The Cop on the Global Beat

Overstatement is the bane of scholarship about government. When political scientists study history, they want to do more than simply record and understand what happened: They aim to discover rules of behavior, based on the belief that political science is actually science.

In the 19th century, various theorists claimed to have discovered history’s key. Karl Marx famously said it was class conflict. Others said it was race. These ideas threw some useful light on history, but they were oversold. In the 20th century, the...