Oen e Sc Scence R f Gubk Cmm Ruug f
Contents
Stanford Universit Press Stanford, Calfornia
© Igg6 by the Board of Trustees o f the Leland Stanford Junior Unrsi Printed in the United States of erica CP data appear at the end of the book
Foreword Cause Gubenkian Fundain Members of the Commission
Xl
The Historical Construction of the
Social Sciences, om the Eightenth Century to
Debates Within the Social Sciences,
to the Present
33
The Validity ofthe Distinctions among the Socia Sciences... 6 The Degree to Which the Heritage
Is Parochia.. 8 The Real ity and Vaidity ofthe Distinction Between the "Two Cul tures... 60 hat Kind of Social Science Shall
We Now Build? Humans and Nature ...8 The State as an Aaltic Buiding Block... 80 The Universa and the Particuar ... 8 Objectiitygo Conclusion: Restructuring the
Social Sciences
94
Foreword
T
he Calouste Gulbenian Foundation sponsored, in the second half of the 1980' s, what became a rst, fruitful phase of the project Portugal 000, generating valuable relections about the framework for and main issues concerning the possible or probable trajectories of the Portuguese nation at the dawn of the tentyrst century These thoughts and investigations have bee n published , in Portuguese , in the se ries Portugal The Next ent Years. " A this initiative unfolded, the Foundation further sought to support relections and endeavors on issues of a global and on problems whose consideration and solutions ar e crucial to the common search by societ for a better future n this context, a survey of the social sciences and the role they perform, in terms both of the relations among the disciplines and of their relation ship ith the humaniti es a nd the natural scie nce s, se em ed appropriate. The great intelle ctual achievements of the
x
FOREWOR
FOREWOR
pas hi o fo yeas eading o he moden sdy of ife and o he science of compexi he emeging need fo conexaiaion" of nivesaisms (which ges an inceasing diaoge eeen ces and he goh of nivesi edcaion since he ae 1950'S a have songy inlenced he pacice of socia scieniss ye ef pecios ie oom fo peoccpaions of a sca and oganiaiona nae. In he pesen sae of he evoion shod ovecoming he exising discipinay sce no e consideed a cena diemma fo he so ciaThe sciences? C aose Genian Fonda ion hs wecomed a popo sa y Pofes so Imman e Waesein Dieco of he Fenand Bade Cene of Binghamon nivesi o condc a disingished inenaiona gop of schoassx om he socia sciences o om he naa sciences and o omhe hmaniiesin a elecon on he pesen socia sciences and hei fe Con seqenly he Genian Commissi on on he Rescing of he Socia Sciences was ceaed in Jy 1993, ih Pofesso Walesein as is chai Is composiion elecs oh he deph an he ide pe specive ha was n ece ssay o achieve he anaysis pesened in he ex ha foows Open the Social Sciences is a seios geneos and povocaive ook which faihfy depics he amosphee and he vivaci of he Gen ian Comm issi ons exchanges ding he oyea peiod ha foowed is ceaion. Thee penay meeings wee hed: he s a he Fonda ions he adqaes in Lison in Jne 1994, he seco nd a he Maison d eiene de omm e in Pais in Janay 1995, and he hid a e Fenand Bade Cene in Binghamon in Api 1995. Is ineeca level is pi
'
maiy de o he capaci of he eminen indiidas who s eved on he Commission he ovea achievemen wod no have een possiehohe enhsiasm deeminaion and eadeship of Immane Waesein which we gaefy acknowedge hee. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Members of the Commission
