A Fable of the Bees: In Reply to Tilly

Abstract

Vast numbers throng'd the fruitful Hive; Yet those vast numbers made 'em thrive. .. Some with vast Stocks, and little Pains, Jump'd into Business of great Gains; And some were damn'd to Sythes and Spades, And all those hard laborious Trades. Bernard Mandeville, •'The Fable of the Bees" Charles Tilly adds an authoritative voice to the growing chorus of doubt about cliometrics. One after another, once-determined quantifiers seem to be losing confidence. "Historians & Computers: Has the Love Affair Gone Sour?" asks Robert Swierenga. Lawrence Stone notes approvingly "The Revival of Narrative," and even cocksure prophets of "scientific history" are billing and cooing at the dowdy practitioners of "traditional history." Of course, not all militant number-crunchers have become so conciliatory. "The social-scientific merchants have developed not only an extensive trade, but a large demand within the historical community for their valuable products and a comprador class to look after their interests in the new territory," writes Morgan Kousser. "Isolationism would be ill advised even if it were possible." 1 But Tilly never was one to bluster this way, and when such a reasonable, self-composed quantifier turns Hamlet, it suggests there might be something rotten in the state of cliometrics. What is it? And what does it have to do with labor history? Should labor historians worry that their field has not been transformed by cliometrics the way economic, urban, and demographic history have been, or should they be relieved to know they can now get by without having to learn matrix algebra? On one point there should be universal agreement: To count, or not to count; that is not the question. No one should doubt the need for statistical measures of the changing size and social composition of the working class relative to other classes, the level and distribution of wealth and income within and between classes, or the allocation of labor votes among mainstream and radical parties. And no one need believe that the more esoteric, the more signifi