Ideas and Interests

Bibliographic Data

ID23158952
AuthorsPeter Clarke (0000-0003-0892-1907, corresponding author)
Year1983
Pages45-48
Publication date1983-12-31
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueNew History (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPrinceton University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1515/9781400886470-004
OpenAlexW2331569364
ISBN9781400886470
LanguageEN
Citations received7

Ideas and Interests The contribution of political science to the study of political history has been in introducing a beneficial rigor to the definition of concepts and the specification of problems. It is also, and not coincidentally, associated with the application of quantitative methods and schematic models. But the social sciences as such deal in abstractions and regularities, especially those which can be approached within a quantitative and comparative perspective. The use of the particular here may legitimately be through case studies in order to enlarge and enhance the body of theory. This procedure, however, imports an illegitimate objective for historians. They can certainly learn from comparative studies and from theory, but as historians they are actually and ultimately concerned with happened once. They draw upon theory in order to enlarge and enhance their understanding of the particular, in all its historical richness.1 And if historians are concerned with what happened once there is an inescapable role for contingency in their causal explanations, especially in political history. They may be forced to discover causes of particular developments, not in deep structural regularities, but in is trivial.2

Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · European Political History Analysis · Political Science Research and Education

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