AskHistorians is not the place for ad hominem attacks, but I believe there is an exception in the rules specifically for Niall Ferguson, so I'll go ahead anyway. He has zero credibility preaching to anyone about research practice (it's been a while since he did any actual original research himself by all accounts), and his own historical writing has grown steadily more ideologically-driven over the course of his career. I'm also not sure that anyone with such a fondness for counterfactuals can really claim that strong an attachment to the careful use of evidence.

Ok, beyond my dislike for the historian in question, his comments here do reflect the way that a certain strain of empiricist historians would like to see themselves - led by hard evidence rather than the sort of woolly thinking and jargon that those silly social scientists indulge in. Quite aside from this version of historical practice being far from universal, Ferguson's views in themselves point to the dangers of fetishising a neutral, objective approach to history. For one thing - as Ferguson's own career attests - none of us actually are neutral, and the narratives we construct are inevitably bound up in the way we see the world. For another, he's trying to paint a picture of history that represents his perspective (very much that of a white, English-speaking conservative male) as the starting point for true neutrality, with other perspectives implicitly driven by emotion, and thereby subjective and unreliable. For most historians, embracing the reality that history is subjective (while still of course being bound by the need to substantiate your interpretations using evidence) opens the door for much richer historical discussions that embrace multiple perspectives. You'll notice this on AskHistorians every time someone asks for a definitive, neutral history of a subject: they'll almost always be told that no such history exists (or can exist), and they'd be better served by reading several accounts from authors with different views. For example, I admitted from the beginning that I don't like Niall Ferguson, so am not neutral here - and you can use that as a starting point for finding views which might look more kindly upon him and therefore offer a different perspective on his thinking here (for instance, that he was just trying to be funny by using a deliberately simplistic summary).

As for the crux of your question - do historians treat history differently to social scientists? - I would say that we often do, as some of the other answers have attested. It reminds me a bit of a conversation I had on here recently about the extent historians borrow other disciplines' methods to analyse history. Generally speaking, our goal is most often to best understand what happened in the past. Other adjacent disciplines often explore the past to inform their work, but are seeking to use it to understand something else - and it therefore makes sense to use the information they find differently.

So to address this question, it's good to start by defining the often-ambiguous limits of each field. Social science is more fluid than other areas of study, which can make that difficult. For example, a zoologist writing a physics paper likely wouldn't be taken seriously, while a historian or an economist can write academically on political science and still be considered credible. (For example, Robert Kagan, who is known mainly as a foreign policy commentator, has a PhD in history.) As I am a political scientist, I will focus mainly on my own experiences working with history (which I minored in), and I will leave the sociologists and anthropologists to do the same, as I am not qualified to speak on their behalf.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways of approaching a problem in social science. Deductive reasoning, indeed, begins with a theoretical model or hypothesis, then proceeds on to the collection of data, and so on. Inductive reasoning, on the other hand, begins with observation, then uses what is observed to form a hypothesis or theoretical model, which is then typically tested using the deductive model. In my political science work, I have never explicitly favored one model over the other, but I do find myself gravitating towards inductive reasoning. In my college history classes, however, I was always pushed to use an inductive model. In my experience, if you go into a historical research project with an idea of what you want to find, then it's going to fry you.

It is also important to distinguish history as an academic discipline from historiography, which is the meta-analysis of historical narratives and methodologies. This is where the lines get much blurrier, as you begin analyzing the trends of history through a theoretical lens, in much the same way that a political scientist would.

Beyond methods of reasoning, however, there is the simple fact that historians and social scientists are looking for answers to different questions, and each will pursue those answers as vigorously as the other. It is indisputable that political scientists need historians, and cite them frequently. In conducting research into the history of nationalism in Quebec, roughly half of the authors I cited are historians, because in order to understand the roots and manifestations of political nationalism, you need to understand how a national identity developed in the first place. Importantly, historians make the jobs of political scientists easier. Writing a paper about the role of party mechanisms in American government would be MUCH harder if I had to discern the historical context surrounding The Federalist Papers myself. I think you'll find that political scientists speak much more kindly about history than they do about political science. We need them more than they need us.

Still, I think I'm presenting a reductionist view of what historians do. As a political scientist, I try to alanyze, prescribe, and predict. The historians I know are some of the most gifted storytellers I have ever met. They are passionate about narrative, and understanding how billions of individual narratives, each of which is informed by the truth of an individual's experiences, can be woven into a broader narrative which is informed by the collective truths of a collective human experience. They are in love with the process of uncovering those narratives, and seeing where they lead.

This is a complicated question, because exactly what differentiates history from the other disciplines will almost certainly be in flux over time and will vary from group to subgroup in each discipline. I think there is some truth to what Ferguson says, but the phrasing sounds just a little mean. I'm going to be looking at what some historians have said about history and the social sciences.

In Logics of History, Sewell tries to open up a dialogue between history and the social sciences and spends the first chapter or so talking about what distinguishes the two. He argues that historians and social scientists differ greatly in training, with social scientists generally taking mandatory theory and methods courses, while historians tend instead to get their methodological training through research seminars. Similarly, he draws a distinction between history as being more descriptive and the social sciences as being more explanatory.

