Analytical Framework Quotes

Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.

The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.

The historical method has revolutionized Political Economy, not by showing its laws to be false, but by proving that they are relative for the most part to a particular stage of civilization. This destroys their character as eternal laws, and strips them of much of their force and all their sanctity. In this way the historical method has rescued us from intellectual superstitions.

I am a phenomenologist - I work on developing theoretical models that are constrained by observations.

I belong rather to a more classical tradition of social analysis.

My business is the analytical framework.

The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations to one another and to their foundation.

You must build public policies on reason, on facts.

As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz's spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time.

Doctrines don't govern policy. They provide a conceptual framework by which policymakers approach their decisions. But there is no such thing as a doctrine that controls policy in every way.

The entire method consists in the order and arrangement of the things to which the mind's eye must turn so that we can discover some truth.

I always start with the assumption that everything that happens in the world is actually in the world. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but it's a very powerful methodological premise.

What hadn't been realized in the literature until now is that merely to describe how severely something has been tested in the past itself embodies inductive assumptions, even as a statement about the past.

As to judging our own time, and thereby gaining some basis for a judgment of future possibilities, we are doubtless not only too close to it to appraise it but too much formed by it and enclosed within it to do so.

Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn't really help me understand a person.

I'm generalizing wildly, but academic books find safety in explanations that reduce the chaos of social life.

What could be more boring than a novel that tells you how to think about everything that happens in it?

All discussion of the ultimate nature of things must necessarily be barren unless we have some extraneous standards against which to compare them.