Education Quote by Albion W. Small

Small is throwing a well-aimed punch at professional history just as it was busy reinventing itself as a science. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, historians in the German-Rankean mold were polishing their credentials: archives, source criticism, footnotes like armor. Sociology, meanwhile, was still fighting for legitimacy, anxious to prove it could explain society rather than merely narrate it. This line lands in that turf war.

The insult is surgical: historians, he suggests, have mistaken technique for purpose. “How to do it” names method as an end in itself, a kind of scholarly muscle memory that keeps producing facts because facts are measurable, defensible, and professionally rewarded. “What to do” is the dangerous part: interpretation, theory, the moral or social stakes that turn data into insight. Small’s subtext is that a discipline can get so good at avoiding overreach that it avoids meaning altogether.

The clever reversal comes in the final clause. Facts are usually treated as the raw material of truth; Small flips the hierarchy. Without “truths” - generalizations, frameworks, claims about causality or structure - facts become collectibles, impressive but inert. It’s also a veiled critique of academic incentives: the safest career move is to excavate another document, not to argue what the documents add up to.

Small is not anti-empiricism; he’s anti-antipurpose. He’s demanding that historical rigor answer to a larger ambition: knowledge that risks synthesis, not just accumulation.