Bringing the History Back into Social and Political Sciences

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.