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Reflections on an Old “New History” Quantitative Social Science History in Postmodern Middle Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Eric A. Johnson
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Not very long ago quantitative historians were on the offensive. Only a decade back the eminent “Annales School” French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie stated in the English language translation of a work he had published a decade earlier in his native language that “tomorrow's historian will have to be able to program a computer in order to survive,” and that “history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.” In America, where even more champions of quantitative work resided, several new journals were founded in the 1970s such as the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Historical Methods, and Social Science History which were explicitly devoted to new social scientific approaches to the study of history and above all to quantitative approaches. And even in Germany, which seemed the most immune to the quantitative contagion of all the major western lands, owing perhaps to its long entrenched historicist traditions and to its historians' preoccupations with the tragic happenings of its still recent past, the decade of the seventies saw the development of several new outlets for quantitative and social scientific historical research such as Geschichte und Gesellschaft and Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung. Hence to most professional historians, whether they liked it or not, quantitative history appeared to be the wave of the future, and ignoring the new possibilities offered by the computer appeared to risk being relegated to the proverbial dustbin.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 22 , Issue 3-4 , September 1989 , pp. 408 - 426
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1989

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References

1. Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, The Territory of the Historian, trans. Sien, and Reynolds, Ben (Chicago, 1979), 6, 15.Google Scholar

2. Were it not for the recent essay of Theodore S. Hamerow, I might have just used the term historians. See his sharp criticism of the history profession, in “The Bureaucratization of History,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 654–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. See, for example, Fogel, Robert and Elton, G. R., Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History (New Haven, 1983), 67ff.Google Scholar; and Kousser, J. Morgan, “The Revival of Narrative: A Response to Recent Critisms Quantitative History,” Social Science History 8 (1984): 134ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. See Konrad H. Jarausch's essay in this volume.

5. Some obvious examples would be Lawrence Stone and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. In German history one could cite many people who may not have become critical, but nonetheless have recently, though possibly only temporarily, changed their methodological focus, like Dirk Blasius, who is now writing a biography of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Tom Childers, who is now working on signs and symbols, Michael Kater, who is now working on jazz, and Steve Hochstadt, who is now working on emigré Jews in China.

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7. See my discussion in “Counting ‘How It Really Was’: Quantitative History in West Germany,” Historical Methods 21 (1984): 61–79.Google Scholar

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13. Citing the leaders of these projects more directly is unnecessary, save for Robert Fogel, who remains convinced that the basic outline of his argument on slavery is correct. He is presently completing an even more massive project which proves this. This first volume has just been published and more are to come. Fogel, Robert W., Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989).Google Scholar

14. Perhaps the only quantitative German history project that has come under serious attack for making overly grandiose claims has been Richard Tilly's and Gerd Hohorst's work on social protest. See the discussion in Eley, Geoff, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture and the Politics of the Everyday—A New Direction for German Social History?” journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 304–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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17. The authors of the second essay cited just above found that between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s there was the greatest amount of highly sophisticated statistical scholarship published on German history, but since that time there has been a notable dropoff in such advanced statistical treatments but no real dropoff in statistical treatments in general. This was only the case in America, however, as in Germany and even in Britain the trend seems to be toward more mathematical sophistication.

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19. Peter Jelavich, “Contemporary Literary Theory: From Deconstruction Back to History,” in this volume.

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23. Thomas Childers, in this volume.

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25. Toews, ibid.

26. Harlan, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” 625.

27. Jelavich, “Contemporary Literary Theory,” 16.

28. David Crew, “Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History ‘From Below’?” in this volume; Eley, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte.”

29. See the extensive citations and important critical discussion in Eley, ibid.

30. In Kocka's words: “This new trend of anti-theoretical everyday history fits well into the old German tradition of historicism, which stressed the reconstruction of ‘meaning’ at the cost of analyzing structures and processes, despised explicit conceptions, morals, and theories, and had little sympathy for generalizations and explicit comparisons, and abhorred the social sciences as ‘mechanistic’and ‘positivistic.’ After 1870 at least, historicist historians were rarely on the left, nor had they much sympathy for social history. For the first time now, neohistoricist tendencies can be observed in social history, and they seem to be compatible with their proponents' leftist inclinations. This does not make them more convincing.” Kocka, , “Theory and Social History: Recent Developments in West Germany,” Social Research 47 (1980): 447.Google Scholar

31. Kocka, ibid.

32. Ralph Dahrendorf has made this point in his Society and Democracy in Germany.

33. See for example, Blasius, Dirk, Kriminalität und Alltag: Zur Konfliktgeschichte des Alltagslebens im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1978)Google Scholar; and many of the essays in Botz, G., Fleck, Chr., Müller, A., and Thaller, M., eds., Qualität und Quantität: Zur Praxis der Methoden der Historischen Sozialwissenschaft (Frankfurt, 1988).Google Scholar

34. Scott, “History in Crisis,” 691, 692.

35. See the recent Kocka article under this title in the Frankfurter Rundschau, July 1989.

36. Though not holding personally to all of these positions, Isabel Hull discusses most of them in her essay in this volume.

37. Tilly, Charles, As Sociology Meets History (New York, 1981).Google Scholar

38. Childers, Thomas, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill, 1983)Google Scholar, Kater, Michael H., The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983)Google Scholar, Hamilton, Richard, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Falter, Jürgen, Lindenberger, Thomas, and Schumann, Siegried, Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik (Munich, 1986).Google Scholar

39. In July of 1990 the major international organization for the history of crime and criminal justice, IAHCCJ, held its triannual meeting in Stockholm, Sweden to prove exactly this point. For a discussion of much of the pertinent literature, see Blasius, Dirk, “Kriminologie und Geschichtswissenschaft: Bilanz und Perspektiven interdisziplinärer Forschung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 14 (1988): 136–49.Google Scholar

40. New methodologies, like logit and probit analysis for example, have recently been developed which enable researchers to quantify and do regression type analysis with nominal level data. These new techniques should be especially useful to historians because their data is often of this type. For a discussion of these new techniques, especially geared to historians and German historians in particular, see Jarausch, Konrad H., Arminger, Gerhard, and Thaller, Mannfred, Quantitative Methoden in der Geschichtswissenschaft: Eine Einführung in die Forschung: Datetnverarbeitung und Statistik (Darmstadt, 1985)Google Scholar. For a recent example of their use in German history, see Jarausch, Konrad H. and Arminger, Gerhard, “The German Teaching Profession and Nazi Party Membership: A Demographic Logit Model,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20 (1989): 197–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar