10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14654

This contribution is based on four assumptions: 1) the social and political sciences should rebuild a systematic relationship with history, 2) this is urgent if we want to give depth to the analysis of new phenomena on a global scale that have characterized this long decade following the Great Recession, 3) sociology and political science need to build research of a comparative nature that will stand the test of time, 4) the crisis of democracies is the unifying topic that today requires a comparison between the crisis of American democracy with the crises of European democracies. This, however, can be done realistically only by understanding the historical uniqueness that characterizes each political system.

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Bringing the History Back In                          USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics. Vol. 5 (2022)
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14654                                                           ISSN 2611-2752




     Bringing the History Back into Social and Political Sciences

                                                  Mattia Diletti

                                               Published: April 7, 2022



                                                      Abstract

       This contribution is based on four assumptions: 1) the social and political sciences should rebuild a
       systematic relationship with history, 2) this is urgent if we want to give depth to the analysis of new
       phenomena on a global scale that have characterized this long decade following the Great Recession,
       3) sociology and political science need to build research of a comparative nature that will stand the
       test of time, 4) the crisis of democracies is the unifying topic that today requires a comparison
       between the crisis of American democracy with the crises of European democracies. This, however,
       can be done realistically only by understanding the historical uniqueness that characterizes each
       political system.
       Keywords: Political Science; History; American Political Development; Democracy; Populism.




Mattia Diletti: Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza (Italy)
 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9296-9078
 mattia.diletti@uniroma1.it
Mattia Diletti is Researcher at “Sapienza”, University of Rome, where he teaches Political Science and Public
Policy. In 2020, with Alessandro Coppola, he edited the book “Radicali all’azione! Organizzare i senza potere”
(edizioni dell’asino), the first Italian translation of “Reveille for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky. With Marco Morini he
coordinates the SPAM Observatory—“Società e Politica Americana”, Department of Communication and Social
Research, “Sapienza”, University of Rome.



Copyright © 2022 Mattia Diletti                                                                                      43
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
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Bringing the History Back                                                                                USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




1 Political Science and History: A Complicated Relationship
The author of this article is a political scientist, whose point of view is influenced by the internal
debate within this discipline, and also by the internal debate within this discipline in the author’s
country, Italy. The internal debate within the disciplines, thanks to the acceleration of the processes of
internationalization of academic work in the last twenty-five years, is becoming less and less “national,”
but it is still very strongly influenced by the element of physical proximity, despite the pandemic, by
the existence of national networks, and by national university recruitment systems, which tend to
regulate the models of scientific production.
    In the internal debate of the Italian Society of Political Science, a standing group called “Politics and
History” was formed, which in turn was influenced by the theoretical work of Massimo Paci, author of
Lezioni di Sociologia storica, a volume published in 2013.1 These Lezioni define the scientific perimeter
of historical sociology, which is still a weak sub-sector in Italy, especially when compared with the
development it has experienced in Europe and especially in the United States. The book rereads
classic authors, such as Durkheim, Marx, Gramsci, Weber, Elias and Aron, up to Bourdieu and the
main exponents of contemporary historical sociology. These authors are linked by the search for a
causal explanation of observed phenomena, a causal explanation that is deeply linked to the historical
genesis of the phenomena.
    In Italy, therefore, in 2018 Marco Almagisti, Carlo Baccetti and Paolo Graziano edited Introduzione
alla politologia storica, with contributions from many authors. These political scientists and political
sociologists worked on the study of long-term changes as an interpretative key of contemporaneity,
in particular through the study of the transformations of political parties and political cultures, both
in the dimension of single case studies and comparative studies.
    These groups of scholars have looked at the American case with some envy. In the volume previ-
ously cited, they discuss the seminal works of Reinhard Bendix, Nation Building and Citizenship (1969),
Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), and the extensive literature of
Theda Skocpol. More specifically, the group cited States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis
of France, Russia and China (1979) and Doubly Engaged Social Science: The Promise of Comparative Historical
Analysis (2003). The latter argues how, in the United States, comparative historical analysis had come
of age long ago as one of the most fruitful research approaches in modern social science.2
    Missing from the volume’s list of citations is perhaps another very important text by Theda
Skocpol from 2004, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, a
fundamental book for understanding some of the causes of the American democratic crisis.3 Another
citation that is also missing is an in-depth analysis of an important sub-field of American political
science, namely, that of American Political Development. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, in
fact, described the theoretical reasons why politics should be studied “historically” in a well-known
book, The Search for American Political Development.4 Orren and Skowronek’s thinking appeared during
the same period as Skocpol’s, i.e., about twenty years ago, and was later updated in 2016 when the
two scholars returned to the topic in an essay entitled Pathways to the Present: Political Development in
America, which appeared in the 2016 Oxford Handbook of American Political Development.
    Considering Europe, Italy and the United States, it is evident that we are talking about very differ-
ent paths, which are not comparable in terms of academic success, institutionalization and scientific
production. Scholars’ academic and biographical paths are also different, as are their motivations,

