Book Reviews
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Book Reviews Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations C. Elman and M.F. Elman (eds.) The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001. 400 pp. $50.00 hardcover, $24.95 softcover International Politics (2003) 40, 291–305. doi:10.1057/sj.ip.8800014
Bridges and Boundaries, edited by Elman and Elman, is an important book on the possibilities and limits of dialogue between historians and political scientists. In their concluding chapters, Jervis and Schroeder reflect on the contributions of their respective fields, and the similarities and differences between political science and history. Both Jervis and Schroeder have spent much of their professional careers walking the borders between history and political science, and both acknowledge debts to the other’s discipline. Despite this fact, they both genially conclude that ‘I could never imagine myself becoming a historian (or political scientist)’. It is fun and enlightening to travel and expand one’s horizons, but always nice to return home. No one was converted, nor do I think that was the aim of the volume. Bridges imply that there is something to connect; boundaries imply something different on the ‘other side’. Some models of inter-disciplinary relations are attempts to colonize the other (e.g., public choice). Others attempt to arbitrage the strengths of respective fields and to exploit comparative advantages. This book is decidedly in the latter category. The substance of Bridges and Boundaries consists of an exploration of the respective disciplinary cores of history and political science. It is organized in three parts. The first part consists of a methodological discussion of research styles and methodological approaches of historians and political scientists. The chapters by Levy, Pelz, Lebow, and Bennett and George are superb and give us insightful glimpses into the research worlds of historians and political scientists. Part II consists of three case studies with paired contributions by historians and political scientists on the 30 years crisis, British hegemony, and the Cold War. Schweller’s chapter on why a concert did not arise during the 1930s to oppose Hitler’s attempt at world domination is a stellar example of how to combine detailed historical analysis with structural theory. Part III consists of the conclusions of a seasoned political scientist and a historian reflecting on the possibilities of learning from the other. What can historians and political scientists learn from one another? The volume provides a sharper sense of how certain inevitable tradeoffs are
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allocated between disciplines: tradeoffs between parsimony and narrative richness, abstract versus embedded theory, and qualitative versus quantitative research (all covered nicely in this volume). However, there are other points of intersection. Political scientists can learn from the historians’s use of archival and primary materials. Can one imagine the historian Milward’s European Rescue of the Nation State (1993) or Larson’
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