![]() ![]() There are real and enduring epistemological and methodological differences that divide the two groups, and there is great value in recognising, maintaining and honouring these distinctions. Political scientists are not historians, nor should they be. ![]() Later in the book, the authors make this distinction even more starkly (Elman and Elman, 2001: 35), By contrast, for the historian, the goal of theory building and testing is secondary – the past interests for itself. Although political scientists might turn to the distant past, the study of ‘deep’ history is relevant to their research objectives only insofar as it enables them to generate, test or refine theory. Political scientists are more likely to look to the past as a way of supporting or discrediting theoretical hypothesis, while historians are more likely to be interested in past international events for their own sake. ![]() The issue is revealed in a passage from one of the best known of these texts (Elman and Elman, 2001: 7): ![]() However, there is a tension that remains unresolved in the relationship between history and IR, one which is long-standing and which reappears with regularity, even in those texts that explicitly bestride the IR-history frontier. History has been employed, albeit unevenly, throughout the discipline (Hobson and Lawson, 2008 Lawson 2012). Rather, history became part of a broader tug of war between approaches that retained history as their central locomotive and IR’s laboriticians, who saw history as providing the main ammunition for their experiments. Although seemingly banished to the margins of the discipline by the rise of neo-positivism, history never really went away as an important feature of IR’s toolkit. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, Martin Wight and Stanley Hoffman employed history as a means of illuminating their research. On both sides of the Atlantic, leading figures in the discipline such as E.H. In some respects, history has always been a core feature of the international imagination. Like most long-running interdisciplinary relationships, the liaison between International Relations (IR) and history has taken many turns. ![]()
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