The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

The weary debate over whether or not historical study is or should be considered a social science is neither important nor interesting. The conclusion depends so clearly upon what kinds of historians and what kinds of social scientists you are talking about. Some historians are clearly compilers of alleged fact, which they try to refrain from ‘interpreting'; they are involved, often fruitfully, in some fragment of history and seem unwilling to locate it within any larger range of events. Some are beyond history, lost-often fruitfully so-in trans-historical visions of the coming doom or the coming glory. History as a discipline does invite grubbing for detail, but it also encourages a widening of one's view to embrace epochal pivotal events in the development of social structures.

Perhaps most historians are concerned with ‘making sure of the facts' needed to understand the historical transformation of social institutions, and with interpreting such facts, usually by means of narratives. Many historians, moreover, do not hesitate to take up in their studies any and every area of social life. Their scope is thus that of social science, although like other social scientists, they may specialize in political history or economic history or the history of ideas. In so far as historians study types of institutions they tend to emphasize changes over some span of time and to work in a non-comparative way; whereas the work of many social scientists in studying types of institutions has been more comparative than historical. But surely this difference is merely one of emphasis and of specialization within a common task.