SOURCE: Tilly, Charles. Review of That Noble Dream, by Peter Novick. Contemporary Sociology 19, no. 4 (July 1990): 535-37.

In the following review, Tilly asserts that Novick's central argument in That Noble Dream is problematic, due to several methodological shortcomings.

Coolly skeptical about the possibility of historical objectivity and wittily contemptuous of the ways that aspirants to historical objectivity have articulated their claims, Peter Novick traces what he sees as the rise, fall, second rise, and second fall of the idea in American history [in That Noble Dream.] He finds little reason to hope for future reliability. While sociologists might at first feel impelled to rub their hands at a rival discipline's discomfiture, Novick's inquiry matters crucially to sociologists, who have long supposed that they could rake up historical facts from historians' fields in order to incorporate them into sociological analyses, and who have more recently aspired to introduce reliable social-scientific...