Thanks to Dan Drezner for exposing Tom Coburn’s ridiculous initiative to cut National Science Foundation money to political science… except in Drezner’s nightmare vision of a world without political science funding, historians would be one of the few remaining sources, along with (parodying Coburn) “CNN, pollsters, pundits…candidates, and political parties”, of knowledge about political behavior.

Horrors.

As an academic discipline, history is sometimes considered an art, sometimes a “science”, which says more about the intended readability of the discipline’s output than anything else. In terms of philosophies and practice of history, there’s a disciplinary truism, wie es eigentlich gewesen – telling it like it is – that many would argue is more “empirical” (not quantitative, which is something else) in its reading of evidence and “scientific” in its rigorous adherence to scholarly method, than a lot of the political “science” that gets pushed out. Lumping historians in with the media and punditocracy  is just as silly as Coburn’s argument that knowledge of political behavior should be limited to those fields.