1.   Massimo Paci, Lezioni di Sociologia storica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2013).

2.   Reinhard Bendix, Nation Building and Citizenship (New York: Wiley, 1964); Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and
     Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Theda Skocpol, States and Social
     Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China from 1979 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979);
     Theda Skocpol, “Doubly Engaged Social Science: The Promise of Comparative Historical Analysis,” in J. Mahoney and D.
     Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
     Press, 2003), 407–428.

3.   Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Okla-
     homa Press, 2004).

4.   Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University
     Press, 2004).



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14654                                                                                   44
Bringing the History Back                                                                                USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




biographies and cultural environments. Yet, a broader and more articulate survey of the literature
of those who have built bridges between disciplines, and established themselves in the interstices of
interdisciplinarity, is still a good cause.
    An “old” good cause, which Leonardo Morlino had already suggested to Italian political scientists,
not first and not last, more than three decades ago, states:

        The problem today is that of relations between fields of knowledge, instead of borders, as it
        was before. Indeed, paradoxically, the most significant contributions have come precisely
        from intermediate fields between philosophy and political science, between history and
        political science, between economics and political science, between sociology and political
        science.5

   While the problem of relationships between disciplines never really finds a solution, the need for
debating the crisis of democracy on both sides of the Atlantic is increasingly evident. And this is
today’s “good cause,” for both historians and social and political scientists.



2 History and Political Science: Today’s Challenges between America and
      Europe
The list of misunderstandings in dealing with phenomena that have to do with the democratic crisis
may be quite long. We have been discussing the democratic crisis for a long time, and basically we
really only know two things, namely, 1) the solutions proposed by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki
in The Crisis of Democracy in 1975 have become part of the problem, while governments and societies are
again looking for a new paradigm “to handle” democracy; 2) non-democratic governments have never
been so healthy as now in the last thirty years, while we all clearly perceive the distrust of the citizens of
democratic countries towards their institutions. This phenomenon has been analyzed for many years,
but it has taken on new meaning after the January 6, 2021 assault on the American Congress, when
ruthless political entrepreneurs and violent minorities joined forces in an unprecedented alliance.
    Let us take one key concept related to the crisis of democracy, one buzz-word of both academic
literature and public debate such as populism. Since 2016, when Donald Trump won the American
presidential election and British citizens voted for Brexit, studies on populism have multiplied, and
scholars who have treated the topic for decades have taken center stage.
    The emergence or re-emergence of a phenomenon depends on multiple factors, as well as its
public dissemination. In 2016 the American public debate was influenced by the release of John Judis’
ambitious volume, The Populist Explosion,6 in which he offered a sometimes Manichean version of
the emergence of global populism.7 For example, Judis suggests his own unified theory of populism
and the causes of its emergence in the United States, where stagnant wages, corporate deserts and
widespread fear of being cast adrift in the global economy have brought Bernie Sanders and Trump
together in their contempt for trade deals.
    This view of the reasons that would unite pro-Sanders voters with pro-Trump voters extends to
the European cases addressed by Judis, although he distinguishes so-called left-wing populism from
right-wing populism. He is eager to distinguish the left-wing economic populism of Sanders and the
anti-elite Podemos Party in Spain, with the champion, “the people,” against the one percent, from the
right-wing cultural populism of Trump and the anti-Muslim Danish People’s Party. The difference is
that right-wing populists accuse the elite of coddling an ever-shifting third group—immigrants, blacks,
terrorists, welfare recipients, or all of the above.
    In an attempt to represent the reasons for the populist wave, it often happens that the debate be-
comes oversimplified at the expense of an in-depth discussion of the roots of democratic crises. Very

5.   Marco Almagisti, Carlo Baccetti and Paolo Graziano, eds., Introduzione alla politologia storica (Rome: Carocci, 2018).

