Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods [Book Review]

Abstract

New Zealand social historian Fairburn’s textbook on research design and argumentation should be widely adopted for graduate classes in history. Drawing on the philosophy of science, Fairburn questions the widespread practices in social history of, for instance, generalizing from isolated instances, unsystematically assessing differences and similarities between and within various groups, and evaluating interpretations on mainly stylistic or ideological grounds, instead of on the basis of the logic and power of their models. Although he persuasively criticizes the cultural relativism of postmodernist and hermeneutic approaches as self-refuting, he is better, and more comfortable, discussing such “soft” stances than he is discussing economics and other “hard” social sciences— which he virtually ignores, despite economists’ numerous contributions to social history—or statistical methods—which he distrusts when authors cannot completely explain them in simple terms to skeptical innumerates.