ABSTRACT

There has been a persistent tension between history and theory in the social sciences ever since the days of Comte and Ranke, or even those of Thucydides and Herodotus. When Thucydides wrote about the war between Athens and Sparta, he claimed that his investigation should be useful not only for those who wish to know about past events but also for those interested in what might happen in the future. The assumption about unchanged human nature renders predictive power to generalizations. However, we cannot understand historical transformations without having knowledge about the formative experiences. This “path dependence” and emphasis on peculiar Sonderwege imply the existence of a normal route. In the words of Walter Bagehot (1885), rightly conceived, the historical method is no rival of the abstract method rightly conceived.