Doing the New History

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History

Doing the New HistoryA Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis by Robert F. Berkhofer,; Quantitative History:Selected Readings in the Quantitative Analysis of Historical Data by Don Karl Rowney; JamesQ. Graham,; History as Social Science by David S. Landes; Charles TillyReview by: Asa BriggsThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Winter, 1973), pp. 555-558Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202554 .

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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 111:3 (Winter 1973), 555-558.

Asa Briggs

Doing the New History

A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis. By Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. (New York, The Free Press, 1969) 339 pp. n.p. Quantitative History: Selected Readings in the Quantitative Analysis of Historical Data. Edited by Don Karl Rowney and James Q. Graham, Jr. (Homewood, Ill., Dorsey Press, 1969) 488 pp. $5.95

History as Social Science. Edited by David S. Landes and Charles Tilly. (Prentice-Hall, 1971) 152 pp. $I.95

So much is happening to the state of history that the first two of these books are already dated. Rowney and Graham's collection of articles and papers remains valuable as an anthology for classroom and refer- ence purposes, but it is no longer comprehensive, even within its own carefully set limits. It has to be supplemented by many other books and articles, and by such useful publications as the Historical Methods Newsletter.

Yet Quantitative History has a double interest. First, it is one of the earliest examples of what will doubtless become a genre. It includes pieces by historians who have subsequently produced new and important work, such as Stephan Thernstrom. Second, it has an explicit classroom or workshop orientation, although this orientation is more popular in the United States than in Great Britain or Europe, where the discussion of the use of quantitative techniques does not yet figure in University curricula. Articles on quantitative techniques are deliber- ately excluded. The editors proclaim modestly that they are concerned only "to provide examples of the use of some of these techniques" (x). It is thus difficult to see how anyone could regard their approach as in any way controversial. It would have been helpful, however, if they had dealt more in their introduction with the framing of questions and hypotheses as a prelude to research design. They do not concern themselves directly with the quality of the questions or with the selection of the hypotheses.

The findings of the authors selected for inclusion in this work vary in historical interest, but some of them have already stimulated important

Asa Briggs is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex and the author of several books on Victorian history.



556 | ASA BRIGGS

debates. William 0. Aydelotte, a pioneer in this field, rightly points to the difficulties of establishing historical "categories" (groups defined in terms of particular characteristics), a matter of significance as quantitative studies proliferate. The vocabulary of social history, in particular, is inexact, and even words like "city" and "urban" invite study in

depth. "No amount of expertise in the manipulation of figures," Aydelotte remarks sensibly, "will make adequate correction for

imprecision in the original data or for categories that do not adequately measure what it is claimed they measure" (io). We need more historical

study of measurement itself to put some of the recent trends into

perspective. The claim that historians should be most concerned with establish-

ing perspectives has been made in the recent report of the History Panel of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Survey in History as Social Science. Their study reveals that about one-tenth of the historians in the sample questioned had undergraduate degrees in behavioral and social sciences other than history. Three-quarters of them said that at least one social science field was "particularly important" to their own field of historical

knowledge. These figures guarantee that we are dealing with a trend, not a fad. The Panel also found a correlation, although not a perfect one, between "outlook," i.e. views on the subjects of the Panel's enquiry, and age. It is revealing to compare their picture with that painted by Rowney and Graham in 1969:

Quantification is a movement lacking agreed-upon boundaries or

precise forms. As a movement it is diffuse, never having formulated a manifesto or a platform of grievances. Moreover, the quantifiers themselves do not constitute a "younger generation" of historians any more than they reflect a particular interest in a specific area or period of

history. Their common interest in analytic techniques and quantitative historical data may well be the only band of unity among so disparate a group. [viii] There is certainly some problem of categories here. When does a

"group" become a "movement"? What, indeed, is a "movement" in this context? Is the increased communication between some historians and some social scientists proving more fruitful-and, if so, in what

ways-than communication between historians themselves or between

groups of other social scientists, like economists and psychologists? There are signs in our time that some groups of social scientists are

feeling the need for history more than many historians are feeling the need for social science.



