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Click here to return to Bill Wood's Blog Pages. The following remarks were made by my late father who was educated as an historian. He was trained to question not categorize. These observations concerning political scientists and economists reveal his approach to knowledge. What follows is a small excerpt from a much longer interview I did with my father back in the spring of 1982 for a class I was taking during my last semester at Columbia Business School. Political scientists have a fundamentally different approach from that of an historian. Political science is Aristotelian and classificatory. A historian is, in the best sense, probably intuitive and he's inductive. The historian tries to find out what something is from examining it. Remember what biology was like before it got smart-- when it was Linnaeus? You described things by saying "That's a worm" or "That's a fish." If it's a fish, it belongs to this order and this species. In the same way, a political scientist will look at some country that's trying to get its independence and say, "That's a classic case of irredentism." It involved Trieste and Fiume. As far as I know, that was the only case of irredentism; that's where the word was coined-- it's an Italian word. Political scientists think if they name something, if they put a label on it, they've done something. Well, all they've done is name it. They haven't explained anything. I didn't understand this when I was working for Bill Reitzel-- kind of a neat old guy, personally I was very fond of him. I used to try to analyze things and make an argument for why something was. And he'd say, "Don't do that! You're being argumentative. Just make categorical statements." In other words, you're supposed to take flat out opinion and make it sound official. As an historian, I just couldn't do that. I developed my distrust for economists without ever having to deal with them. I read enough about them and by them to realize that I didn't trust them. If economics really were a technical science, for any given problem in economics there would be a solution with which a fairly substantial number of economists would agree. In fact, there don't seem to be any such problems. This makes me feel that it isn't that economists are stupid as individuals; it's that their discipline is stupid: that it doesn't exist. The trouble really started in the nineteenth century when political economy was split into political science and economics. Political economy makes a great deal of sense. Political economy realizes that the exercise of power and the production of goods and services are intermeshed. History's function is to explain how this worked in specific times and places. Once you start talking about universal rules of human behavior, it doesn't really matter what psychology you use, because I don't think even psychology transfers from one culture to another. Even Freduianism, I think, describes the behavior of somewhat distraught Jewish ladies in nineteenth century Vienna more than anything else. That doesn't mean Freudianism is totally wrong, but it certainly tells me that Freudianism does not translate wholesale to the Trobriand Islands, or even to Charlestown, Massachusetts. I don't think it does. I don't know how many lives have been ruined because practitioners thought that it did. I suspect that it's a very large number of lives indeed. |
