ABSTRACT
‘History’ says the distinguished French historian, Frederic Mauro, ‘is the projection of the social sciences into the past’. Few historians, I think, will wholeheartedly accept such a declaration; but this view of history ought not to be dismissed out of hand without some consideration of what elements of value it contains. The economist and the sociologist attempt for their own reasons to interpret certain aspects of the life of present-day societies. They consider facts, they develop theories and apply them to data—strictly speaking to historical data, though very often relating to the immediate past. There is no reason in principle why the theories they develop and test adequately should not be applied usefully to the data of the more remote past—and sometimes they are—but historians often suspect this application. They do so chiefly because these are fairly new sciences, much of their theory as yet extremely tentative, imprecisely worked out, inadequately tested and frequently revised. If the social sciences could claim the precision of the physical sciences—of, say, chemistry —most historians would feel obliged to attempt some understanding of their methods and their application to historical problems. Moreover, as a rule the historian has plenty of facts; and confronted with an economist’s or a sociologist’s or a psychologist’s attempt to fit some aspect of history into a theoretical framework, he can usually dredge up a few facts which appear to discredit the result. He can do this the more easily, the less he understands of the purposes, methods and unexpressed assumptions of the branch of social science concerned ; the less, that is to say, he is ready to think himself sympathetically into the intentions of those he is criticising, and to consider whether his information really makes their propositions quite untenable, or merely throws light on ambiguities of formulation or ways in which the social scientists theory may usefully be remodelled.
