan, 'The structuring of mass politics in the smaller European democracies: a developmental typology', in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 10:2 (1968), 173-210. " S. Lipset, Political Man (London, Heinemann, 1959) and P. Cutright, 'National political

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subject to sophisticated statistical analyses. The criteria of modernity and other key concepts were largely borrowed from sociology and anthropology. The American Social Science Research Committee on Comparative Politics considered that political development could be studied in terms offivecrises of integration, legitimacy, penetration, participation and distribution. The early literature contained interesting arguments about the effects of sequences of popular participation and the rights of organized political opposition for achieving stable democracy," about levels of socioeconomic development," about political culture,'* and about the relationship between increased political participation and effective political institutions." In no other area, however, was the neglect of history so potentially unfortunate. It soon became clear that theories of political development had to be checked against past experience. Change had to be studied over a longer period of time and the experience of the great European states had to be brought in. By the end of the 1960s the Committee on Comparative Politics, in its work on political development, shifted to the study of European states and to history and the work of historians. The volume edited by Charles Tilly contains studies of classic state-building activities like tax collection, police, food supply, finance, armed forces and administration in Europe and the US.*" The most significant factor to emerge was that key state-building developments in European states occurred against a background of virtually continuous warfare. The editor remarked: 'We consider the historical experience to be more important than contemporary observation in the formulation or verification of some kinds of generalisations about large-scale political changes'.*' The volume Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United State found that the Committee's earlier statements about crises and their sequences, as well as other universal models of development, dissolved when confronted with the particular histories of particular states.*- Also notable was the confessed unease of many of the country specialist historians in relating the 'exceptional' histories of their countries to the concepts and framework developed by social scientists. Thefivecrises were no longer key concepts but were employed more as a vocabulary and framework for the comparative analysis of European political history. In some states, such as Britain and the US, legitimacy and participation were handled relatively early; in others, such as Germany and Russia, penetration by the bureaucracy was handled early. But there was a general awareness that choices made in the past shaf)ed subsequent paths of development; decisions at one particular time excluded some options and facilitated others.
development", American Sociological Review, 28:2 (1965), 253-64. " R. Dahl, Polyarchy (New Haven, CT. Yale University Press, 1971) and B. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston, Beacon, 1966). " Lipset, Political Man. " G. Almond and S. Verba, The Civic Culture (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1963) and H. Eckstein, Division and Cohesion in Democracy (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1966). " Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies. ^ C. Tilly (ed.). The Formation of National States in Western Europe, (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1975). " Tilly (ed.). The Formation of National States in Western Europe, p. 3. *' R. Grew, Crises of Political development in Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1978).

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Study of the historical development of states is separate from the renewed interest in the state as an independent actor. The behavioural reaction against legal formalism involved a reduction of interest in the state. The recent statecentred approach claims that policies are not a reaction to, or reflections of, the pressures of interest groups, but more often reflect the deliberate choices of decision-makers. The approach covers, for example. New Right ideas about the self-serving character of many state bureaucrats and public employees, as well as public choice approaches and corporatist theories.^'

