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Title: Empiricism and History (Theory and History) by Stephen Davies ISBN: 0-333-96470-5 Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: First Rate! And a needed corrective...
Comment: Stephen Davies has written the essential primer to the methodological wars among historians that crested in the 1990s. While other fields of social science (economics and political science especially), have gone their merrily productive ways, the rotgut of epistemological relativism within the humanities that affected English literature and other fields continues to roil historians. What is the student to do? Consult Davies' well-considered slender volume first.

Davies guides the doomed and eager between the sirens and shoals of recent and classic literature. The evolution of the discipline from 18th and 19th century sources is admirably surveyed the in the first two chapters. The third examines the most classical definition of history: biography. Not that he restricts himself to Herodotus or Plutarch's Lives; far from it! Rather, he concerns himself with Carlyle, Gooch, and recent thinkers such as E. H. Carr whose notions run smack into this populist genre and define "history" to most people. The problem of Hitler and the Holocaust is a case example for the virtues and limitations of the method. Next, Davies examines institutional history, the rise and fall of Whig history - a perfect base, given its revival in recent Nobel winning economics, from which to defend empirical history. In fact, his grasp of economic thinkers exceeds that of all but 99% of all historians. Inverting the commonest of contemporary perceptions, he quotes Schumpeter to the effect that even economics owes more to history than it does to statistics or theory. From here, he discusses traditional political history, asking if it really is the master narrative traditionalists have made it out to be. Then he surveys the rise of economic history and the problematic field of the history of ideas. The new social history is both only very briefly treated, yet also forms the larger background of theoretical debate recounted here: advocates of anthropological and Marxist history had better go elsewhere if they want to be taken genuflectively.

The usefulness of this book is aided by perceptive albeit light footnoting. People who need further guidance will find it in the annotated bibliography for every chapter. Here, the technical terms bolded in the text and listed in the glossary are buttressed by pointers and a list of the highly pertinent literature.

All this munificence, especially his perspicacious ruminations upon English history, is marred by his neglect of the core issues from which the entire contretemps issues and how it could be staunched. I suspect the author subscribes to Keith Windshuttle's unfortunate appropriation of David Stove's misapprobations of Karl Popper and his school, (something Rafe Champion has done much to undo elsewhere online). This I infer simply from his otherwise thorough knowledge of David Hume.

Nowhere are Hume's - and before him Empiricus' - epistemologically skeptical arguments against induction, ones that gave rise to the postmodern-turn in the first place, ever confronted. Instead, he simply points to others' defense of historical induction and leaves it at that. If Davies knew and understood W. W. Bartley and I. C. Jarvie's arguments that Popper actually solved the problem of induction, then these recent debates are cut-down fully on the battlefield of argument. Therefore, the recent postmodern-turn was fully unnecessary, as was the infection of history with the virus of epistemological relativism.

But perhaps a follow-up volume will meet such impressive intellectual shortcuts that restore us to the post-hoc ante. Davies' primer reminds us that such defenses used to be unnecessary because no one was so foolish as to think otherwise. Now we know better. In the meantime, we are the happy beneficiaries of this timely and invaluable vade mecum putting historians back on the road there.