Perspectives in Policy History

The Perils of Particularism: Political History After Hartz

John Gerring

A sea-change has occurred in political historywriting since the 1950s. Gone, for the most part, are many of the broad, sweeping generalizations that used to characterize this field. The terms employed in such endeavors--the American Mind, the American Way of Life, American Civilization, the American Spirit (all titles of books published in the mid-twentieth century)--seem anachronistic, if not downright ridiculous, today. Whatever it is that defines the values and direction of American politics, this set of cultural markers seems a good deal more elusive today than it did to scholars like Louis Hartz, Daniel Boorstin, and Richard Hofstadter in the postwar era. In the place of studies of America, the disciplines of history, political science, and sociology have turned to careful, highly focused studies of particular eras, areas, and groups. National character is out, local cultures are in. The venerable nation-state is out, replaced by regions, states, cities, or even smaller territorial and nonterritorial units. As Thomas Bender noted recently:

For some time the field of American history has been divided into embarrassingly short time periods as well as into the subfields of political, economic, intellectual, and social history. But even more ominous is the rise in recent years of a new kind of division within social history. Specialization now focuses on social groups within society. These subfields, because they represent real populations in the American past, are easily assumed collectively--and in a simplistically cumulative manner--to constitute American history. So we have the history of women, blacks, labor, immigrants, and so on as special fields of study. Each is studied in its own terms, each with its own scholarly network and discourse. ¹ [End Page 313]

This movement--broadly stated, from synthesis to particularism--might also be considered as part of a more general intellectual movement within the humanities and the social sciences. There is no question that the embrace of the particular constitutes a methodological/epistemological reorientation of some considerable dimension. I shall concern myself here only with the study of American political history, but it is probably worth considering these questions within broader rubrics as well.

By particularism, then, I mean two things: first, narrowly defined topics, and second, an approach to the task of explanation that focuses on explaining the event in question rather than on building conceptual and theoretical tools that might explain a larger range of cases. Of course, theory has not been entirely ignored; surely there are at least as many theoretical frameworks circulating among historywriters today as there were several decades ago. But these theories tend to be all-encompassing, and poorly specified. They float hazily above the surface of the text, and writers demonstrate little attention to the development of generalizable causal propositions.

What I am advocating, then, in opposition to what I have labeled "particularism," is not science per se but rather theory, of the middle-range sort that Robert Merton identified many years ago. ² Indeed, many of those writers I wish to criticize are irreproachably scientific (in the sense of using operational concepts and quantifiable indicators) in their approach to the study of history. (By the same token, the best exemplars of middle-range theory are often historians who never employed so much as a pocket calculator.) This essay, rather, attempts to come to grips with what has been lost since historical writing began to eschew epic scale and causal analysis as modes of apprehending the past. My argument, perhaps already apparent, is that the move toward particularism within the field of political history has involved a set of costs that has not been fully acknowledged or appreciated.

As my primary foil, I shall use Joyce Appleby's 1992 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians. ³ Appleby, as many readers will recognize, is an odd choice for this task since her own work is hardly particularistic. However, this address represents a rare attempt to articulate in a relatively concise fashion the practices and perspectives of historywriting in the post-1950s world. As a state-of-the-discipline piece, it offers an excellent synopsis of a nonsynopsizing genre. Perhaps it could have been written only by someone whose work is considerably at variance--methodologically speaking--with the mode it celebrates.

The most common criticism of little-picture analysis hones in on the obvious point: synthesis is sacrificed for detail, the forest for the trees. To this the particularists may logically respond: there is no single, unified forest, but only clumps of trees, here and there. Thus stated, the debate seems [End Page 314] purely empirical. One has only to examine the historical record to see whether or not society-wide patterns or consistent secular trends through time can be discerned. I suspect, however, that this historiographic debate is not resolvable by an appeal to facts, for the facts themselves can be ordered in too many ways.

Even so, the particularist may argue, the more focused the study, the less risk there is of committing violence against the historical record. Presumably, a historian who spends the better part of his or her life engrossed in a specific locale or period will be less prone to error than someone who roams blithely across time and space. Perhaps. But here one must call attention to two types of distortion. The first and most obvious occurs when a generalization conflates several things that are rather different in type in order to achieve wholeness. Five pine trees are grouped with a birch and an oak and denoted "pines." This is the sort of reductionism that the post-fifties generation is keen to avoid. There is another sort of distortion, however, that occurs where a narrowly focused study ignores similarities over time or across political-social units. The metaphor in this case, would be a tree (the object of study) that cannot be identified, or is improperly identified, because its similarity to other trees in the vicinity--or in the distance--are ignored. Evidently, mistaking the particular for the general is just as costly as mistaking the general for the particular. In short, a tight-focus style of analysis does not necessarily get one any closer to the Truth; it simply involves a different error bias.