Both seem to lead to a third distinction in how articles work, with social scientific articles having a theoretical preface of sorts explaining what theory is used, while history articles tend instead to have "something that evokes the particularity of their subject matter—for example, an anecdote or a salient quotation from contemporary sources — than with discussions of theory or historical interpretation."

With that said, Sewell spends a bit of time complicating the distinctions he has made. While historians might not have explicit theories or methodologies, Sewell argues that they clearly have an implicit theory of temporality, a set of methods relating to archival research, and their own critiques of major social science thinkers; the point of the book, as it were, is to make those implicits explicit so that they can enter into a dialogue with the theoretical work of other social scientists.

Even the "descriptive vs. explanatory" distinction is challenged. In the AHA Conversation "Explaining Historical Change", Sewell notes that one of the big changes in history is that historians have reduced in explicitly theorizing about causation and have more rarely used the term "cause" but still hope to explain change. The big difference he sees is that the focus of change has shifted from social and economic to cultural explanations.

Those views seem rather echoed by the other conversants, albeit with a lot of disagreement on certain particulars -- e.g. what causation actually is and whether explanation subsumes it, whether history should be parsimonious, and so on.

Mark Hewitson, another member of the Conversation, has a rather interesting line relating to history and the social sciences:

Although social scientists can take into account a far larger number of variables and look for correlations between them with the aid of computers, the basic difficulty of defining and coding (or quantifying) variables continues to exist and entails a form of “parsimony.” Historical explanation does not involve prediction, covering laws and the calculation of probabilities, or parsimony in this sense. It does, though, require classification and generalization.

Which seems to put the distinction between history and the social sciences as the degree to which it needs to parsimonious, the methods it uses (computation, quantitative, law-based vs. generalizations), and its goals (predictive or not).

With that said, even the discussion seems to acknowledge that these distinctions are not essential as much as the result of specific historical processes within the profession. All mention something of social history, which certainly had segments interested in using some of those methods.

To give two near contemporaneous examples of variance: Floud, a quantitative historian, notes that within his milieu it was commonly thought that non-quantitative historians would disappear and quantitative history would rule the roost. Instead that did not happen, and he saw some "People's History" (a term often used by people associated with Historical Workshop) as being particularly disconcerting in that despite their Marxian and social historical background, they refused to embrace quantification and instead were "antiquarian" (recovering lost detritus). What's fascinating is that around the same time he makes this claim, Hobsbawm is talking about how trying to find generalizations and regularities is of essential importance to history (and implicitly radical history), seeing the focus on narrative as being rather conservative. Even though all these historians were could be read as social historians, they clearly radically disagreed about how to do history and what methods and theories were associated with each.

I think if you had to nail it down, you would definitely see differences in education. As Sewell says, historians tend to not take mandatory theory and methods courses, while social sciences do. Similarly in terms of methods, historians tend to favor interpretative ones, while social scientists are more likely to favor quantitative ones. And historians probably do some less explicit theorizing than social scientists do.

There is going to be diversity there. For example, Andrew Abbott notes that the sociologists that social historians often interacted with tended to belong to anti-quantitative networks. Similarly cultural anthropologists have a pretty big overlap with history in terms of some canonical figures (Geertz and Foucault). So within the social sciences, some social sciences will be more amenable to history, particularly those that are more culturalist and less quantitative. At the same time, for historians, there were also traditions of quantitative history that have been marginalized by the success of the cultural turn.

Even these configurations are going to be contingent. Sewell, despite being a partisan of the cultural turn, wants historians to embrace more quantitative methods (even rational choice theory!), so it seems plausible that these configurations could change as methods, educational practices, and theory changes.

References:

Abbott, Andrew. "History and sociology: The lost synthesis." Social Science History 15, no. 2 (1991): 201-238.

"Agendas for Radical History." Radical History Review 36 (1986): 26-45.

"Explaining Historical Change; or, The Lost History of Causes." AHA 120, no. 4 (2015): 1369-1423.

Floud, Roderick. "Quantitative history and people’s history: Two methods in conflict?." History Workshop no. 17 (Spring 1984): 113-124.

Sewell Jr, William H. Logics of history: Social theory and social transformation. University of Chicago Press, 2005.

I’ve recently been researching how the past as a concept of its own has been interpreted by individuals and groups. There’s a whole body of work that writes of the past in all its forms: as personal autobiographical memory, as monuments, as cultural identity, as feeing and emotion.

I usually thought of the past within disciplines, but it’s baloney for the actual use, experience, and formation of the past in both our lives and respective cultures (I think at times anyways). We all use the past! We can fit it into one box to understand it for a hot second, but there’s more of it than there are boxes.

And to put it VERY roughly: Political scientists may look at the past to formulate national beliefs of certain countries, an anthropologist may look at the use or thoughts of past within groups, while a sociologist may look at the role of the past in identity formation.

Here are a few works you might be interested in that’ve helped me place the treatment of the past within their disciplines:

Pascal Boyer, James V. Wertsch. “Memory in Mind and Culture.” Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Check especially Part III and skim through conclusions throughout: it’s a mix of sociological, psychological, and historical essays that summarizes how the past is used pretty well for me.

David Lowenthal. “The Past is a Foreign Country Revisted.” Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2015. This book is a must have if you’re REALLY interested! Has tons of sources for reference, and the amount of coverage is impressive. It gets pretty philosophical, but is nevertheless a good source for other sources!

Hope this helps?