ABSTRACT
Politics shapes the behavioral sciences by the part it plays in giving meaning to the events with which the sciences deal. “Knowledge of cultural events is “inconceivable,” Max Weber wrote, “except on the basis of significance which the concrete constellations of reality have for us in certain individual concrete situations.”1 The political situation as much as the purely scientific one, if there is any such thing, gives significance to the constellations dealt with by the behavioral sciences. This is especially true of history as a discipline. There are various types of history, and corresponding types of historical interpretation. In a particular body of historical writing, several types can be present simultaneously, intertwined with one another, as they are in the work of such writers as James Bryce and Alexis de Tocqueville. Each type poses distinct methodological problems. There is need for an understanding of more than what is true in principle about the writing of history: we need to understand what in fact historians do. In principle, the description, interpretation and explanation of what happened in history may be no different from what applies to disciplines dealing with any other subject matter; in practice, there are many special problems. It is absurd to proclaim conclusions about the truth “in the last analysis” while we are still floundering in the first analysis.
