ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how historians have contributed to our understanding of the processes of democratization. It focuses on the different views historians have taken of alternative paths to democracy and particularly its early stages -the so-called ‘first wave’. The chapter examines the ways in which different historians have approached the writing of history. Historians have unlimited freedom to dispute what meaning they should attach to their source material. American historians have long since come to see the American Revolution not as a form of Constitutional debate but as the consequence of a deep-seated conflict of interest between Britain and its colonies - a view with which Thomas Jefferson would undoubtedly have agreed. The regular polls of American historians on the greatness of US presidents have shown interesting changes as the liberal consensus of the 1960s gave way to the New Right in the 1980s. Little historical work on the micro-management of political systems finds its way into the common discourse.
