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Historical Explanation and the Study of Politics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

A. H. Birch
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Extract

MY STARTING POINT IS THE RATHER PLATITUDINOUS PROPOSITION that political science is a branch of scholarship which can be defined in terms of the activity studied but not in terms of the method adopted, which is to say that it is not a discipline like history or physics. To say that these subjects are disciplines is to indicate that historians and physicists are committed both to a certain method of acquiring data and to a certain mode of explanation. Because political scientists are not so committed they are inevitably involved in controversies about method and explanation, and the view I propose to discuss here is the view that, although several modes of explanation are open to students of politics, only the historical mode, and on a different level the philosophical mode, are appropriate. Those who hold this view lean heavily on the writings of Professor Michael Oakeshott and I shall begin with a very brief reference to Oakeshott's account of the main modes of experience and explanation. Subsequent sections will discuss the relevance of this account to students of politics, the nature of historical explanation, and the possibility of alternatives such as sociological explanation.

Type
Original Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1969 , pp. 215 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1969

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References

1 I use the term ‘political science’ in its traditional and generic sense to denote the academic study of politics, not any sub-division of that study.

2 See Oakeshott’s, remarks in Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962) at p. 169.Google Scholar

3 Cambridge, 1933.

4 I shall use the term ‘explanation’ in place of ‘experience’ henceforth as it seems more helpful if one is concerned with the study of political and social events, for which the poetic mode of experience is not appropriate.

5 Ibid., p. 164.

6 In the 1966 edition the treatment of this example has been amended and others added, but I have referred to the original version because I think the point emerges more clearly there. All subsequent quotations are from the 1966 edition, however.

7 Ibid., p. 311.

8 Ibid., p. 311.

9 Ibid., p. 327.

10 Ibid. p. 316.

11 Reprinted in Rationalism in Politics.

12 Cf. David Truman’s remark in 1961: ‘The ultimate goal of the student of political behavior is the development of a science of the political process’, quoted in Dahl, Robert A., ‘The Behavioral Approach in Political Science’, in American Political Science Review, vol. 55 (1961) p. 767.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 See Rationalism in Politics, p. 329 n.

14 March, James G., ‘The Power of Power’, in Easton, David (ed.), Varieties of Political Theory, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1966, p. 70.Google Scholar

15 Dahl, Robert A., ‘A Rejoinder’, in American Political Science Review, vol. 51, 1957, P. 1056.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 See Who Governs?, New Haven, 1961.

17 David Apter, ‘Political Systems and Developmental Change’, a paper presented to the 1967 World Congress of the International Political Science Association, p. 5.

18 Experience and its Modes, p. 321.

19 The analogy of the web comes from the first sentence of Pollock and Mait-land’s great book on the history of English law: ‘Such is the unity of all history that any one who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his first sentence tears a seamless web…’. See Pollock, F. and Maitland, F. W., The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, Cambridge, 1895, 2nd edn. 1898, vol. 1, p. 1.Google Scholar

20 Experience and its Modes, p. 132.

21 Ibid., p. 166.

22 Nationalism in Politics, p. 166.

23 I am leaving the philosophical explanation of political ideas on one side on the ground that the importance and relevance of this activity is beyond reasonable dispute.

24 A third possibility is that he might reject Oakeshott’s whole approach to philosophy, but I shall not pursue this.

25 See Runciman, W. G., Social Science and Political Theory, Cambridge, 1965, p. 16.Google Scholar

26 Experience and Its Modes, p. 167.

27 Ibid., p. 167.

28 See E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Social Anthropology: Past and Present’, in Man, 1950, 198, and the correspondence in the following issues of Man.

29 Anthropology and History, Manchester, 1961, p, 3.

30 Experience and Its Modes, p. 331.

31 Dilthey, Wilhelm, Patterns and Meanings in History, edited with an introduction by Rickman, H. P., London, 1961, New York, 1962, p. 50.Google Scholar

32 This remark occurs in a paper on ‘The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Studies’, Which was read to the Prussian Academy in 1910. It was reprinted in Volume VII of Dilthey’s collected works (ed. B. Groethuysen, Stuttgart, 1926) and appears in translation on p. 68 of the book edited by H. P. Rickman.

33 For discussions of Dilthey’s work see Hodges, H. A., The Philosophy of Wilhelm Diltbey, London, 1952,Google Scholar and Kluback, William, Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of History, New York, 1956.Google Scholar

34 Experience and Its Modes, p. 141.

35 On this see Scriven, Michael, ‘Truisms as the Grounds for Historical Explanations’, in Gardiner, Patrick (ed.) Theories of History, Glencoe, Ill., 1959.Google Scholar

36 For the classical statement of this viewpoint see Hempel, Carl G., ‘The Function of General Laws in History’, in Journal of Philosophy, vol. 39, 1942,CrossRefGoogle Scholar reprinted in Theories of History.

37 On this, see Dray, William H., ‘The Historical Explanation of Actions Reconsidered’, in Hook, Sidney (ed.), Philosophy and History, New York, 1963.Google Scholar

38 Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History, Oxford, 1946, pp. 222–3.Google Scholar

39 Fisher, H. A. L. (ed.), The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland Cambridge, 1911, vol. III, p. 303.Google Scholar