| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Bertrand M. Roehner and Tony Syme. Pattern and Repertoire in History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2002. Pp. xii, 413. $45.00.
"The main objective of this book is to show that seemingly unrelated events in fact follow common patterns, so behind an apparently chaotic collection of events there is in fact a hidden order" (p. 50). Bertrand M. Roehner and Tony Syme have high hopes of bridging the gap between natural and social science (p. 40) and of making social science cumulative "by breaking up complex historical phenomena into simpler 'modules'" (p. ix): that is, patterns and repertoires of collective behavior that can be compared across time and space and so reveal unexpected regularities.	1
The hope of creating a social science equivalent to natural science has been at home in France since the time of Denis Diderot at least. Auguste Comte institutionalized the aspiration by inventing sociology; Roehner and Syme persevere in the same hope, helped most notably by an infusion of American-style historical sociology from the works of Charles Tilly. Yet the isolation of this tradition from existing patterns of historical discourse in the United States makes the book unlikely to attract readers of the AHR or to convince historians that they are really on track to make social science precise and powerful.	. . .

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