6.   John Judis, The Populist Explosion (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016).

7.   For a more accurate reconstruction, see Carlos De La Torre, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (Abingdon-on-
     Thames: Routledge, 2018).



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14654                                                                                  45
Bringing the History Back                                                                         USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




often, whoever gets there first is able to shape the public debate. Think, for example, of a success-
ful simplification such as that of The Economist, which in July 2016 spoke of a “New Political Divide:
Farewell, left versus right. The contest that matters now is open against closed.” Again, the Sanders
phenomenon and the Trump phenomenon are put together because they both would pursue goals
of restriction for free markets and for the free movement of people. “America is not alone. Across
Europe, the politicians with momentum are those who argue that the world is a nasty, threatening
place, and that wise nations should build walls to keep it out.”8
    However, even political and social scientists have struggled to escape a fascination with easy gen-
eralizations and monocausal explanations, although within high quality research. In Cultural Backlash:
Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism, a book published in 2019 that has been highly successful,
Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart draw on statistical data and a broad range of literature to make
the case for patterns of voting for populist parties across Europe, in the UK with Brexit, and Donald
Trump in the USA.9 Cultural Backlash is a substantial book, drawing on a wide, heavily-cited body of
literature to build its argument in a clear sequence towards a general conclusion that patterns of voting
for populist parties across Europe, for Brexit in the UK and for Trump in the USA, all show substantial
intergenerational differences. The greatest support for populist-authoritarians comes, in the authors’
view, from the older generations, which are declining in size, both relatively and absolutely, while
set against their younger contemporaries who are more likely to favor post-material values and their
related politics.
    However, as the late Ron Johnston and other authors have pointed out, some of the statistical
inferences in the book did not stand up to careful analysis, especially those that were supposed to
bring water to the mill of the book’s thesis. The conflict between cosmopolitanism and authoritarian
populism would be essentially traceable to a cultural and generational clash between members of four
types of generations (mainly European, plus the United States): Interwar (those born between 1900
and 1945); Boomers (1946–64); Generation X (1965–79); and Millennials (1980–96).
    Johnston’s analysis is gently relentless. “Their chosen approach to establishing whether the cul-
tural backlash theory works uses multiple regressions in which the first model includes just the four
generations, which prove statistically significant—again unsurprising given the large samples—but
the r2 values are mostly very low (less than 0.05 in many cases; in one place a correlation of 0.074 is
termed”moderately strong“). Further models add extra variables representing class, education, reli-
gion, populist and authoritarian values, among others. As these are added, so the size and statistical
significance of the generational variables declines, reflecting collinearity among the independent vari-
ables that is only weakly recognized: Generation X individuals are more likely to have degrees than
those in the Interwar generation, for example.”10
    The impressive work of Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart could miss the point of explaining
worldwide populism, even in the country on which the authors focus the most, namely, the United
States. And it is precisely here that social and political scientists, much more modest in their ambitions
and ability to generalize, should ask themselves if it is not convenient to work more carefully on a
limited number of cases and actors, with an approach capable of giving historical depth to the social
and political phenomena of the present.



3 Conclusions. For A Unified Agenda on the Crisis of Democracy
History should help political and social scientists to understand what familiar or unfamiliar elements
of the past illuminate the present. Instead, historians will be surprised, perhaps, to learn that several


8.   See “The New Political Divide: Farewell, Left Versus Right. The Contest That Matters Now is Open Against Closed,” The
     Economist, July 30, 2016, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/07/30/the-new-political-divide.

9.   Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge
     University Press, 2019).

10. See Ron Johnston, “Book Review: Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism by Pippa Norris and
    Ronald Inglehart,” LSE Review of Books, June 5, 2019, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2019/06/05/book-review-
    cultural-backlash-trump-brexit-and-authoritarian-populism-by-pippa-norris-and-ronald-inglehart/.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14654                                                                           46
Bringing the History Back                                                                            USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




studies on populism, including the American case, fail to cite a seminal text like Michael Kazin’s The
Populist Persuasion,11 although it was updated and republished in 2017. The risk is one that the social
sciences have always run when making generalizations about phenomena that come from afar. Like
treating the case of Trumpian American populism, precisely, as a simple derivative of the global phe-
nomenon of the revolt against globalization, a point of view that may have very good reasons, based
on satisfactory empirical analysis. There is the risk, however, of losing 120 years of American populist
history and a full understanding of the phenomenon.
    Not by chance, it was Michael Kazin himself who intervened to ask how it was possible to equate
Bernie Sanders with Donald Trump, since both are populists:

