New directions in formalization and historical analysis

Abstract

In the early 1960s, historians and sociologists in American universities began a rather curious dialogue. Individuals from both disciplinary camps had begun making regular forays across the scholarly divide. The translation into English of Max Weber's work inspired a number of American sociologists (Reinhard Bendix, Barrington Moore, Neil Smelser, and Charles Tilly, for example) to begin raising historical questions, pursuing them through detailed empirical scholarship and bringing to bear the theoretical sensibilities and formal analytic techniques that characterized mainstream social science. At the same time many historians, among them Lee Benson, Stephen Thernstrom, Robert Fogel, and (at the University of Iowa) Allan Bogue, William Aydelotte, and Samuel Hayes had begun to make use of computer aided quantitative analysis and formal analytic approaches to address traditional historical disputes and also to raise new social scientifically informed questions.1