Generating and Testing Frameworks Many dynamic analyses of political systems and frames of reference are derived from concepts rooted in the past. The most ambitious was that of Marx, who mterpreted the past to arrive at a view ofthe future. More modestly, one thinks of A. H. Birch's Whitehall and Liberal models of theory and practice in British politics, derived from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, or of Beer's models of Whig, Tory and collectivist politics to describe the evolution of British politics in the past two centuries." Another example is W. H. Greenleaf s The British Political Tradition.*^ He sees not so much a polarization as a coexistence between collectivist and individualist values and how over time there IS a shift in emphasis between the two sets of values. Thatcherism and the New Right, on this reading, is only the latest stage in a continual interplay between two themes. These approaches are inevitably historical for the relevant experience and political data are in the past. One has no alternative but to try and discern patterns and types over time. Political scientists are more likely than historians to ransack the past - often treated as case studies - to derive and test propositions. Thus Barrington Moore's comparison of the experiences of England, France, the US, Japan and China proposes three routes to the modern world. He argues that a particular kind of socioeconomic revolution is necessary for the transition to democracy. In the British case the early commercialization ofthe rural sector was crucial, as was the role of the middle class in creating the path to industrialization and representative democracy: no bourgeoisie, no democracy. In Germany and Japan the middle class played a lesser role and the monarchy and bureaucracy were more dominant. In Russia and China modernization was achieved by a violent revolution.** Lipset's study of whether the eariy stages of working-class politics in several countries take a radical or reformist character suggests two propositions. The first is that the more rigid the status demarcation lines in a society, the more likely the emergence of a radical working-class party. The second concerns the way in which the economic and political elites respond to
" See J. Dearlove, 'Bringing the constitution back in: political science and the state". Political Studies. 37:4 (1989), 521-39 and the exchange between S. Krasner, 'Approaches to the state: alternative conceptions and historical dynamics". Comparative Politics. 16:2 (1984), 223-46 and G. Almond, 'The return to the state", American Political Science Review. 82:3 (1988), 853-74. " A. H. Birch, Representative and Responsible Government (London, George Allen & Unwin, l'*64) and S. Beer, Modern British Politics (London, Faber, 1965). " W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), Vol. 1. * Moore, Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship.

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demands of workers for economic and political rights. Where the working class is denied full political and economic citizenship, strong revolutionary movements usually developed; the more accommodating elites were to such demands, the less radical the working-class political parties. S. E. Finer's study of military intervention in politics also samples a large number of cases. Noting that military intervention in its modem form is two centuries old, he claims that it was the French Revolution and empire which nourished factors which in turn produced the conditions conducive to military intervention."' An interesting question to consider is how political scientists might actually sample history. What are the criteria for selecting cases? The holding constant of variables to test hypotheses is central to Max Weber's view of the historical method. One approach to comparative study is to follow John Stuart Mill's method of difference (comparing instances in which a phenomenon occurs with those in which it does not) and isolate a few dissimilarities. By holding some variables constant, one is better able to isolate the differences. Such an approach is seen in Lipset's comparative studies of Anglo-American societies. Another example is Louis Hartz's Founding of New Societies, which studies the impact of fragments of European societies which emigrated to the new states of Australia, Canada, South Africa and the US."* Alternatively, one can try and maximise the variance, particularly on the dependent variable, so that one is able to consider a broad range of causes. This is the approach adopted by Barrington Moore in his study of alternative paths to industrial modernization."' In reading such studies, one is struck by how reliant political scientists are on the accounts provided by historians.'" Consider four topics on which historians have cast a good deal of light and which also are of great interest to political scientists: why the US adopted a New Deal in the 1930s; why the French Fourth Republic collapsed; why the Liberal Party declined so abruptly after 1918; and why the Bolsheviks were able to seize power in 1917. For political scientists these four cases are significant for theories about, respectively, public policy and the role of government, the breakdown of regimes, the decline of political parties, and revolution. Yet in understanding these cases we are dependent on historians for their description and analysis of the interplay and relative impact of elite decisions and manoeuvres, domestic social and economic factors, international trends and political issues. To claim that history is too important to be left to the historians means that we should not compete with historians in describing the past but should recognize that historians provide us with so much of the material from which we select for our own analytical purpose. The traffic is not all one way. Historians in the future will have to take account of studies of the post-1945 period collected by social scientists. There now exists a substantial body of survey data on British general elections since 1964 and US elections over a longer period," even though this was employed to explain shortterm changes in voting behaviour. What would historians of nineteenth-century politics give for such material. For Britain, Butler and Stokes were able to use the
" " " * S. E. Finer, Man on Horseback (London, Pall Mall, 1962 and London, Pinter, 2nd edn, 1988) Hartz, The Eounding of New Societies. Moore, Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship. G. Almond, S. Flanagan and R. Mundt, Crisis. Choice and Change (Boston, Little Brown.

" See R. Rose and I. McAllister, The Loyalties of Voters (London, Sage, 1990) and A. Heath, R. Jowell and J. Curtice, How Britain Votes (Oxford, Pergamon, 1985).

