The Past Rise of Social Security: Historical Trends and Patterns

When the hard social sciences seek the opinion of historians on any topic, it is usually a matter of politeness and courtesy rather than a trawl for real enlightenment. The attitude of the social sciences to history, or so it seems to most historians, is summed up in Catherine Morland’s famous line from Northanger Abbey: “History tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilence; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all, it is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” Nor, truth be told, have the lines of communication been more open in the other direction. Historians envy the influence and pecuniary pull of their methodological cousins while disdaining the—in their eyes—narrowly pragmatic and temporally blinkered approach followed by the more quantitatively oriented and generalizing of the social sciences.