ABSTRACT
Human history, the bolder sociologists argued, is primarily a record of social evolution. Historian and sociologist alike, despairing of any demonstrable relationship between cause and effect in many phases of life, must turn to such ideas as that of the interdependence of variables for a vague clue—and that conception has little practical helpfulness. The French Revolution, as a vast social movement, tumultuous and mutable as a stormy tide, represented a multitudinous complex of emotions, economic forces, social aspirations, ideas, and philosophies. Both history and economics lie embedded in a social framework, and both use special tools, those of the economist being more and more difficult to master. Any historians insist that their special field of interest must always lie quite apart from the special field of the sociologist. Sociologists admit its validity, granting that they are interested chiefly in the repetitive elements of the human past, while the historian must be interested principally in the non-repetitive elements.
