Excerpt

This article responds to those who think that a science of history is in principle impossible. First, I tackle the issue of prediction and point out that it is not limited to forecasting the future. Scientific prediction is also (and much more usefully) employed in empirical tests of scientific theories. Next, I switch from conceptual to empirical issues, and review evidence for general empirical regularities. I also discuss some recent examples of using scientific prediction in testing theories about historical dynamics. I conclude by pointing out that we now have the right quantitative tools and, even more important, a growing corpus of historical data for testing theories. An analytical, predictive history, or cliodynamics, is eminently possible.

Introduction

Philosophers have long debated whether history can be a science in the same sense that physics and biology are sciences. At the heart of the debate are two opposing views of history. Nineteenth century thinkers, such as Leo Tolstoy and Carl von Clausewitz (see Gaddis, this volume, Chapter 3), believed that historical process was governed by some kind of general laws. Many French and English historians of the nineteenth century viewed history as a science [42]. Twentieth-century historians such as Toynbee [31] proposed grand schemes to account for the rise, the flowering, and the decline of civilizations. A less ambitious (but in the long run more influential) effort by McNeill [17] is another example of an attempt to discern patterns in history. 

During the second half of the twentieth century, however, the general opinion among philosophers and historians swung against the possibility of scientific history. For example, Karl Popper [18] argued that there is a qualitative difference between history and natural sciences. Historical processes are too complex and different in nature from physical or biological processes. Most tellingly, people have free will, while atoms do not. 

Among the historians, research paradigms that modeled themselves on natural sciences were still popular in the 1960s and 1970s [43]. Perhaps the most influential of such research programs was the French Annales school of history. During these decades the new economic history, or cliometrics, briefly flowered in the United States [44]. However, in the 1980s historians repudiated these approaches. As one reviewer of an early version of this article wrote, “cliometrics went under by the early 1990s; our own quantitative historian was denied tenure in approximately 1996 (by that point, no one really cared about the subject or its application in history).” Instead history experienced its “linguistic turn” or “cultural turn” [44, 45].

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