We seem, as social science historians, to have become increasingly interested in the way that we present our evidence or tell our story or narrative. Donald McCloskey’s address last year cajoled us, or perhaps exhorted us, not to separate the scientific from the humanistic approach to writing history. As he pointed out, metaphor even creeps into economics, which is, by its earliest accounts, a dismal science. Metaphor influences the way one argues even with numbers (McCloskey 1990). I share his interest in rhetoric and add an interest in narrative.

A central concern of both sociological theory and historical inquiry involves the relationships between structure and function. The two foremost grand theories of the past 100 years, structural functionalism and Marxism, posit opposing answers to the question of whether structure determines function, or vice versa. Contemporary studies in fields as diverse as urban politics and organizational sociology continue to draw inspiration from this conundrum, since the “answer” has such profound implications for understanding the driving forces within society and history.

The present article follows in this tradition. An examination of the history of capital finance within transportation is used to elucidate the direction of causality in relationships between structural arrangements, such as the amount and kinds of debt used for capital investment, and functional outcomes, such as growth in new kinds of transportation services.

In this issue of Social Science History we begin a special series of articles surveying the impact and use of historical research and reasoning in the other social sciences—anthropology, economics, geography, political science, and sociology. The authors of the essays have been asked to analyze their disciplines so that readers will get a sense both of major issues and research directions and of influences. In addition, they have been asked to include in their references older important works as well as more recent ones, so that those in other disciplines may use the essays as bibliographic sources. After the series is completed, we expect to publish an expanded version of it as a separate book.

One might have predicted that “as sociology meets history” (Tilly 1981), there would arise a demand for synthesis, for a history-as-social-science that would combine the best of both disciplines. A few voices, chief among them the late Philip Abrams (1982), issued that call. But the synthesis has not arrived. Today the relation between history and sociology is that of parents from differing backgrounds whose adolescent children have contracted a friendship at school. There is a pleasant but empty cordiality between the elders. Although the adolescents have an acrimonious rivalry, they close ranks against parental orthodoxies of either sort. One hopes that the young people will cooperatively transform the social attitudes of their parents, but unthinking loyalties ultimately prevent this transformation. So the synthesis of history and sociology, or more broadly of history and social science, has not arrived. Today, the most synthetic call we hear is for each (sub)discipline to keep the other honest (e.g., Roy 1987b).

In a well-known paper published some years ago Donald McCloskey (1976) addressed his fellow economists on the importance of history to their discipline. He argued that greater emphasis on economic history would make for better economics and for better economists. It cannot be said that McCloskey’s arguments were taken to heart. The tendency for economists to expend their effort on (and award their honors for) the refinement of mathematical models and statistical techniques has continued unabated and perhaps has increased. This has led many scholars in related disciplines, social science historians in particular, to believe that economists are uninterested in history and unreceptive to arguments based on historical evidence.

In 1986, 585 out of 5,686 members of the Association of American Geographers declared their allegiance to the Historical Geography Specialty Group; among 50 AAG specialty groups, the historical geographers ranked 7th. Yet one prominent human geographer regards historical geography as “overdetermined,” an “empty concept” conveying “few (if any) significant analytical distinctions” (Dear 1988: 270). Dear’s argument is that, by definition, all geography should be historical, since “the central object in human geography is to understand the simultaneity of time and space in structuring social process.” So the only subdisciplines of human geography which have any intellectual coherence are those focused on distinct processes—political, economic, social. To me, even this distinction is unrealistic and impracticable for research purposes. But Dear does not go so far as to argue that historical geography or other “overdetermined,” “multidimensional,” or “peripheral” subdisciplines are wrong, merely that they are incidental to geography’s “intellectual identity.”