论量化历史对历史政治学的价值与风险

The Importance and Risk of Quantitative History to Historical Political Science

从历史中汲取养分、构建中国本土化的政治学理论体系,不仅要求我们以史为鉴、知古鉴今,也需要我们在“史无定法”的方法论原则指导下,探寻能为历史政治学贡献知识增量的研究路径。在大数据时代,量化历史已逐渐成为新史学研究的重要范式之一;而历史政治学作为一种基于历史分析的政治学研究路径,量化历史也能为其提供许多方法和技术层面的助力。通过对量化历史与历史政治学研究取向的辨析可知,量化历史能为历史政治学研究在历史变量的测量、相关性和因果关系分析以及拓展微观研究视野等方面提供帮助,但也存在简化历史、史料屏蔽及丢失人文关怀的风险。只有通过与多元化的研究范式不断对话进而形成自身的方法自觉,才能实现历史视野下中国政治学研究的创新与发展。

To explore the Chinese indigenization political theories from the history of China,we have to not only learn from history,but also find the research path that can contribute knowledge increments to historical political science under the guidance of the methodological principle of“History is indeterminate.”In the era of big data,quantitative history gradually becomes one of the important paradigms of new historiography.As a political research path which based on historical analysis,historical political science can also gain many methodological and technical assistances from quantitative history.Through analysis of quantitative history and historical political science,we know that quantitative history could be helpful in the research of historical political science in measurement of historical variables,correlation and causal analysis,and could expand the perspective of micro-research as well,but risks also exist in simplifying history,shielding of historical materials and the loss of humanity.Only in the constant dialogue with diverse research paradigms,we can build our own method consciousness,and realize the innovation and development of Chinese political science research in the historical perspective.