Writing the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Pragmatism and Historical Inquiry

Extract

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.