The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

by John Lewis Gaddis

“rational choice” assumptions in economics and political science, which maintain that people calculate their own best interests objectively and on the basis of accurate information about the circumstances within which these exist; (2) “structural functionalism” in sociology, which sees institutions as necessary components of the particular social structures within which they are embedded; (3) “modernization” theory, which insists that all nations go through similar stages of economic development; (4) the “where you stand depends on where you sit” argument in organizational studies—also known as Miles’s Law—which explains the behavior of bureaucracies, large and small, in terms of an overriding concern with self-perpetuation; (5) Freudian psychology, which seeks to account for the actions of individuals by invoking a set of unconscious impulses and inhibitions inherited—by everyone—from childhood; and (6) “realist” and “neorealist” theories of international relations, which claim that all nations seek, in all situations, to maximize their power.