Of course, a good case study also looks at connections to the world surrounding the object of study, in hopes of identifying all possible contexts for that object. Contextualization has been embraced enthusiastically by historians of the particularistic school. This sort of generalization, however, examines the surrounding forest for what it can reveal about the tree in question. One is not really "generalizing" at all, but rather classifying and describing (thickly). Fine, the particularist will maintain, the purpose of the work of history is to illuminate the particular nature of the tree in question, not to create "laws" of trees or topological maps of the forest. The obvious conclusion at this point in the debate is that the generalist and the particularist have fundamentally different objectives--the one brings "history" to bear in order to shed light on his or her particular subject; the other sees in every particular subject a "case study" that might be brought to bear on the general problems of history. The ideograph and the nomothet seemingly share little common ground. Their projects are antithetical. One splits; the other lumps.

I do not think matters are quite so simple. I do not think, more specifically, that most particularists have really renounced the project of historical [End Page 315] synthesis. (It goes without saying that generalists have not given up on getting the record straight.) Consider, for example, Appleby's address, in which she sketches her vision of a "multicultural" history:

Perhaps we can think of multiculturalism as an invitation to look at what has always been there--a cluttered slate of interdependent and highly diverse people shaped by the consequences of five centuries of interaction in the New World. E pluribus unum is an ideal; it is not a description of American life in any period. Free of that restricting ideological imperative, we can now set out to recover the historic diversity in our past. ⁴

The essay argues, on one level, that if historians can puncture the veneer of American exceptionalism--the tale of American history as told by Hartz, Boorstin, et al.--then a world of diversity will reveal itself, "a cluttered slate of interdependent and highly diverse people," little unum and much pluribus. American history is about this, that, and the other.

But mostly it is about the Other. In the exceptionalist account, which first took hold in the 1790s and which, in some form, endures to the present day, "There is no hint of the daily, perfunctory brutality of a slave institution that incorporated mandatory physical abuse of men, women, and children . . . nor . . . of the systematic ejection and extermination of the indigenous population." ⁵ At last, however, after decades of painstaking research by social and cultural historians,

we could see a system--or more ominously, the system--categorizing the worth of individuals, controlling access to opportunity, distributing the nation's cultural and economic goods. Social history lifted from obscurity those who had been left behind, excluded, disinherited from the American heritage. It also demonstrated how the functioning of impersonal systems influenced personal lives and challenged the plausibility of human uniformity, a clean slate, and the autonomous individual. ⁶

What I am suggesting is that Appleby, in common with many other historians of the present era, wish to have it both ways. They wish to create specific, nontotalizing narratives that explore the alteriority and diversity of the past and they wish to make general pronouncements about American politics and history (albeit couched in particular persons and situations).

Similarly, current criticism of the old school--American exceptionalism, consensus history, the liberal tradition, and so forth--has not occurred in a [End Page 316] vacuum. There are specific features of the grand old narratives that seem, well, just plain wrong. In other words, having toppled the House of History, these writers do not simply revel in the ruins; they also seek to erect other structures in its place. Instead of stories about white, protestant, male elites, historians now produce stories about women, minorities, and the underclass (variously defined). A new set of categories--race, class, ethnicity, and gender--has superseded the old. History from above has been discarded in favor of history from below. (Of course, class was examined by many of the earlier historians, but in quite different ways--as the product of institutions rather than as an immediate social and cultural experience.) Now the question becomes, Is this new set of categories less totalizing (reductionist, fact-denying) than the old?

This is a hard call. One might maintain that multiple categories (three or four) are more pluralistic than a single category. But this overlooks the fact that there are actually many versions of American exceptionalism, and even of the liberal tradition. Indeed, a catalogue of all the various explanations for the absence of socialism and the backwardness of the American welfare state would fill a small library. There is, perhaps, as much diversity of narrative in this tale as in tales constructed around the multicultural categories. To be sure, the multiculturalists--collectively--take in a broader swath of humankind, and this is certainly a worthy enterprise.

But this is not a matter that can easily be quantified, and hence resolved; I raise it only to get to a more important point. The strife between new-style and old-style historians is not, I think, primarily about epistemological issues at all; it is rather about what, for lack of a better name, I shall call substance. Multiculturalists disagree with the Fifties generation (and previous generations as well) about the nature of the past. The difficulty, however, is that many in the current generation of historians--not all, to be sure--have been rather disingenuous about their particular project of historical reconstruction.

