Mises famously held that history depends upon theory. As noted in this space many times previously, this is exactly backwards. The abstract is parasitic upon the concrete.
A simple example may be helpful here: I could not possibly form a theory that water freezes at low temperatues without having previously understood concrete instances in which it was getting colder and water froze.
However, Mises was a very bright man, and his error here is comprehensible once we consider the sort of "histories" of which he was thinking.
The historian, qua historian, has the job of determining what we can say, given the evidence available, about what really happened in the past. But, being human beings, he often seeks to go further: he wants to say, e.g., what "fundamental forces" were really responsible for these events. At that point, he has ceased to be an historian and has become a social theorist.
Which is fine, except that the theoretical framework he then employs is often non…