NEW HISTORY | 557

Berkhofer writes less as a member of a movement than as an indi- vidual scholar, open-minded in outlook, and strongly influenced by a wide and varied reading in several social sciences. He believes that "dis- putes over systems analysis, functionalism, dynamic versus static analysis, consensus versus conflict models of society . .. have not even found their way into historical circles" (I), an enthusiast's feeling that is not entirely borne out either by the History Panel's report or by the pages of the Historical Methods Newsletter.

The main effect of Berkhofer's book is to demonstrate his tolerance when confronted with contradictory answers to great issues and his willingness to pick up ideas from anywhere. On quantification, however, which is not in his index, he is less than enthusiastic. Although, in his view, techniques of quantification must be substituted for "impres- sionistic surveys" whenever possible, "quantification is no substitute for a carefully thought-out set of questions"; "counting far too often replaces cerebration in the recent adoption of social science fads [a curious noun for him to use] by historians" (3 I5). Berkhofer feels most at home with the "culture concept" (in fact, with a whole range of con- cepts related to the word "culture" and seeking to establish the idea of a unified field of historical enquiry) and with possible interdisciplinary exploration with anthropologists and social psychologists. By contrast, he seems least at home with mathematicians and systems analysts. Yet his last few pages show that he has not entirely established his own intellectual position. In his conclusion he invites us to turn not to social science, but to contemporary art for our ultimate model:

If Clio had sat for her portrait in the middle of the nineteenth century, she would have been painted as a romantic but nevertheless simple three-dimensional maiden in the manner of Bouguereau or, better, Ingres. Today we would commission, at the least, Picasso for her picture. [320]

If he had given his book a frontispiece, he goes on, it would have been Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror. It is very difficult to see just how this conclusion is related to the rest of the book, except through his sense of the "complexity" of history. Certainly, many of the particular social scientists whom he quotes would neither understand this conclusion nor, if they understood it, sympathize with it.

There is another difficulty in these pages. Berkhofer repeatedly illustrates his arguments with examples. Sometimes it is possible to think of better ones, for his knowledge of English or French history and



558 | ASA BRIGGS

English and French historians, for example, is sketchy. Also, more is being done in some fields than he suggests-such as in historical semantics. This does not detract fromn the value of the book for those readers who have interdisciplinary interests of their own. What is harmful about this presentation, however, is that Berkhofer illustrates usually without criticizing. Some of his illustrations are examples of how not to proceed; others are original sorties into unexplored ter- ritories. All are treated more or less as equals.

There are also some notable omissions in this work. Among the people who are not mentioned are J. H. Hexter, whose article on "the rhetoric of history" in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences ([N.Y., I968], VI, 368-394) should be read in conjunction with this book. Berkhofer is weak, too, on the Marxist contributions, on the work of the Annales team in France, and on the Past and Present contrib- utors in Britain. Finally, his language sometimes seems at odds with his message. What of the word "revamp" in the sentence "an appre- ciation of culture can revamp the historian's conception of the role of ideas in men's lives" (146)? Surely "revamping" is a menace and can only justify the fears of those historians who do not like the social sciences and claim that social science history merely means dressing up real history in jargon which helps nobody.

No criticisms can undermine the interest of A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis, however, for it deals intelligently with issues that should be more familiar to historians than they often are, but which are now capturing the sometimes inordinate attention of the minority to which the History Panel referred. It would be revealing to see how the ideas behind this book could be given a similar classroom or workshop orientation to that which we can find in Rowney and Graham. Berkhofer obviously produced his book in a study or a library, although he refers to a History Department Colloquium at Minneapolis, where some of the themes were discussed. They are so far reaching that it would need not a movement but continuing colloquia of the most open kind effectively to push the study further.



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Doing the New History