History and Social Causation

R. M. MacIver

The Journal of Economic History, 1943, vol. 3, issue S1, 135-145

Abstract: Historians are not so prone as their brethren of the social studies to lengthy disputation concerning the function, the objective, the method, the locus and the limit of their subject. They tell us freely enough and often enough and variably enough what history is and does, but they seldom justify their pronouncements by elaborate argument. They rarely seek to place the other social disciplines in relation to their own. Not uncommonly their own proceeds as though these others did not exist or as though they existed on another level of communication altogether. History takes so free an amplitude that these others become angles of incidence to its main highroad. It is presumptively concerned with the concrete reality, the wholeness of things, while these others attach to abstractions such as law and government and economics and morals. The other social disciplines vex themselves with the ambition to be entitled sciences and cast aspiring and emulous eyes on the physicist and the mathematician, but history loses no sleep over such aspirations—untroubled by the inferiority complex of its associates it is even ready to reject the title of science when offered.

Date: 1943
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