Immanuel Wallerstein chai of he Commiss ion so cioog SA Dieco of he Fenand Bade Cene fo he Sdy of conomies isoica Sysems and Ciiiaions and Disingished Pofes so of So cioog Binghamon nivesi Pesiden Inenaiona Socioogica Associaion aho The Mode Word-System (3vol Unthinking Social Science. Calestous Juma science and echnoog sdies enya xecive Seceay N Convenion on iodivesi Geneva fome xecive Dieco fican Cene fo echnoog Sdies Naioi coaho Long-Run Economics: An
lutiona Approach to Economic Growt h Evelyn Fox Kellerphysics SA Pofesso o he
isoy and Phiosophy of Science Massachses Insie of echnoog Mach Feow I99-I997; aho Rections on Gender and Science Jrgen Kockahisoy Gemany Pofesso of he isoy of he Indsia Wod Feie nivesi Bein pema
xv
MEM BERS OF TH E C OMM ISSION
MEMBERS OF THE COMMISSION
xv
nn Fow Wissnschafskog Bin Dico Cn fo Conmpoay Hisoy Posdam aho Arbeitverhlnisse und Arbeiterexistenzen; dio Bourgeo Socie in Nineteenth
Peter J. Taylor gogaphy K Pofsso of Goga phy Loghoogh nivsi dio Political Geogphy; co dio Review ofInteational Poltical Economy; aho Polit
Century Europe
ical Geogphy WordEconom NationState and Locali
Dominique Lecourt phiosophy Fanc Pof ss o of
h Phiosophy and Hisoy of Scinc nivsi d Pais Dnis Dido aho A quoi donc sert la philosophie? Des sci ences de la nature aux sciences politiques; Promthe, Faust Frankenstein Fondements imaginaires de l'thique V Y MudimbeRomanc angags Zai Wiiam R Knan J Pofsso a Sanfod nivsi wh h achs in h Dpamn of Compaaiv ia Fnch and Iaian and Cassics and in h Afican Sdis and Modn Thogh and Lia pogams Gna Scay Soci fo Afican Phiosophy in Noh Aica aho The Invention of ica; codio Aica and th Disclines Kinhide Mushkoji poiica scinc Japan Pofs so Fac of Innaiona Sdis Mii Gakin nivsi fom Psidn Innaiona Poiica Scinc ssociaion fom VicRco fo Pogamm nid Naion s nivsi Psidn Japans Conci fo Innaiona Affais aho
Global Issues and Intearadigmatic DialogueEssays on ul tolar Politics Iya PrigogineVicom chmisy Bgim No Pi fo Ch misy I977; Dico In sis Innaionax d Physiq d Chimi fond pa E Sovay Dic Iya Pi gogin Cn fo Sdis in Sh and Compx La nouvelle Sysms nivsi of Txas a sin
alliance; Exploring Complexity; Entre e temps et leit
Michel-Rolph Trouillot anhopoog Haii i gEisnhow Disingishd Pofsso of Anhopoog and Dico Insi fo Goa Sdis in C Pow and Hisoy Th Johns Hopins nivsi fom Chai di soy Conci WnnGn Fondaion fo Anhopoogica Rsach aho Silencing the Past Power and the oduc
tion of Histo; Peasants and Capital Dominica in the Word Economy
Oen e S Sene R f Gubk Cmm Ruug f
The Historical Construction of the Social Sciences� from the Eighteenth Century to 1945 Think of lfe as an immense pro blem, an equation, or rather a famly of equations, partially dependent on each other, partially independent . . . it bein understood that these equations are very complex, that they are fll of surprises, and that we are often unable to iscover their "roots. Fernand Braudel'
T
h ida ha w can c inigny on hna of hmans hi aions o ach oh and o spiiua focs and h s ocia scs ha hy hav cad and ihin which hy iv is a as as od as codd hisoy Th civd i gios xs discss hs mas as do h xs w ca phio sophica And th is h oa isdom ha has n passd on hogh h ags a nd on p ino in fom a on poin o anoh No do much of his wisdom was h s of cing indcvy om h funss of xpincd hman if in on o anoh pa of h wod ov a ong piod of im vn ss w psnd in h fom of vaion o aiona ducion om som inhn na hs ha w oday ca socia scinc is hi o his isdom I is howv a isan hi and phaps on an ngaf and I. Fernand Braudel, preface to Chares Moraz, Les bourgeois conqurants (Paris Libraire rma nd Colin, I957).
