“Dehumanizing” Economic History: Cliometrics, from Boom to Bust, 1960s–1980s

Abstract This article studies the rise of cliometrics and its challenges in the context of the widening divide between science and the humanities in the postwar United States. The argument here is that the development of cliometrics eventually resulted in the “dehumanization” of economic history. Cliometricians drew on the logical empiricist conception of natural science—prominent in 1940s economics and philosophy of science—to justify their use of quantitative methods and models, thereby contributing to the marginalization of alternative approaches, notably humanistic ones. While the scientism of cliometrics was instrumental to its academic success, it also contributed to the audience and recruitment challenges faced by economic history when cliometrics became dominant in the 1980s. By adopting methods and models from economics, cliometricians made economic history more technical and mathematical, which tended to limit its audience to specialists and diminish its comparative advantage relative to other subfields.