History Is Not a Science

The court historians, who insist that they have the only “correct” view of history, like to claim that theirs is the only true version of history because it is based on primary sources. But they fail to distinguish between what the primary sources state, and their own interpretation of the significance to be attached to those sources. Moreover, their selection of which historical sources are to be given paramount importance, and which may safely be ignored, is often selected to fit within their own preferred theory.

In understanding the War Between the States, we are given to understand that the writings of John C. Calhoun, Alexander Stephens, and Jefferson Davis are “biased,” and the truth is to be found in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln which are not biased at all. The only speech of Alexander Stephens we are to study is the so-called Cornerstone Speech—which is so named because we are to focus on the paragraph where he calls racial inequality the cornerstone of the Confederate constitution, and we are to ignore everything else he said about the Confederate constitution because that is not important. This is all presented as the “truth” based on a scientific—or at least science-like—study of the evidence by the trained experts. The implication is that you should no more dismiss the establishment view of history than you would dismiss the report of an engineer on the structural integrity of a bridge.

In his book Theory and History Ludwig von Mises skewered the sham “scientism” adopted by such historians, who depict their collectivist methodology, largely based on studying groups and group activity, as akin to the study of physics or chemistry. For example, the historian Samuel H. Beer in his essay “Political Science and History” argued that the social sciences and the study of history can yield principles that are universally true, based on descriptions across time and place. He called this “the doctrine of universality,” arguing that it can be used to derive theories explaining “the essential nature of law, science, and causal explanation.”

He was even “ready to accept as lawlike and explanatory propositions which do not hold in all contexts.” Part of the reason why social scientists prefer a collectivist approach to the study of history is that they seek, as far as possible, to imitate the methodology of the natural sciences by quantifying and measuring group activity, deriving general theories that would describe and explain the actions of specified groups of people and provide a foundation for making predictions of how people are likely to act in future. The actions of individuals are deemed to be irrelevant to this “study of mass phenomena.” As Mises explains,

While the study of individual traits is of no special interest to them, they hope study of the behavior of social aggregates will reveal information of a really scientific character. For these people the chief defect of the traditional methods of historical research is that they deal with individuals. They esteem statistics precisely because, as they think, it observes and records the behavior of social groups.

Mises argued that the methodology of the natural sciences cannot appropriately be applied to understanding human action, and that history cannot be fully understood without studying individuals. In Human Action, he explains the methodology of the historian as having two components, the first of which is based on examination of primary sources such as historical documents—the aim being to ascertain what the documents say or depict. On this component, any honest historian can be treated as reliable:

Those facts which can be established in an unquestionable way on the ground of the source material available must be established as the preliminary work of the historian. This is not a field for understanding. It is a task to be accomplished by the employment of the tools provided by all nonhistorical sciences. The phenomena are gathered by cautious critical observation of the records available.… What a historian asserts is either correct or contrary to fact, is either proved or disproved by the documents available, or vague because the sources do not provide us with sufficient information. The experts may disagree, but only on the ground of a reasonable interpretation of the evidence available.

On that point, the word of the court historians is no more or less reliable than that of anyone else examining the same documents armed with nothing more than ability to read and basic reading comprehension ability. Good old common sense. Problems arise in relation to the second component, which involves “application of the nonhistorical sciences to the subject matter of history.” Here historians will debate “the effects and the intensity of the effects brought about by an action…the relevance of each motive and each action.” They are not disagreeing about the evidence, but about the significance or implications of that evidence and how that evidence is to be deployed in an explanatory “theory” about history. The theories they derive about history, the narratives they spin and the stories they tell, are neither universal nor scientific. They cannot be “tested” like theories in the field of physics or chemistry, because “there necessarily enters into understanding an element of subjectivity. The understanding of the historian is always tinged with the marks of his personality. It reflects the mind of its author.”

At this level, historians are not disputing the veracity of the facts, but the importance or relevance to be attached to the selected facts, or the value judgments that went into their decision to highlight certain facts and brush others aside. Hence Mises argues that, “Historical understanding can never produce results which must be accepted by all men.” By contrast, scientific principles in the natural sciences are generally or universally true. When we describe gravity as scientific, we do not simply mean that most scientists “agree” with it, nor do we mean that it is a matter of opinion whether one regards gravity as significant or not.

In defending his argument that history can yield universal principles, Beer gave the example of the statement “all apples in basket b at time t are red” as one sense in which we may describe a statement as universal—he saw that as “universal in logical form” because it does not apply to just one apple in the basket or a few apples in the basket, but rather to all apples in the basket. But as Beer goes on to note, this is not, of course, what is meant by saying that scientific principles are universal. As Mises explains it, the principle that “man acts” is scientific and universal because to be human is to act. It does not merely mean that “all men in a specific place p at time t act.” A historian who sets out to describe all apples in a basket, or even all apples in multiple sets of baskets across time and location, is not involved in scientific endeavor, but is merely engaged in gathering the evidence. The evidence is not transformed into a universal scientific principle merely because it happens to apply to all the groups studied by that historian. Beer argued that this weakness—limitation to the particular time and place of the evidence actually studied—could be corrected by ensuring that the statement reflects what he calls “nomological universality”:

…to be a law, a statement must not only be universal in logical form, but also free of such local reference. Or to put the matter more positively, all predicates, it is said, must be “purely qualitative.”

Thus, he regards history as a “science,” or at least science-like, when, to use his example, he examines apples in baskets multiple times and places to derive principles that are generally true about apples. Thus, for example, if we derived a statement such as “there are red apples in different continents around the globe, and such apples are found to subsist across several different centuries” that would be “qualitative”—it describes apples without confining the observation to time and place, and “could be corroborated in a very wide variety of space-time contexts.” It is certainly true that the red apple is ubiquitous. But that is still a descriptive point concerning the available evidence. The fact that red apples are ubiquitous is interesting information and a potentially comforting thing to know—if you go on a global tour you can reasonably expect to be able to find apples wherever you are—but that does not make it a scientific principle comparable to Newton’s laws of motion.

Historians can certainly shed light on human nature by describing events that apply generally to groups of people, or mass phenomena, across time and place, what Beer called “the analytic and generalizing historian,” but this does not mean historical conclusions derived in that way are scientifically and objectively true. The evidence still requires to be put into the context of other explanatory factors. Observing human action at the level of groups obscures a wide range of human activity which does not fit within the group trait under observation. As the distinguished historian Clyde Wilson has argued, “History is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.”