Bringing the History Back into Social and Political Sciences

Abstract

This contribution is based on four assumptions: 1) the social and political sciences should rebuild a systematic relationship with history, 2) this is urgent if we want to give depth to the analysis of new phenomena on a global scale that have characterized this long decade following the Great Recession, 3) sociology and political science need to build research of a comparative nature that will stand the test of time, 4) the crisis of democracies is the unifying topic that today requires a comparison between the crisis of American democracy with the crises of European democracies. This, however, can be done realistically only by understanding the historical uniqueness that characterizes each political system.

Keywords

• political science
• history
• american political development
• democracy
• populism