EXPANDING THE DATA BASE: AN ARTICLE SUMMARY
The article summarized was written by John Lewis Gaddis in 1987. Gaddis initially devotes time to substantiating his contention that political scientists, historians, and policy makers (foreign affairs and matters of national security) work from data bases that are materially different from one another. Historians work primarily from data bases that more often than not fails to account for contemporary developments, while political scientists are so intent on attaining contemporary relevance that the data bases from which they work are typically incapable of providing historical context and precedent for contemporary situations. Policy makers, in contrast to both historians and political scientists, tend to work from data bases containing elements of those used by both historians and political scientists, but which are frozen at various time points. The time at which the data bases of policy makers tend to be frozen are most often the points when formal education ceased and professional activity began for each individual policy maker.
Gaddis contends that the situation described above does not serve the country well within the context of foreign and national security policy. A further contention made by Gaddis in the article is that improved foreign and national security polices would result from an interchange of ideas between policy makers, political scientists, and historians in the policy development process.
Achieving such an interchange of ideas will be a formidable task, however, for reasons on which Gaddis elaborates in this article. First, historians, according to Gaddis, tend to be arcane in their approach to presenting history, contending that, if history must be explained, then it is really not history. Second, according to Gaddis, all too many historians accept the assumption that history is not concerned with the present and has to only with the past. Acting o...