         Yet differences of language matter; they suggest what a candidate will seek to accom-
         plish if he or she takes power. The nineteenth-century antecedent that Trump evokes
         in his nativist appeals to white working and middle-class Americans is not the populism
         of the People’s Party but rather that of the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s, which simi-
         larly argued that immigrants were taking Americans’ jobs and breaking the nation’s laws.
         Trump’s “populism” is a brilliant specimen of performance art but one that bears little
         resemblance, even in style, to the capital-P kind. The earnest activists from the People’s
         Party of old brandished a lengthy blueprint for reform; Trump’s personality overshadows
         his program. His canny lack of finesse finesses us all.

    And he reminds us to look at the emergence of an “anti-system” protest as proof of the crisis of
the American democratic system: “But every major ‘populist’ insurgency is a warning about serious
problems festering in our politics. To simply blame the messenger is an exercise in denial.”12
    The invitation to pay attention to the historical origins of the phenomena to which Kazin refers
should not discourage us, however, from rigorously researching the topics on which to build compar-
ative analyses of the democratic crisis, always considering a full historical knowledge of the case we
are dealing with. We already have an enormous amount of empirical research on all this, and it is hard
to keep up with everything that academic journals publish.
    It is worth investigating rigorously, for example, the origins and perspectives of extreme and pop-
ulist right-wingers in Europe and the United States, keeping well in mind the peculiar origins of the
American extreme right, which does not possess the heavy European past. Obviously there are al-
ready those who do this in an excellent way, but what should not be forgotten is the weight of the
difference between systems and political cultures. Likewise, it is worth investigating the forms of di-
alogue and mutual influence between the right-wingers on both sides of the Atlantic. The Atlantic
dialogue is continuous, it applies to right-wingers today as it did to the Third Way leftists of the 1990s.
But then we must always keep in mind how profoundly different Donald Trump’s nativism is from
Eric Zemmour’s, even if their public speeches have several points of contact.
    Just as interesting is uncovering the common agenda among groups supporting, on both sides of
the Atlantic, climate denialism, pandemic denialism, and conspiracy theories. And the same may be
true of movements against the climate crisis, for example. For each of these fields of study, already
crowded with scholars and experts, what I said before still applies: we are certain, for example, that no
one should study American conspiracy theories in the same way as one treats European conspiracy
theories. Trivial? Less than it seems.
    Similarly, it is worth investigating from an empirical point of view what Paolo Gerbaudo has called
The Great Recoil, or “the return of the state.” Gerbaudo states that neoliberalism, the ideology that
presided over decades of market globalisation, is on trial, while state intervention is making a spectac-
ular comeback amid lockdowns, mass vaccination programs, deficit spending and climate planning.13
Is this true? Is it only partially true? Is it an optical illusion caused by the pandemic crisis? And what



11.   Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017).

12. See “How Can Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Both Be ‘Populist’?,” The New York Times Magazine, March 27, 2016, https:
    //www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/how-can-donald-trump-and-bernie-sanders-both-be-populist.html.

13. Paolo Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil: Politics After Populism and Pandemic (London: Verso Books, 2021).



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14654                                                                             47
Bringing the History Back                                                              USAbroad. Vol. 5 (2022)




does it mean in terms of policies, if we look at the American federal system today, compared to the
multi-level governance model of European countries?
    These few pages, in short, are just a modest invitation to keep history as a working horizon for
social and political scientists, especially here in Europe. Political scientists who want to investigate
the democratic crisis of this decade, after all, should just remember the incipit of one of their wise
colleagues, namely, Alfio Mastropaolo. Mastropaolo writes in the volume Is Democracy a Lost Cause?
Paradoxes of an Imperfect Invention,

       it is an oft-forgotten fact, but democracy is a human invention and therefore a historical
       fact. It claims to be the supreme good, but it is not. Neither is it the fate of the human race,
       or even a necessity. It originated somewhere, from where it is spread widely, changing and
       adapting, and it is destined to have an end. As with all historical facts, its birth, success
       and misfortunes are characterized by a broad margin of uncertainty.14




14. Alfio Mastropaolo, Is Democracy a Lost Cause? (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2012), 9.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/14654                                                               48
