The view adopted here is that the study of politics is appropriately regarded not so much as a discipline with a distinctive method but more as a field of study which is amenable to various approaches .sx In the real world political activity connects with history , law , culture , society and so on .sx It is necessary to take these phenomena into account in any explanation of politics and to use other approaches , where they can be helpful .sx To argue for the usefulness of the historical approach does not involve a claim that it is the only or the best approach .sx This paper suggests that the contribution of history , as the systematic study of the past , to political science has been more as a body of knowledge than as a set of methods .sx The concepts and models of sociology and economics are more evident in contemporary political science methods .sx In considering the advantages of the study of history to political science the paper first explores the factors that led to tensions between the two .sx It then reviews some of the ways in which historical approaches have been constructively employed .sx Finally , it considers some areas which illustrate the fruitfulness of the relationship between history and political science .sx Political Science Versus History .sx More than most other fields - history certainly - politics has been preoccupied with its status as a science .sx As a field of academic study in the late nineteenth century , politics was closely related to history ; historians often doubled as authorities on politics and political institutions were often studied as evolving over time .sx This fashion was challenged in the US in the interwar years .sx The behaviouralists , inspired by Charles Merriam at the University of Chicago in the 1920s , sought to emulate the developments in other social sciences , particularly psychology .sx History was dropped , emphatically as a source of methods and partly as a body of knowledge .sx Being 'scientific' entailed the search for more observable and measurable data , hypothesis testing , model building and , eventually , predictability .sx There was , understandably , an emphasis on contemporary political behaviour .sx The early behaviouralists also hoped that the new political science would serve as a tool for encouraging practical problem - solving , civic education , and social and institutional reform .sx History appeared to have little to offer to the early behaviouralists .sx Another reason for encouraging divorce was that political science was striving to establish its status as a discipline in its own right .sx One can leave aside the naive view of science which lay behind the original behavioural thrust but acknowledge that the reformers were also fired by an understandable impatience with the chronological , descriptive and formal approach of much legal institutional work .sx There was an undoubted need for greater rigour in defining concepts and a need for collecting data .sx Much so-called political theory had degenerated into antiquarianism .sx Those of a more cautious bent warned that politics ran the risk of losing touch with history ( as well as with philosophy and law ) and becoming impoverished in the process .sx According to one scholar , who is at home in both fields , political science " abandoned the study and use of history until what began as a cognate field had become as distant as astrophysics " .sx More recently , Nevil Johnson , representing a typical strand of the British approach , has mourned the separation of political science and history .sx History , he claims , is now rarely used except as " dignified background " , as students have pursued a misconceived quest for science .sx I do not think that this is a fair assessment of British political science and at present it is probably less true of the work of Americans than at any time in the post-war period .sx In adopting so-called scientific approaches ( largely defined in terms of the behaviouralism in the US ) Britain and Western Europe lagged behind the US .sx As a university subject in Britain , politics was until the mid-twentieth century taught largely by historians and philosophers .sx As late as 1966 a third of the 400 or so university teachers of the subject had still taken a first degree in history , and in Germany and France the links with law were even more secure .sx In no West European country were the links of political science with sociology and psychology and its status as a social science as strong as in the US .sx The reaction to behaviouralism ( post-behaviouralism ) in the 1970s included calls for work to be relevant to practical problems , rejection of the extreme 'methodism' borrowed from the natural sciences and reaction against the uncritical acceptance of pluralist democratic values .sx The decline of scientism and doubts about how 'rational' and disinterested the research methods of the natural sciences actually were , undermined the scientific pretensions of the behaviouralists .sx The demand for the study of politics to be seen as part of the humanities has helped the revival of history and political theory .sx Types of History .sx There are , of course , different historical approaches .sx Many ( perhaps most ) historians would claim that their task is to advance understanding of past events and behaviour , primarily through study of original documents .sx Historians , according to J. H. Hexter , describe , narrate and deal " not with why-questions at all but what-questions ( and also , one might add , parenthetically who- , when- and where-questions ) " .sx Such history contributes to an understanding of particular events , rather than producing hard scientific statements of relationships between variables or law-like generalizations .sx For Ranke , if the historian was guided at all times by his sources then the truth would emerge from a serious study of all the documents .sx No room here for mass opinion surveys , conceptual frameworks , log-linear analysis or elite interviews !sx In fact , much history has gone beyond Ranke .sx The French Annales School reacted against what it regarded as an excessive interest in l'histoire e v e nementielle' , particularly political and constitutional history .sx In studying 'total history' and turning to social and economic factors , it embraced social science methods , stressed the influence of such durable forces as climate and geography .sx It studied 'forgotten' subjects like marriage , childhood or death .sx The 'macro' philosophies of history , with