ABSTRACT
During the fall of 2016, one of the editors of this anthology, a historian, dined with two social scientists. Their conversation proceeded pleasantly enough until one of the social scientists asked, provocatively: Why would anyone read works by historians who produced “unsophisticated” narratives that almost always lacked basic quantitative analysis. The historian responded by asking who actually understood the jargon of social scientific articles that more often than not overlooked the complexities of historical causation. “How could anyone take the assumptions like parsimony or the ‘rational actor’ theory seriously,” the historian quipped, “when they produce theories that usually collapse under the weight of close historical scrutiny and prove so bad at predicting the future?” “Come on,” the social scientists responded, “historians use the inevitable limits of theory building to hide their ignorance of quantitative methods and other kinds of ‘sophisticated’ analysis. Please tell us: What have historians written that will actually help people make this world a better place?”