HISTORICAL CONSTRCTION
nacknowdging hi fo socia scinc consciosy dnd i sf as h sch fo hs ha wn yond sch civd o ddcd isdom. Socia scinc is an npis of h modn wod Is oos i in h amp fon sinc h sxnh cny and pa and pac of h conscion of o modn wod o dvop sysmaic sc knowdg ao ai ha is somhow vaidad mpiicay This ook h nam of sci entia which simpy man k nowdg Of cos phiosophy moogicay aso mans knowdg o mo pcisy h ov of knowdg Th s ocad cassica iw of sc inc pdominan fo sv a cnis now was i on o pmis s On was h Nw onian mod in which h xiss a smmy n pas and f This was a qasihoogica isio n ik God w can aain cids and hfo do no nd o disingish n pas and f sinc vhing coxiss in an na psn Th scond pmis was Casian daism h as smpion ha h is a fndamna isincion n na and hmans n ma and mind n h physica wod and h sociaspii a wod hn Tho mas Hook w p h sas of h Roya Soci in 166 3 h inscid as is ociv o impov h knowdg of naa hings an a sf As Manfacs Mchanick paciss Engns and Invnions y Expimns" adding h phas no mding ih Diini Maphysics Moas Poiicks Gamm Rh oicks o Logick" Ths sas incanad aady h dii 2. Cited in Sir Henry Lyons, Greenwood Press I968), p I
The RoyalSO� 10-140 (New York:
EIGHTEENTH C
ENTRY TO
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3
sion of h ways of knoing ino wha C P Snow wod a ca h o cs" Scinc cam o dnd a s h sach fo nivsa aws of na ha maind ov a ofim and spac Axand Ko acing h ansfomaion of opan concpions of spac om h fnh o h ighnh cny nod The innite Universe of the Ne Cosmology innite in Duration as ell as in Extension, in hich e ternal matter in accordance th eternal and necessar las moves endlessl and aimlessl in eteral space inherited all the ontological attributes of Dinity. Yetonl those-all the others the departed God took aa th Him 3
Th oh ais of h dpd God w of cos h moa vas of a Chisian wod sch as ov hmii chi Ko dos no h mak on h vas ha cam in hi pac w know ha h dpad God did no qi av a moa vacm hind If h ss w ifd yond imi so oo w hman amiions Pogss cam h opaiv wod now ndowd h h nwyacqid sns of innid and infocd y h maia achivmns o f chnoog. Th wod" of which Ko spaks is no h si go h cosm os Indd on migh ag ha ov h sam piod h pcpion of sia spac in h Wsn wod was dgoing a ansfomaion in h vs owad nid Fo m os pop i was ony wih h voyags discovy avsing h go ha h ah cosd in ono sphica fom To s h cicmfnc of his sph was fa ga han h on Coms had imagind i was
Frm the Csed Wrd t the Innite Universe
Aexandre Kor, (Baltimore: Johns Hopns Universit Press, I97), p. 276
4
HISTORICAL C
ONSTRCTI ON
nonthlss nit Furthrmor with us and ovr tim ths sam voyags of discovry stablishd th commrcial routs and th consqunt nlargd divisions of labor that would stadily shrink social and tmporal distancs
EIGHTEENTH
CENTRY TO 1945
5
could even be invoked as added incentive for the ever mor upward and outard explorations needed to enlarge that sphere of
trmsscinc unit simplicit mastry and vn th univrs" ar ndd to complt th lxicon Natural scinc as it was constructd in th svntnth and ightnth cnturis drivd primarily from th study of clstial mch anics t rst thos who attmptd to stablish th lgitimacy and priorit of th scintic sarch for th laws of natur mad littl distinction btn scinc an d philosophy To th xtnt that thy distinguishd th to domains thy thought of thm as allis in th sarch for scular truth But as xprimntal mpirical work bcam vr mor cntral to th ision of scinc philosophy bgan to sm to natural scintists mor and mor a mr substitut for tholog qually guilt of a priori assrtions of truth that wr untstabl By th bginning of th nintnth cntury th division of knowldg into to domains had lost th sns o f thir bing sparat but qual" sphrs and took on th lavor of a hirarchy at last in th ys ofnatural scintists knowldg that was crtain (s cinc) vrsus knowldg that was imagind vn ima ginary (what was not scinc) Finally in th bginning of th nintnth cntury th triumph of scinc was nsconcd linguistically Th trm scinc" without a spciing adctiv cam to b quatd primarily (oftn xclusivly) with natural scinc This fact markd th culmination of th attmt of natural scinc to acquir for itslf a