"Concepts and theories," Appleby notes "deliberately obscure the multiplicity of details in real situations in order to highlight significant relationships. But this involves deciding in advance which human lives and whose social enactments will be counted as significant. And this is an act of authority, not research design." ⁷ Precisely. And multiculturalists (Appleby's term) are little different in this regard than previous generations. Having freed themselves from one imperative (exceptionalism), post-Fifties historians are not traveling randomly through space and time in search of history, as Appleby's essay at various points implies. If the last several decades of historiographic and methodological research have taught us anything, it is that the past cannot be apprehended in the raw. [End Page 317]

No doubt it will seem to the reader that I am engaging in a substantive debate of my own. In fact, I am in sympathy with most of the substantive claims of the multiculturalist historians. With Appleby, I would agree that the liberal tradition has been interpreted far too broadly, that its forceful role in socializing Americans often has been overlooked, that its part in American history has been reified--as if Americans arrived not only equal (which they weren't) but also Hartzians (which they decidedly weren't). So I would prefer to be considered on the right side (which is to say the Left side) of this debate. But I do not think it advances either the cause of history or the cause of justice to masquerade substantive arguments as formal ones. The fight over the past remains as real as ever, and if we are to fight that battle well, we shall need to employ the implements developed by social science over the past several centuries. This includes--though is not limited to--(a) theories that are relatively parsimonious, (b) writing that is clear and to the point, and (c) generalizations that cover more than a single decade or a single demographic category.

It is worth recalling that a century ago the writing of history was considered synonymous with the chronicling of facts. Henry Adams, George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, James Ford Rhodes, Theodore Roosevelt, and most other American historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries assembled enormous multivolume studies of who did what, where, and to whom (actually written, usually, by a workshop of amanuenses). In the hands of the founding generation of American scholars, writing history was virtually indistinguishable from accurate record-keeping. The arrival of the Progressive historians at the turn of the century was revolutionary, therefore, not simply because of what they were saying about the nature of American politics and history, but also because of how they were saying it. The "Turner thesis" was roughly twenty-five pages long. More important, it was a thesis.

Of course, the chroniclers also had a thesis, or at least a set of orienting assumptions. But it is a difficult thesis to locate. One must devote considerable time to the writings of Adams, Bancroft, Rhodes, and company before a central idea becomes apparent. Only very occasionally did these historians let slip a general (explanatory or descriptive) statement. Often such "theorizing" would occur in an interior chapter rather than in the introduction or conclusion. Indeed, such books did not have introductions and conclusions in the way that we think of such chapters today. In other words, the argument of the chroniclers--obvious though it may be to present-day readers--remained implicit. (Perhaps, one imagines, if these arguments--e.g., of Anglo-Saxon superiority--had been forced into the open sooner, historians would have become more self-conscious about their role as apologists for American [End Page 318] conquest. Consciousness, from both marxist and freudian perspectives, is the first step toward critique.)

Contemporary historians, of course, would not debate the notion that every writer has a point of view; they do not affect to be writing "objective" history. Yet by refusing to formulate their arguments clearly and explicitly, and in a form that, if not falsifiable, might at least be challenged, they are falling into a habit that is at best simply disingenuous and at worst, destructive to the search for a meaningful past.

It may be well to point out that the hypothesis of a fragmented ("diverse") past is itself a generalization of quite large proportions. What, precisely, does diversity mean? What would a homogenous society, culture, and politics look like? Are there such things? (Note that historians have been discovering the same diversity in the presumably more homogeneous countries of Europe.) These are all questions that demand a synthetic response, not merely an accumulation of period pieces. A similar quandary arises when one invokes the idea of oppression (racial, class, gender, or whatever). What are the meaningful variations across time and across national units? ⁸ What might explain this verdict?

Broad scope--temporal and/or comparative--is therefore necessary not just to identify causal factors (the "comparative method") but also, more fundamentally, for purposes of description. What is a term like "deference" to mean in the United States if it cannot be placed within the context of deferential patterns in England and on the continent? What is "liberalism" to mean if we cannot identify and describe nonliberal polities? The very terms that we use to describe our past invoke comparative dimensions that are seldom systematically explored. A particularist approach to historywriting may have the ironic effect of further entrenching the exceptionalist schema, or giving birth to a host of mini-exceptionalisms. (How else, really, can the refusal to generalize be interpreted except as a statement of incommensurability?)

Once it is accepted that historians have a positive agenda, rather than a merely reactive one (cataloguing the failures of the previous generation), it is incumbent upon this generation to provide us with a full accounting--which is to say a comprehensive and crossnational accounting--of how that agenda rearranges the facts of the past. It is not enough merely to describe, for the accumulation of anecdote is confusing, and ultimately perhaps, inconclusive. Anecdotes of patriotism gone amuck can always be countered by anecdotes of patriotism in its finest hours. For surely it had some fine hours.

