History and Social Science

Richard Ostrofsky
(May, 2006)
In his treatise on Poetics (Part IX), Aristotle declares: “Poetry, therefore, is
a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, for poetry tends to
express the universal, history the particular.” Agree or not, such valorizing
of the abstract and general over the concrete and particular was crucial to
the development of science and to our present-day, scientific world-view. To
a classical philosopher, particulars are valued for the universal truths that
they embody. Incidental features are irrelevant – if not corrupt or deviant.
As any actual circle that could be drawn is inferior to the mathematically
ideal circle, so actual people and the things they did are inferior to godly
ideals of heroism and wisdom. The actual historical record is always less
edifying, less inspiring, than the myth. Why labor to chronicle the hurly-
burly of a real war, when you could read Homer? Even today, by the same
token, why study history (which, at its best, can only tell you what
happened in some particular situation), when you could turn to sociology
for a theory of how people behave and how societies work in every similar
situation?
A central result of the Darwinian concept of a self-organizing universe is
to overturn this philosophical preference for ideal types and grand
generalities. “Fitness” – the quality of fecundity, and ecological
compatibility with everything else – is a quality of individual cases and
specimens. Life is a probing of “the edge of the possible” (in Stuart
Kauffman’s words), not a living up to general principles. The patterns and
principles that we find in nature always come after the fact. Any general
principles that we discover are abstractions of our representations of the
real, rather than laws to be obeyed or plans to be followed. In particular,
sociology is only possible when the complexities and sheer messiness of
lived events are ignored or stripped away. Historians too must do this to
some extent, if they are to tell a coherent story. But they, at least, are
committed to recognize and capture (what they judge to be) the essential
facts of a concrete situation. And they are aware and apologetic for their
necessary acts of reductive judgment – as sociologists, too often, are not.
 Ignorance of history and preference for sociology in the United States
may be one cause of that country’s self-defeating approach to foreign policy
– and its disastrous “neo-conservatism” which is not conservative at all.
Sociology, after all, suggests the possibility of social engineering – a
technologizing effort to change society according to one’s own preferences.
By contrast, history mostly exposes the futility of such efforts and the
human suffering they have caused. Authentic conservatives know this.
Consequently, they prefer an evolutionary and Fabian approach to social
change, and are suspicious of drastic measures. Whether we think them
right or wrong on a particular issue, they deserve better than to be confused
with the present lot of radical opportunists who call themselves
“conservative” and are anything but.
The Darwinian view of society as a self-organizing system explains why
the study of history is vitally important, and why sociology is at best the
historian’s useful servant, not the other way round. Sociology can be a
useful adjunct to common sense in the construction of historical
explanations, but it is unlikely that we will ever know enough about the
dynamics of social organization to predict future history, any more than we
can know enough about atmospheric physics to predict the weather more
than a few days ahead. On the other hand, the theory of self-organizing
systems requires that a society remain consistent with itself, and that each
day, week and year, must build on the outcomes of the last in re-entrant
fashion. Come what may, a society remains tightly bound to its own past in
ways not necessarily predictable, but very real.
Perhaps we learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from
history. Even so, reading history at least gives a feeling for the ecological
character of a society, and its resistance to change against its character. It
helps us see society as an organic whole, more easily deranged than
mended. Serious history also exposes the shallowness and mendacity of
historical myth. This alone should be sufficient reason to study it.