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Response to Ledford and Sperber

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Marcus Kreuzer
Marcus Kreuzer
Affiliation:
Villanova University
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Extract

Over the last decade, historians have made steady inroads into the frequently static social sciences as they are trying to understand the changing post-Cold War order and the even more rapidly changing global and domestic political economies. Such softening of disciplinary boundaries is also observable in the other direction. Jonathan Sperber's work on nineteenth-century electoral politics and Kenneth Ledford's study on German lawyers offer two examples among many of historians borrowing concepts and methods from the social sciences. Yet, these encouraging signs of disciplinary trespassing cannot mask the fact that these two disciplines continue only infrequently to publish in each others' journals, intelligently review each others' works, or jointly reflect on the payoffs of interdisciplinary scholarship. Given this limited dialogue, it is a particular pleasure to reply to two such thoughtful and constructive respondents. In subtly tackling the problems inherent in comparing, Kenneth Ledford ventures into the disciplinary borderlands of history and the social sciences while Jonathan Sperber stays more closely in the historical corner and — to use Ledford's apt characterization of his colleagues — “picks cautionary holes in the applicability” of comparisons.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , September 2003 , pp. 375 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2003

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References

1. Ledford, Kenneth, From General Estate to Special Interest: German Lawyers, 1878–1933 (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sperber, Jonathan, The Kaiser's Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Skocpol, Theda and Somers, Margaret, “The Uses of Comparative History in Macro-sociological Inquiry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980): 174–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. The distinction between lumpers and splitters was made by Hexter, Jack, On Historians (Cambridge, 1979), 241–42Google Scholar.

4. These tables are drawn from a large multinational research project that Herbert Döring conducted in large part to move the debate concerning governing institutions beyond the stale, overly-abstract differentiation between presidential and parliamentary systems. Döring, Herbert, ed., Parliaments and Majority Rule in Western Europe (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

5. I discuss this point more fully in Institutions and Innovation: Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation of Democracy—France and Germany, 1870–1939 (Ann Arbor, 2001), 15–21, 157–69Google Scholar. See also Gaddis, John Lewis, The Landscape of History (Oxford, 2002), 28–32Google Scholar.

6. Kühne, Thomas, “Parlamentarismusgeschichte in Deutschland: Probleme, Enräge und Perspektiven einer Gesamtdarstellung,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 24, no. 2 (1998): 325–26Google Scholar.

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8. After 1985 volumes 103, 112, 116, 133 dealt with the imperial Reichstag; before 1985, it was volumes 7, 20, 47, 50, 54, 58, 59, 60, 67, 72, 73. I did not count biographical studies focusing on individual deputies or party monographs.

9. For the unwillingness of German historians, even when they study the Reichstag, to engage the parhamentarization debate, see Butzer, Herman, Diäten und Freifahrt im Deutschen Reichstag (Düsseldorf, 1999), 20Google Scholar.

10. I used First Search's Art and Humanities database. Rauh, Manfred, Die Parlametitarisierung des Deutschen Reiches (Düsseldorf, 1977)Google Scholar; idem, Föderalismus und Parlamentarismus im Wilhelminischen Reich (Düsseldorf, 1973); Langewiesche, Dieter, Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1988)Google Scholar; Groh, Dieter, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1973)Google Scholar; Puhle, Hans-Jürgen, Agrarische Interessenpolitik und preussischer Konservatismus im wilhelminischen Reich, 1893–194 (Hanover, 1967)Google Scholar.

11. Furthermore, if Hartwin Spenkuch's recent review article is any indication, the debate still seems to be alive in Germany, even if Americans have grown tired of it. “Vergleichsweise beson-ders? Politisches System und Strukturen Preussens als Kern des ‘deutschen Sonderwegs’,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 29 (2003): 262–93Google Scholar.

12. Schönberger, “Parlamentarisierung,” 659–64.

13. Frauendienst, Werner, “Demokratisierung des deutschen Konstitutionalismus in der Zeit Wilhelms II.,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 113, no. 4 (1957): 738Google Scholar.

14. See for example: Smith, Woodruff and Turner, Sharon, “Legislative Behavior in the German Reichstag, 1898–1906” Central European History 14, no. 1 (1981): 3–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schonhardt-Bailey, Cheryl, “Parties and Interests in the ‘Marriage of Iron and Rye’,” British Journal of Political Science 28 (1998): 291–330CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thompson, Alastair, Left Liberals, The State, and Popular Politics In Wilhelmine Germany (Oxford, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Sperber, , Kaiser's Voters, 2Google Scholar.

16. For an attempt to explore the payoffs of such interdisciplinary research see Kreuzer, Institutions and Innovation, 8–15Google Scholar.

17. An incredibly stimulating and thoughtful contribution to such a dialogue is Gaddis, Landscape of History. Among other things, he makes the provocative claim that historians, without really trying, are methodologically more in tune with the natural sciences than the social sciences with their outdated, Newtonian view of the world.