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
