Restoring Politics to Political History

Abstract

If history ever was simply the study of past politics, it is no longer. Dissatisfied with narratives of Great Men, more interested in analyzing the impact of larger forces and in tracing out patterns of the lives of the masses of people, skeptical that a recounting of election campaigns and a counting of votes reveals much about social thought or action, strongly affected by currents of opinion which have long run deep in France, American historians have turned increasingly to social history. Others, perhaps those more comfortable with mathematics, have concentrated on economic history. Even most practitioners of the "new political history" have focused chiefly on the effect of social forces on politics or have used votes as a measure of society's opinions. Political history is in danger of becoming a mere branch of social history.

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