Writing the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Pragmatism and Historical
Inquiry. By Jonathan B. Isacoff. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
216p. $70.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Jonathan Isacoff argues that American political scientists, and in
particular international relations researchers, should be much more
self-critical about their historiography. Political science, he claims, is
afflicted by a stubborn “positivism” that leads case-study,
qualitative researchers (like Kenneth Waltz) and large-n, quantitative
researchers (like J. David Singer) alike to treat historical data as if
they are value-free and unchanging. This historiography blinds researchers
to the normative and theoretical biases of their theories—especially
a bias toward system-structural explanations for international
conflict—by screening out data that contradict those theories.
Moreover, subsequent revisions to the historical record undermine their
findings, leaving research that is empirically disengaged and irrelevant
to political experience.