Towards an Integrated Political History: Bridging Disciplinary Divides

Abstract

The study focuses on the evolution of political history and the assessment of the perspectives of its further development. Since the second half of the 20th century, political history has been cultivated in three basic subfields: new political history, social political history, and cultural political history. Subsequently, the discussion turns to other subfields that are or could be used in the analysis of political history. Ultimately, the study proposes the idea of creating an "integrated" political history that would result from combining the strengths of different theoretical and methodological approaches, especially history, political science, economics, and sociology. Author has called for the creation of an "integrated" political history that would emerge by combining the strengths of different approaches. In particular, he argued for building a bridge between the new political history, political science, and political economy. This, however, would require scholars from each discipline to recognize that the other disciplines are not misguided or mistaken, but equal and worthy of the closest collaboration. It would also require the formation of interdisciplinary teams; in the case of political history, these teams would include political scientists, sociologists, economists, statisticians, lawyers, and anthropologists in addition to historians. Similarly, disciplinary barriers would have to be overcome in journals indexed in Web of Science and other databases. The emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach is nothing new in the social sciences and humanities, but the question is to what extent it has been feasible to present policy analysis from the theoretical and methodological perspectives of multiple disciplines.