There are any number of species of social animal; only man is also an historical animal, in that history is both a product and a cause of his social behaviour. My purpose is to explore this most important aspect of social psychology, which has been wholly neglected. I do not count the fleeting controversy over whether social psychology should be regarded as ‘history’ (Gergen 1973) or as ‘science’ (Schlenker 1974). That was fundamentally sterile: it rested on Gergen's misconceptions about the nature of science, which were elegantly corrected by Schlenker. I shall return to this shortly. Neither Gergen nor Schlenker, however, actually looked at, or used, historical material. I shall do so here: not in order to ‘decide’ between social psychology as history or as science, but to make articulate and to demonstrate the relevance of historical evidence as an integral part of basic scientific concerns of social psychology.

It is relevant to consider why social psychologists have ignored historical evidence. The fundamental reason is our identification of social psychology as a science, and our concept of ‘science’ as concerned with the formulation of ‘universal laws’ which underlie particular phenomena: by comparison, the events of history are contingent. At one level of analysis this is quite valid. We are not only ‘social’ and ‘historical’, we are indeed also ‘animal’, and in that respect, objects of scientific enquiry.