dominance still fther. In short, the abode of our present and past habitation came to look less like a home base and more like
tual lgitimacy tha was totally sparat from indd vn in position to anothr form ofnowldg calld philosophy
However, this nitude of the earth was not, at least not until recently, a source of discouragement. "ile the ideal and the ision of unlimited progress drew sustenance om the innities
of time and space, the practical realization of progress in human affairs through technological advance depended on the knowabilit and explorabilit of the world, on a condence in its nitude in certain key dimensions (especially its epistemology and geography . Indeed, it was generally supposed that achieing progress required that we rid ourselves completely of all inhibitions and restraint in our role as discoverers seeing to uncover the inner secrets and to tap the resources of a world ithin reach. Up until the te!tieth century, it seems that the nitude of the earthly sphere served primarily to facilitate the explorations and exploitation demanded by progres s, and to make practical and realizable Western aspirations to dominion. In the
tentieth century, as terrestrial distances began to shrink to a level that seemed to be constraining, the limitation s of the earth
a launching pad, the place from which we, as men (an d a few women) of science, could soar into a position of mastery over an ever more cosmic
Progrss and discovry may b th ky words hr but othr
This clear Enlish and in e Romance lanuaes. less clear in German, where e erm Wissenschaft coninues o be used as a eneral erm for sysemaic knowlede and where wha in nlish are called he "humaniies are called Geisteswissenschaften which rans laes lierally as knowlede of spiriual or menal maers.
6
HISTORICAL CONSTRCTION
EIGHTEENTH CENTRY TO
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7
Scinc ha is naa scinc was mo cay dnd han is anaiv fo which h wod has nv vn agd pon a sing nam. Somims cad h as somims h hmaniis somims s o belles-lettres somims phiosophy somims vn s c" o in Gman Geteswsenschaften h anaiv o scinc" has had a vaia fac and mphasis a ack of innal cohsivnss which did no hp is paciions plad hi cas wih h ahoiis spciay givn hi sming inaii o off pacica" ss. Fo i had gn o ca ha h pis moogica sggl ov wha was giima knowdg was no ong a sggl ov who wold cono nowdg ao na h naa sciniss had cay won xcsiv ighs o his domain y h ighnh cny ao who wod cono knowdg ao h hma n wod Th nd of h mon sa fo mo xac knowdg on which o as is dcisions had d o h mgnc of nw ca gois ofknowdg aady in h ighnh cn hs cagois si had ncain dniions and onis Socia phiosophs gan o spak of socia physics" and Eopan hinks gan o cogni h xisnc of mip inds of social sysms in h wod how can on a Psian ? wos vai ndd xpanaion I was in his conx ha h ni
hoog cam mino somims dis appaing c ompy o ing pacd y a m dpamn of igios sdis wihin h fac of phiosophy Th fac of mdicin consd is o as h cn of aining in a spcic pofssiona domain now niy dnd as appid scinic knowdg. I was pi maiywihin h fac ofphiosophy and o a fa ss dg wihin h fac of aw ha h modn scs o f knowl dg w o i. I was ino his fac wich maind scaly nid in many nivsiis was sdividd in ohs ha h paciions of oh h as and h naa sci ncs wod n and id hi mip aonomos discipi nay scs
vsi which had n in many ways a moind insiion sinc h sxnh cny h sl of having pvio sly n linkd oo cosy wih h Chch was vivd in h a igh nh and ay ninnh cnis ' h pincipa insi \ nal ocs fo h cai on of knowdg Th nivsi was vivd and ansfomd Th facl of