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voters' recall of their parents' votes in the 1960s to speculate about what happened to old Liberal voting in the interwar years." For the US Nie et al. adopted a similar method to trace changes in voting in the 1930s." Survey researchers employ panel surveys to examine changes in attitudes and behaviour over relatively short periods. Butler and Stokes compared the voting choices of a panel on three occasions - 1963, 1964 and 1966. Conventional wisdom held that the replacement of a Conservative government by a Labour one in 1964 was largely the result of a shift of voters from Conservative to La*jour, The panel results showed that the two major sources of electoral change were the physical replacement of voters between 1959 and 1964 (due to death, emigration and enfranchisement) and the circulation of votes between the Liberals and the major parties. In the US, the change in the relative strength of the Democratic and Republican parties has also been explained in terms of changes in generations or the physical replacement of the electorate. Anderson's The Creation of a Democratic Majority sees the party's hegemony during the New Deal period as a product of the arrival of first-time voters and previous non-voters onto the electoral register.**

History and the Understanding of Political Concepts Traditionally, the writings of the past masters of political thought are the basic datum and study is largely by the analysis of texts. According to John Plamentez one reads the texts 'over and over again; without bothering to relate them to the circumstances prevailing when they were written'." An alternative approach, identified with Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School, encourages the political theorist to seek to understand the author's intentions. In turn such a quest demands the historian's knowledge ofthe political and intellectual context at the time of writing - what people were prepared to believe and what authors meant. Skinner's approach is to focus 'on the more general social and intellectual matrix out of which their work arose', for 'political life itself sets the main problems for the political theorist, causing a certain range of issues to appear problematic and a corresponding range of questions to become the leading subjects of debate'.'* To understand the author's meaning and intentions requires a study of the vocabulary and assumptions operative at the time of writing. For Skinner such an approach is a way of exploring the interactions between pohtica! thought and political behaviour, producing 'a history of political theory with a genuinely historical character'." The historical approach has also been applied to the study of how key concepts like representation, state, democracy and so on change over time. By studying the
-' D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain (London, Macmillan, 1969). ' N. Nie, S. Verba and J. Petrocick, The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1976). '" K. Anderson, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928-36 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1979). " J Plamentez, Man and Society (London, Longman, 1963), Vol. 1, p. x. * * Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge University "ress, 1978), Vol. l,p. x. " Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Vol. I. p. x. Also, see J. Tully (ed.), 'leaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 988).

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conceptual history of ideas in current usage we may gain a richer understanding of their meaning. Some concepts may have a dominant contemporary meaning but still retain elements of earlier usages which colour their use in debate. Ideology, for example, today is generally thought of as a belief-system. It may also, however, refer to 'false consciousness' or distorted belief, as well as to interest-driven beliefs,'* both past usages of the term. Concepts usually change gradually. At a time of"political crisis, however, the change can be speeded up, as happened during the French Revolution, the English civil war and the American Revolution. Ball and Pocock have recently illustrated how such key terms as sovereignty, republic, representation, liberty, constitution and federalism were virtually re-coined in the US during debates over the ratification of the constitution. 'Political innovation and cenceptual change went hand in hand'."

