Worth repeating: always historicize, only connect

Even [Robert] Fogel, the staunchest advocate of econometrics and the counterfactual method, adopted a more conciliatory approach toward “traditional” historians following the intense debates of the 1970s. Fogel’s shift in tone reflected his intellectual maturation, shaped in part by his debates with noncliometric historians. He told [Douglass] North that his views on historical method grew closer to those of more “traditional” historians like Geoffrey Elton and Lawrence Stone because of a “better understanding about what each of us was getting at.” He moved away from the revolutionary rhetoric of his early career, conceding to his opponents that humanistic history was “complementary” to scientific history and therefore not destined to disappear (Fogel 1979: 2, 48; 1983). . .

Like the proponents of the “old” economic history in their day, he now contended that economic models and statistical techniques served merely as tools to support narrative history, rather than as replacements for it. In his final book on antebellum slavery, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (1989), he set out to illustrate the complementarity of scientific and traditional methods by integrating cliometric analysis with a qualitative, interdisciplinary exploration of the political institutions, social norms, and ethical perspectives that made and unmade the slave system over three hundred years (Fogel 1989). Fogel described Without Consent or Contract as a “narrative history” that fell into the “traditional” rather than the “scientific” mode, because it was a narrative only partly based on cliometric methods. In his opinion, a narrative spanning three hundred years could not be scientific, as there was no scientific procedure for integrating and interpreting the various pieces of quantitative and qualitative evidence used in constructing the story.

(accessed online at https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article/doi/10.1215/00182702-12511398/409321/Dehumanizing-Economic-History-Cliometrics-from; footnotes deleted for ease of reading; underlines are mine)