ind of autonomous i nstitutiona ife. T hey had been abe to earier because they coud lay caim to socia and poitical
The inteectua histor of the nineteenth century is marked above a by this discipinarization and professio nalization of nowedge, that is to say, by the creation of permanent inst itutional structures designed both to produce new knowedge and to reproduce the producers ofknowedge. The creation of mutiple discipines was premised on the beief that systematic research required skied concentration on the mutipe separate arenas of realit, which was partitioned rationally into distinct groupings of knowledge. Such a rational division promised to be effective, that is, i nteectuay productive. The n atura sciences had not awaited the reviva of the universit to estabish
po on h asis of hi pomis o podc pacica sls ha w immdiay s. Th is of oya acadmis in h svnnh and ighnh cnis and h caion of h grandes coles y Napoon lcd h wilingnss of h
8
HISTORICAL CONSTRCTION
EIGHTEENTH C
ENTRY TO
I95
9
ls o pomo h n aa scincs Th n aal sciniss phaps dd no nd h nivsiis o ps hi wok I was ah hos who w no naal scinisshisoi ans classiciss scholas of naiona liaswho id mos o viv h nivsis in h cos of h ninnh cny sing i as a mchanism o oain sa sppo fo hi schol alywok Thy plld h naal scinss ino h goning nivsi scs hy poing fom h posiiv pol of h naal sciniss. Th sl howv was ha fom hn on h nivsiis cam h pimay si of h conning nsion n h as (hmaniis and h scincs which w now ing dnd as qi diffn and fo som anago nisic ways of knoing In many conis cainly in Ga Biain and Fanc i was h clal phaval ogh ao y h Fnch Rvol on ha focd a en claicaon of h da T ps s fo polical and social ansfomaion had gaind an gncy and a lgimacy ha cold no asily conaind any long simpl y poclaiming hois ao a spposdly na al od of social lif Insad many agd ha h solion lay ah in oganiing ad aionaliing h social ch ang ha now smd o inial in a wold in which h sovgn of h popl " was fas coming h nom no do hoping
posiiv" h scinc phaps h Wih his in iw many of hos who gan o lay h ass of modn social sci nc in h s half of h ninnh cny mos noaly in Ga Biain and Fanc nd o Nwonian physics as a modl o mla Ohs mo concnd ih niing h social ni of h sas which had ndgon o w hand y social dis pion lookd o h laoaion of naional hisoical ac cons o ndpin h nw o ponal sovigns accons ha w howv now lss accons o f pincs han o f po pls" Th fomlaion of hisoy" as gechichte hap pnd wha really happnd was hogh o giv i impccal cdnials Hisoy wold cas o a hagiogaphy sing monachs and com h soy of h pas xplaining h psn offing h asis of is choic fo h f This ind of hiso (asd on mpiical achival sach oind so cial scinc and naal scinc in cing spclaion " an d ddcion" (pacics which w said o m philoso phy" B pcisly cas his nd of hisoy was dply con cnd wih h sois of popls ach mpiically diffn om h oh i lookd wih sspicion vn hosili pon h amps of h xponns of h nw social scinc" o gn ali ha is o salish nivsal laws of so ci
hy o limi is xn. B if on w o ogani and aio nali social chang on had s of all o sdy i and nd sand h ls which govnd i Th was no only spac fo a dp socia nd fo wha w com o call social sci nc Fhmo i smd o follow if on w o y o ogani a nw so cial od on a sal a s h mo xac ( o
In h cos of h ninnh cny h vaios plins spad o lik a fan coving a ang of pos iions on nd lay s mahmacs (a nonmpiical ac ii and nx o i h xpimnal naal scincs (hm slvs in a so of dscnding od of dminismphysics chmisy iolog . h oh nd lay h hmanis ( o as
0
HISTORICAL CONSRCTION