History as a Source of Lessons Decision-makers learn from their own experiences {personal history) and from what is happening in their own and other countries. Lesson-drawing may be both national and cross-national.** But there is also no doubt that decision-makers and commentators draw 'lessons', for better or worse from their understanding of the past. In France, the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques was founded in 1872, with the objective of educating the servants of the state to make better policies, in part by learning lessons from the study of past decisions. The same approach is found in some of the courses provided by the Keenedy School of Government at Harvard. American cases of 'learning' are discussed in E. R. May's Lessons of the Past''' and Nuestadt and May's Thinking in Time." Sometimes, the analogies may be misleading, perhaps because the earlier experience is not fully explained and analysed. One thinks of Eden, in 1956, regarding Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal as a replay of Hitler's aggression, or of the reasoning behind French and British appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s which viewed his policies as a reaction to the 'unjust' peace treaty imposed on Germany at Versailles. The 'appeasement' case is perhaps one of the most overworked, as any group engaged in what it regards as self-defence of its rights points to the disastrous consequences of 'appeasement' of the opponent. Promoters of particular 'lessons' of history may have their own agenda to promote: both Krushchev and Gorbachev regarded the exposure of the crimes of Stalin as crucial for mobilizing support for their programmes of political and economic reform. It is useful in this context to examine what is broadly called political economy in western states. Different economic policy responses across states in the post At this point I have drawn on David Miller, 'The resurgence of political theory'. Political Studies, 3i:3 {1990), 42\-31. * T. Ball and J. Pocock, Conceptual Change in the Constitution (Kansas, University Press ol Kansas, 1988) and T. Ball, J. Farr and R. Hanson, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988). The quotation is from Ball and Pocock, p. 8. " SeeR.Rose,Lesson-DrawingAcrossTmieandSpace(Tuscaioosa,\JniveTsityo(\]a.harmPTess. 1991). " E. R. May, Lessons of the Past: the Uses and Misuses of History in American Eoreign Policy (Oxford, Oxford University press, 1972) " R. Neustadt and E. R. May, Thinking in Time: the Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York, Free Press, 1986).

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,var period have been explained in terms of different national political culturesand social structures.'^ Historical experiences in the interwar years seem 10 be a crucial factor explaining the resort to corporatist forms of decisionmaking" and Swedish-style social contracts between government and economic interests. Different macro-economic outcomes correlate with different policy styles and group-government linkages." But to move from establishing an association between factors to explanation one often resorts to historical factors (memories of the past) to explain the performance and policy approaches of decision-makers in, say, Germany (the fear of inflation), Japan (the emphasis on consensual decision-making) or Sweden (the 'social contract' approach to policymaking), or to an historical approach through a study of changing relationships between macro-economic outcomes over time. Perhaps nowhere has the lack of historical perspective been more regrettable than in the large number of studies in policy analysis which have employed aggregate, statistical methods. The size ofthe coefificients between selected policy variables (such as welfare expenditure) and selected political variables (such as party competitiveness or left-right party control of the executive) and environmental variables (such as wealth or urbanism) have been taken as a measure of the relative influence of the last two factors. Aggregate statistical approaches to the study of policy outcomes had obvious attractions; they readily lent themselves to collection of data and measurability and one could examine a large number of cases over time and space. During the 1970s there was a veritable torrent of studies ofthe policy outputs of American states and in the 1980s there were more cross-national studies of the political and environmental correlates of particular programmes and patterns of expenditure. Elsewhere, the author has commented on the literature: It is understandable that such a welter of contradictory findings from so tnany studies invites a reaction close to despair. The body of hterature points to no clear-cut conclusions. Sotne studies show that some factors have an influence on some policy outcomes, while other studies show the reverse. Although follow-up studies provide some elaboration and specification of earlier findings, what emerges is a set of almost idiosyncratic findings, confined to particular periods, places, policy output, political and/or environmental variable(s) and even research approaches and statistical tneasures . . . This is rather chastening, given the large number of studies, the elaborate collections of data, and the statistical ingenuity employed.** Overall, the studies betrayed the worst excesses of behaviouralism and the dangers ofthe neglect of history. Clearly, the findings ofthe aggregate statistical studies are but the beginning, a mapping, rather than the end of an explanation of what determines policies. What is called for are more detailed historical studies of
" J. Goldthorpe (ed.). Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984). " P. Schmitter, 'Still the century of corporatism?". Review of Politics. 36:1 (1974) 84-131. " D. Cameron, 'Social democracy, corporatism, labour quiescence, and the representation of economic interests in advanced capitalist society", in J. Goldthorpe (ed.). Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984). * D. Kavanagh, Political Science and Political Behaviour (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1983), p, 166,

