Too Important To Leave To Others Summary

In academia, debate continues to rage on between the distinct differences between the disciplines of History and Political Science. The overlaps of the works that each discipline includes and the fluctuations of the way to study each discipline has fueled the debate. This makes it hard to identify the specific distinctions between the two. Jack S. Levy, in Too Important to Leave to Others: History and Political Science in the Study of International Relations, argues that history “Explains the connections between a series of events” while political science shows the “Relationships between variables or classes of events (32)," and that both optimize the use of theory to suit their distinct differences. To go about setting up his argument, Levy brings up the most common agreed upon distinction between history and political science that cotemporary analysts agree on, which is the idiographic and nomothetic distinction. This belief argues that history is focused on the uniqueness of each event, while political science is focused on parsimony. However, while delving into the role of theory in historical explanations, Levy showed that the idiographic and nomothetic distinction did not always hold up. Furthermore, while showing the inconsistency in time of the theory/narrative distinction, Levy showed how theory itself was not distinct to only political science; “Some historians are quite explicit about the analytical assumptions and …show more content…
Political scientists build general theories and test them, whereas historians use theory-or as set of theories-primarily to structure their interpretations of particular events