and ls saing h philosophy (h pndan of mahma ics as a nonmpiical acivi and nx o i h sdy of fomal aisic pacics (lias paining and sclp msicol og o n coming clo s in hi pacic o ing hisoy a his oy of h as And in n h hmaniis and h naal scincs hs dnd lay h sdy of social ais h hisoy ( idiogaphic clos o ofn pa of faculis of as and ls and social scinc" (nomohic clos o h naal scincs Amids an vhadning spaion of nowldg ino o dffn sphs ach h a diffn pismological mphasis h sdns of social aliis fond hmslvs cagh in h middl and dply diidd on hs pismolog cal isss All h is hov as occ ing in a conx in hi ch (N onian ) scinc had imphd ov (spc laiv) philosop hy and had h fo com o incna social psig in h old of noldg This spli n scinc and philosophy had n pocla imd as a divoc y gs Com alho gh in ali i psnd pimaily h cion of Aisolian ma physics and no of phi losophi cal conc ns p s No nhlss h iss s posd smd o a l: is h old govnd y d minisic las? o is h a plac a ol fo (human ivn ivnss and imaginaion? Th inllcal issu s fuh mo ovlain ih hi puaiv poliical implicaions. Polii cally h concp of dminisic las smd mo sfl fo amps a chnocaic conol of ponially anachi mov mns fo chang And poliically of h picla h nondmind h imaginaiv mo sfl no only fo hos ho sising chnocaic chang in h
EIGHTEENTH CENTRY TO
945
nam of con sving ising insi ions and adiions a lso fo hos who w sggling fo mo spo nano s mo ad cal possiiliis of ining hman agncy ino h sociopoli cal ana In his da which was coninos nlancd h ocom in h wold of nowldg was ha scinc (physics was vwh placd on a pdsal and in many conis philosophy was lgad o an v sm all con of h nivsi sysm On spons o f som philosophs was vnally o dn hi acivis in ways mo consonan ih h scinic hos (h analyic phil osophy of h Vinna posiiiss Scinc was poclaimd o h discovy of ojciv al i sing a mhod ha nald us o go outside h mind whas philosophs w said mly o cogia and i ao hi cogi aion s This w of scinc and philosophy was assd qi claly y Com and Joh n Sa Mill in h s half of h ninnh cny as hy undoo o lay don h ls ha wold govn analyss of h social wold In viving h m s ocial physics" Com mad cl his poliical con cs H ishd o sav h Ws om h sysmaic cop ion" which had com cd i no an indspns al ool of govning" cas of h inllcal anachy ha had n manifs sinc h Fnch Rvolion In his viw h pa od was asing islfof onmov omodd ( Caholic dal whil h p mndocins was asing islf onand ngaiv and dsuciv hss dawn fom Posanism Fo Com social physics wold pmi h conciliai on of od and pogss y ning ov h solion of social qsions o a small nm of li inlligncs" ih h appopia
12
HISTORICAL C
ONSTR CTION
EIGHTEENTH CENTRY TO
1945
ducation. In this way th Rvolution would b trminatd" by th installation of a nw spiritual powr. Th tchnocratic basis and th so cial function of th nw social physics wa s thus clar. In this nw structur of knowldg philosophrs would bcom in a clbratd formula th spcialists of gnralitis." hat this mant was that thy would apply th logic of clstial mchanics (brought to prfction in PirrSimon Laplac's vrsion of th Nwonian prototp) to th social world. Positiv scinc was intndd to rprsnt total libration from tholog and mtaphysics and all othr mods of xplaining" ralit. Our rsarchs thn in vry branch of knowldg if thy ar to b positiv must b connd to th study of ral facts without sing to now thir rs t ca uss or nal purpos . " 5 Comt' s English countrpa rt and corrspondnt John Stuart Mill spok not of po sitiv scinc but of x act scinc but th modl of clstial mchanics rmaind th sam: [th scinc of human natur] falls far short of th standards of xactnss now ralid in stronomy; b ut thr is no rason that it should not b as much a scinc as Tidolog is or as stronomy was whn its calculations ha d only astrd th main phn omna but not th prturbations ." 6 lthough th undrpinnings of th diisions ithin th social scincs wr clarly crystalliing in th rst half of th nin-