their universal theories of progress and decline , are perhaps the nearest to 'scientific' history .sx Such historians perceived phenomena being interconnected in a seamless web and history as unfolding in a particular direction .sx It was claimed that in the past certain principles of universal validity could be detected which enabled one to make predictions about the future .sx Popper's attack on historicism discredited such philosophies of history :sx An approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is achieved by discovering 'the rhythms' , or 'the patterns' , or 'the laws' , or 'the trends' that underline the revolution of history .sx sic !sx .sx Despite different conceptions of history , for present purposes we understand an historical approach to politics to be studies which systematically describe and analyse phenomena that have occurred in the past and which explain contemporary political phenomena with reference to past events .sx The emphasis is on explanation and understanding , not on formulating laws .sx By contrast , political science uses generic concepts to study patterns of relations , which are assumed to recur over time and across place , between , for example , institutions , groups , individuals , events and states .sx The distinction is not a sharp one .sx Some historians increasingly use generic concepts ( such as feudalism , totalitarianism , liberalism and fascism ) and the work of , for example , Michael Mann , Perry Anderson or Ferdinand Braudel , formulates propositions about the past .sx Much political science is concerned more with descriptions and analysis than developing 'laws' .sx But as a general statement the claim here is that there is a basic preoccupation with the particular in history and with the general in political science .sx Uses of History to Political Science .sx In the real world of scholarship , the distinction between the work of professional historians and political scientists often breaks down .sx Apart from specialists in history and in political science , there are political scientists who write history or draw on the work of historians ( for example , W. D. Burnham , Kenneth Wald , Sammy Finer and S. M. Lipset ) as well as historians who do political science ( such as Charles Tilly and Lee Benson) .sx The sheer amount of work which uses the past as a body of knowledge on which to ground theories about politics is impressive .sx Much of it can properly be termed interdisciplinary .sx The historical approach to the study of politics is many-sided .sx In an attempt to order the relevant material I have considered it under five headings :sx history as a source of material or data ; as an aid to understanding the links between the present and past ; as a body of knowledge within which to test theories and frameworks ; as a means of analysing political ideas and texts ; and as a source of lessons .sx History as Source of Material .sx All of the material used by political scientists is derived from the past , distant or immediate .sx We rely on historians to tell us about the causes , events and immediate effects of the French Revolution , of the 1832 Reform Act , of the 1914-18 war and so on , but we also rely on them to give meaning to the past .sx In so far as we have collective memories of the past , they are largely shaped by historians and attempts to impose patterns and typologies on political phenomena will rely on that work .sx I have in mind as examples Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism , Linz and Stephan's The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes , Huntingdon's Political Order in Changing Societies , Lipset's The First New Nation , or the works of Ian Kershaw on Nazi Germany .sx Few would doubt that such work shows significant gains from combining the approaches of political science and history , but the use of history does raise both methodological and substantive problems .sx One concerns the status of contemporary history , the other concerns the attempt to 'break' history into relevant and not so relevant periods .sx In Britain , simply because of the 30-year rule limiting access to government documents , one tends to think of contemporary history as covering events which have occurred within the last 30 years .sx Pending the release of official documents one makes do with biographies and memoirs of key participants , media coverage , or oral history .sx Historians can be dismissive of such sources , as they can be about newspaper accounts of politics .sx A more serious point is that the passage of time , apart from releasing more official documentation , also allows a perspective on the present to develop and for the longer-range outcomes of events to be perceived , the historicisation of experience as it were .sx Thus , if the Labour Party returns to office in the 1990s , then the 1980s and the years of Thatcherite hegemony may look very different from how they looked in 1989 .sx The return of 30 Labour MPs in 1906 looked more significant after 1918 than it did before .sx There may be different 'rational' approaches to contemporary history .sx In Germany , the term applies to history post-1914 .sx In France , whereas sic !sx the term was for long applied to all history since the outbreak of the French Revolution , there has - despite the 50-year rule - been a strong emphasis recently upon twentieth-century history .sx In the US , recent events are widely regarded as suitable for either history or political science .sx There is no 30-year rule to contend with and they have written many rigorous studies of post-1945 events and Presidencies .sx In Britain more historians object to contemporary history , but the objections are not confirmed to historians .sx Johnson has complained about " the fallacy of misplaced history " , in which the present " passing show " of actors and activities is described and analysed by political scientists without a full understanding of the outcome .sx We may , for example , study the premiership of Gladstone or Lloyd George but not that of Mrs Thatcher .sx We may study the decline of the Liberal Party between 1914 and 1931 but not that of the Labour Party in the 1980s .sx The events and practices concerning , say , Lloyd George , have been completed and settled , but this is not so for Mrs Thatcher .sx We should not study a topic " when the actor is still at work , nor even when the events or circumstances in which he or she played a part lie in the recent past , and therefore , project themselves into the present " .sx