Atelier PACTE-LET

Past and Present: History, Interpretation and Generational Change in the Policy Sciences

Generational change has traditionally been studied as an historical phenomenon.Histories are full of "periods" and "eras"; historical texts commonly have titles such as"The Age of X" or refer to conventional periods such as "The Victorians" or "TheEnlightenment". I shall argue that the renewal of interest in periodization in policystudies and the suggestion that a new "round" of policy change is best studied as amodification of previous rounds rather than a new event on a blank slate are bothmanifestations of the revival of historical methods in the policy sciences. As such, theysuffer from the well-known limitations of such methods and their sphere of applicationneeds to be carefully delineated and distinguished from superficially similar butmethodologically distinct approaches.

Now, the claim that we are currently witnessing a "revival" of history in policystudies1 is likely to provoke the indignant retort that history never really went away. Itwas, after all, the distinguished nineteenth century historian Thomas Babington Macaulaywho coined the phrase "that noble science of politics" and defended its historical basisagainst the deductivism of James Mill (Collini et al. 1983). The first academicappointment in political science in the United States was the Prussian, Francis Lieber,who occupied a chair of "History and Political Science" at Columbia College from 1857(Oren 2007: 216). Even in the latter half of the twentieth century, supposedly the heydayof behaviourism and hard social science, there were plenty of studies of policy andadministration over the longue durée undertaken by historians or by social scientistsusing the techniques of history as traditionally practiced, including archival research andnarrative presentation. Nonetheless, I want to argue that there is something different andinstructive about the latest rapprochement between history and policy studies.