of th social scincs was formally rcogni d in th principal univrsitis in th forms that w now thm today. To b sur in th priod btn 1500 and 1850 thr had alrady xistd a lit ratur concrning many of th cntral qustions tratd in whatw today call so cial scinc th f unctioning of politic al institutions th macroconomic policis of th stats th ruls govrning intrstat rlations th dscription of nonEuropan social systms . Today w still rad N iccolo Machiavlli and Jan Bodin William Ptt and Hugo Grotius th Frnch Physiocrats and th Scottish Enlightnmnt as wll as th authors of th rst half of th nintnth cntury from Thomas Malthus and Daid Ricardo to Fraois Guiot and lxis d Tocquill to Johann Hrdr and Johann Ficht. W vn hav in this priod arly discussions of social dvianc as in Csar Bccaria. But all this was not yt quit what w hav com to man today by social scinc and non of ths scholars yt thought of himslf as oprating within th framwork ofwhat latr wr cons idrd th sparat disciplins. Th cration o f th multipl disciplin s of social scinc was part of th gnral nintnthcntury attmpt to scur and advanc objctiv" nowldg about ralit " on th basis of mpirical ndings (as op posd to spculation") . Th intnt was to larn" th truth not invnt or in tuit it. Th pro css of institu-
tnth cntury it was only in th priod 18501914 that th intllctual divrsication rlctd in th disciplinary structurs
tionaliation of this indFor of knowldg at allclar simpl or straightforward. on thingactiitwas it was not not at rst whthr this actiitwas to b a singular on or should rathr b diidd into th svra l disciplins as latr occurrd. Nor was it at th outst clar what was th bst rout to such nowldg that is what ind of pistmolog would b mo st fruitful or vn
Discurse n the Psitive pirit and Inductive, stem f Lgic Cected Wrks f hn tuart Mi
(London: uuste Comte, A Wllam Reeves , I93), p . I . 6 ohn Stuart Mll, A vol. 8 of (Toronto Unverst of Toronto Press, I97), bk. 6, chap. 3, para , p 86.
HISTORICAL CONSTRCTION
EIGHTEENTH CENTRY TO 1945
5
lgitimat. Last of all was it clar whthr th so cial scincs could in som sns b thought to co nstitut a third cultur" that was btn scinc and litratur" in th latr formulation of Wolf Lpnis. In fact non of ths qustions has vr bn dnitivly rsolvd All w can do is to not th actual dcisions that wr mad or th majorit positions that tndd to prvail. Th rst thing to not is whr this institutionaliation took plac. Thr wr v main locals for social scinc activit during th nintnth cntury: Grat Britain Franc th Grmanis th Itali s and th Unitd S tats. Mo st of th scholars most of th univrsitis (of cours not all) wr locatd in ths v placs Th univrsitis in othr countris lackd th n umrical wight or in trnationa prstig of thos in ths v. To this day most of th nintnthcntury works that w still rad wr rittn in on ofhs v local s. Th scond thing to not is that a vry larg and divrs st o f nams of s ubjct mattrs" or disciplins" wr pu t forward during th cours of th cntury. Howvr by th First World War thr was gnral convrgnc or consnsus around a fw spcic nams and th othr candidats wr mor or lss droppd. Th s nam s as w shall discuss wr primaril v: history conom ics socio log political scinc and anthropol-
tonomous institutional xistnc was history. It is tru that many historians igorou sly rjctd th labl of so cial scinc and som still do s o today. W howvr rgard th quarrls btn th historians an d th othr social scinc disciplins a s quarrls within so cial scinc as w shall try to mak clar as w procd. History was of cours a longstanding practic and th trm itslf is ancint. ccounts of th past particularly accounts of th past of on's o popl on's stat wr a familiar activit in th world of knowldg. And hagiography had always bn ncouragd by thos in powr. hat distinguishd th nw d isciplin" of history as it dvlopd in th nintnth cntury was th rigorous mphasis it put on th sarch to nd out wie es eigenich gewesen ist (what rally happnd") in Rank's famous phras. opposd to what? Most of all as opposd to tlling storis that wr imagind or xaggratd bcaus thy lattrd th radrs or srvd th immdiat purposs of rulrs or any othr powrful groups . It is hard to miss how much this Rankian slogan rlctd th thms usd by scinc" in its struggl ith phil osophy" th mphasis on th xistnc of a ral world that is objctiv and owabl th mphasis on mpirical vidnc th mph asis on th nutralit of th scholar. Furthrmor th historian lik th natural scintist was not su pposd to nd his data in prior