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Why Political Science Needs History

the development of particular policies in a country or a sample of countries. To gain an understanding of precise linkages (why and how) in the process and testing the general relationships suggested in the aggregate statistical approaches, the particularity of the historical approach is more promising. Among the early works recognizing that the study of change over time is a useful way of getting at causation and relationships are Hugh Helco's comparative study of the development of income maintenance programmes in Sweden and Britain over the past century," work on the emergence of welfare states in Britain, France, Germany, Sweden and the US,** and research on the impact of Keynes's ideas on policy in different countries." The historical method may be particularly important in explaining policy continuities over time as consequences of decision-makers' preference for incrementalism and for policy-making routines which are deeply embedded in the political process. If policy is a form of learning, the most important influence is likely to be past policy and its consequences. Indeed, so much public policy in terms of laws, budgets and programmes, is actually inherited rather than chosen by governments. The 'overload' of government spending in the 1970s had less to do with new programmes than the growth in costs of inherited programmes. Claims for the role of history as a practical guide can be pushed too far. There may be a problem with the historical data. According to Meehan: The accounts may be inaccurate or inadequate; historians do not always record the kind of information that social scientists require, nor is this information put in a form in which it is readily accessible and useful." One has only to think of the many 'verdicts' of history which successive generations of revisionists have made. J. R. Strayer's careful judgement is that the historian's knowledge is useful 'not for making predictions but because a full understanding of human behaviour in the past makes it possible to find familiar elements in present problems and thus makes it possible to solve them more intelligently'.^^ History is not therefore a recipe book of obvious lessons or courses of action. In so far as it educates the policy-maker or student to an understanding of the successes and failures of how actors behaved in broadly similar situations in the past, then it may help to develop better policy.

Conclusion The range of studies reviewed shows that the break with history as an approach and a body of knowledge has been incomplete and varies across political science sub-fields. It has been particularly severe in much study of the 'input' activities which have attracted the interest of behaviouralists: research into voting,

" H. Heclo, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1974). " D. Ashford, The Emergence of Welfare States (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986). " P. Hall, The Political Power of Economic Ideas (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. 1990). " On this see R. Rose, 'Inheritance before choice in public policy'. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2:3 (1990), 263-91. I " E. J. Meehan, Explanations in Social Science (Homewood, IL, Dorsey Press, 1968). ^ Cited in A. Marwick, The Nature of History (London, Macmillan, 1970), p. 18.

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legislative behaviour, public opinion, political socialization and recruitment. It has been markedly less evident in the study of institutions and political theory. Any review of the literature over the past 30 years, for example, on voting behaviour, policy outputs, political socialization, and public opinion, to name but four topics, shows how time specific and variable many of the findings have been. In recent years there has been a greater awareness of the relevance of history and greater cooperation between political scientists and historians. Indeed a separate paper could be written on why history needs social science," In the case of modem British history, Robert Skidelsky, David Marquand and Paul Addison are as at home with the concepts, methods and findings of sociology, economics and political science, as with history. Political or social science concepts, particularly modernization theory, have also been particularly important in the historical debate in Germany,'* A review of the output of contemporary political science shows that the links with history are still strong, but it is history as a study and record of the past rather than as a method. Much ofthe work reviewed above is historical in so far as it uses knowledge ofthe past to explain present-day political phenomena or to test propositions. In this, it differs from 'proper' history, which is concerned to understand the past in its own right. The historical approach is often presented as opposed to the notion of a science of politics because it so often refutes ideas of universal laws. History has not been a means of generalizing and reintegrating a fragmented and compartmentalized political science. By showing how things have been different in another age it may stimulate the imagination and suggest relationships and possible areas for study. What it seems to provide above all is a sense of context. In so far as a knowledge of history broadens one's base of relevant knowledge and perspective, then it helps to guard against time-bound judgements. An historical study of, for example, the British Cabinet, the US presidency, or French constitutions may show how long-standing many contemporary problems and issues are, as well as suggesting reasons why these institutions have taken their present form. The historian's reasonable claim is that such contextual knowledge of links from past to present improves our understanding.

" See P. Burke, Sociology and History (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1980). '* See. R. Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1%9). For a revisionist view see D. Blackboum and G. Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984).