There will be no end to this tit-for-tat unless members of the present generation can take up the cudgel of theory a bit more effectively. The reason that Louis Hartz still lingers in the corridors of American History writing [End Page 319] is that no synthetic statement about the American past has yet been formulated with power and sweep to match The Liberal Tradition in America. Dead theories are not beaten to death; if they expire at all, it is because they are eventually ignored and forgotten. Who reads Beard today? The Progressives are consulted--and then only parenthetically--by those writing literature reviews and those looking for straw-man arguments to knock down. This is the condition of paradigmatic death. It is certainly not the condition of Louis Hartz. The new post-Hartz day will not dawn for having been proclaimed. It will dawn when and if a new theory arrives that can successfully displace the old. Thus far, there have been few takers. This, I think, is largely because it is not the accepted style of contemporary historywriting to do so. It should be no surprise, therefore, if the current recriminations and lamentations continue. The more he is beaten, the more life dear old Hartz seems to have in him. ⁹

To be sure, as I noted at the outset, contemporary historywriters are not bereft of theory. But it is Theory, not middle-range theory, that seems to excite this generation of writers. Its purpose often seems more for social critique than for explaining historical outcomes. Again, the case of Hartz is illustrative. Analysts have been keen to point out the role of racism, class oppression, sexism, core-periphery relationships, the state, and capitalism in American history. None of these categories, however, allows us to explain anything about the different historical route that the United States seems to have taken (and that Hartz directly addressed), for these theories are universal in scope. There is not much that you cannot explain with them. Ironically, particularists risk falling into exactly the kind of reifying and essentializing work they deplore, and it is because boundless concepts are, inevitably, ubiquitous. Useful academic work of any kind, I am tempted to say, explores variation, either over time or across space; it does not endlessly accumulate examples of the same thing happening over and over. Once an apple has fallen, and its velocity measured and accounted for, there is little sense in shaking down the orchard.

One further possibility deserves to be treated. Perhaps Hartz survives because he was right. Are we--the current generation of writers--seeking to overthrow the old theory simply because it is old, and continually failing because it happens to offer the best arrangement of the facts? This may well be the case. My point, of course, is that in order to discover whether or not Hartz is right--or to what extent he is right--demands a comprehensive, and probably comparative, approach to historywriting, not more case studies. The "facts," if you will, are present; it is our task to arrange them in the most plausible order.

We shall probably never recapture the exuberance or the hubris of previous generations of writers, from Tocqueville and Bryce to Hartz and [End Page 320] Hofstadter, who sought to account for the totality of the American political experience with a few conceptual and theoretic levers. This is perhaps a good thing. Several decades of self-criticism have engendered a healthy skepticism of our own enterprise. However, it will not do to withdraw into a solipsistic contemplation of details. This is not useful for the discipline, and perhaps accounts for some of its current malaise--and certainly for some of its disconnection with contemporary life and contemporary politics outside the academy. In any case, as is perhaps clear by now, the discipline has been anything but disengaged in recent years. What is necessary at the current juncture is that we put this engagement into more usable--and, perhaps, familiar--forms. In short, there is lots of work to do, and it is not the sort of fine-toothed sifting of the grains of history that has preoccupied most writers in the current generation. It is, to put a label on it, "middle-theoretical."

Boston University

John Gerring, an assistant professor at Boston University, has recently completed Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and has written articles for JPH, Party Politics, Polity, Social Science History, and Studies in American Political Development. He is currently at work on a book on social science methodology.

Notes

1. Thomas Bender, "Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History," Journal of American History 73 (June 1986): 128. I am, needless to say, indebted to Bender's insightful piece. I am skeptical, however, about whether the notion of a "public culture" offers a way out of this problem of balkanization. In any case, Bender's concern is with the discipline of history as a whole, while mine is on the subfield of political history (including the work of historically-oriented political scientists). This may explain my greater reliance on theory rather than culture.

2. See Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York, 1957), 5-10.

3. Joyce Appleby, "Recovering America's Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism," Journal of American History 79 (September 1992).

4. Ibid., 431.

5. Ibid., 421.

6. Ibid., 428.

7. Ibid., 429-30.

8. There are, of course, some wonderful crossnational studies organized around these conceptual categories, so I do not mean to suggest that this approach has been utterly neglected. See, for example, C. Vann Woodward, ed., The Comparative Approach to American History (New York, 1968); Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, N.J., 1986). For a review of recent excursions into foreign territory, see George M. Fredrickson, "From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-national Comparative History," Journal of American History 82 (September 1995).

9. One notable exception is Rogers Smith, "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America," American Political Science Review 87 (September 1993): 549-66. More surprising than the absence of a new Hartz is the general absence of synthetic statements on favored issues like race, ethnicity, class, and gender. There are a few, to be sure, but they are somehow not as impressive as the previous generations' output--for example, Gunnar Myrdal on race, Oscar Handlin, John Higham, and Stephen Thernstrom on ethnicity, and Seymour Martin Lipset on class. Gender is perhaps the only category in which the newer generation has unambiguously taken the field.