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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
A Commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue should not mask the unwieldy complexity of “social science history,” this strange-sounding compound word invented to stress the equality of partners in their joint enterprise. Some of the benefits as well as the difficulties inherent in crossing disciplinary boundaries can be detected, from a historian’s point of view, in Theda Skocpol’s Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984) in which a group of young historical sociologists and two “sociologically acclimated social historians” reassess the work of major figures in the subfield of historical sociology. approached this book with considerable excitement, for at the time of its publication, I had just sent to press the manuscript of Reliving the Past (1985), a volume in which five historians of different regions of the world reappraise the use of social-scientific models in historical analysis, examine the ways in which these models are applicable to different geographic areas and take a fresh look at the place of social history within history. To add to my excitement, Charles Tilly, who contributed an essay on European social history to Reliving the Past, was one of the nine major figures whose work was examined in Vision and Method, a testament to the influential role this scholar has played in the two disciplines of sociology and history.