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Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods [Book Review]

New Zealand social historian Fairburn’s textbook on research design 
and argumentation should be widely adopted for graduate classes in 
history. Drawing on the philosophy of science, Fairburn questions the 
widespread practices in social history of, for instance, generalizing from 
isolated instances, unsystematically assessing differences and similarities 
between and within various groups, and evaluating interpretations on 
mainly stylistic or ideological grounds, instead of on the basis of the 
logic and power of their models. Although he persuasively criticizes the 
cultural relativism of postmodernist and hermeneutic approaches as 
self-refuting, he is better, and more comfortable, discussing such “soft” 
stances than he is discussing economics and other “hard” social sciences— 
which he virtually ignores, despite economists’ numerous contributions 
to social history—or statistical methods—which he distrusts 
when authors cannot completely explain them in simple terms to skeptical 
innumerates.