History QUASSHed: Quantitative Social Scientific History in Perspective

Abstract

History is different from the other social sciences. Nine contrasting qualities have produced a striking variation between the course of development of quantitative methods in history and that in the rest of the social scientific disciplines. First, historians have framed less compelling research agendas, and feel less constrained by the ones which have been proposed, than do professionals in other fields. Historians borrow, rather than invent theories, prize diversity of insight more than coherence; paradoxically, more are attracted by interpretations which claim to overturn or replace older ones entirely, rather than those which stress their continuity with previous structures of understanding. If historians are often classified as belonging to one "school" or another, the underlying educational philosophy is decidedly progressive, the assignments only roughly structured, the discipline very loose.