og. On might add to this list as w shall s th so calld Orintal scincs ( calld Orintalism in English) dspit th fa ct that thy slfcon sciously did not consdr thmslvs social scincs . Whyw do not includ psycholog and law in this lis w shall xplain Th rst of th social scinc disciplins to achiv an au
ings (th library locus of rading) or in his own thought csss (th study locus of rlction) but rathr in a plac whr objctiv xtrnal data could b assmbld stord controlld and manipulatd (th laboratory th archiv loci of rsarch) . This c ommon rjction o f spculativ philos ophy drw history and scinc togthr as modrn" (that is not mdival)
16
HISTORICAL CONSTRCTION
mods of nowldg But sinc th histoians w also jcting philosophy insofa as it ntaild th sach fo gnal schmas which nabld on to xplain mpiical data thy flt that a sach fo scintic laws" of th social wold would only lad thm back into o It is this doubl maning fo histoians of thi jction o f philosophy that xplain s h ow thy could in thi wok not only lct th nw dominanc in Euopan thought of th pimacy of scinc but also b th stong halds and poponnts of an idiogaphic antithoiing stanc It is fo this ason that thoughout th nintnth cntuy most histoians insistd that thy blongd in facultis of ltts and tndd to b way of any idntication ith th nw catgoy th social scincs that was slowly coming into fashion hil it is tu that som ofth aly nintnthcntuy histoia ns statd outith so mvision s of a univsal histo y (a last link ith tholog) t h combination o f thi i diogaphic commitmnts and th s ocial pssus co mingom th stats as wll as fom ducatd public opinion push d histoia ns in th diction of witing pimaily thi own national histois th dnition of the nation being more or less circumscribed by a push back in tim of th spac occupid in th ps nt by t h stat boundais in xistnc o in constuction. In any cas th m-
phasis of histoians on th us o f achivs basd on an indpth
contxtual nowldg of th cultu mad histo ical sach sm most valid whn pfomd in on 's own bacad Thus it was that histoians wh o had not wantd to ngag any long in justiing kngs found th mslvs in justing "na-
tions" and oftn thi nw sov igns This was no doubt usful to th stats b ut only indictly i n
EIGHTEENTH CENTRY TO
19 45
7
tms of infocing thi social cohsion It did not hlp thm to dcid on is policis in th psnt and ctainly od littl isdom about th modatis of ational fomism Bn 1500 and 180, th vaious stats had alady bcom accustomd to tuning to spcialists oftn ciil svants to hlp thm fog policy paticulaly in thi mcantilist momnts Ths spcialists offd thi knowldg und many ubics such as juispudnc (an old tm) and law of th nations ( a nw on) political conomy ( also a nw tm indcating qui t litally macoconomi cs at th lvl of th politis) statistics (anoth nw tm fing initially to quantitativ data about th stats) and Kamelwissenschaften (administativ scincs) Juispudnc was alady taught in th facultis o flaw of th univsitis and Kamelwissenschaften bcam a subjct in Gmanic univsitis in th ightnth cntuy Howv only in th nintnth cntuy do w bgin to nd a disciplin calld conomics somtims ithin th facult oflaw but oftn ithin th facult (s omtims xfacult) of philosophy And givn th pvailing libal conomic thois of th nintnth cntuy th phas p olitical conomy" (popula in th ight nth cntuy) disappas in fav o of cono mics" by th s cond half of th nintnth cntuy B y stipping away th adjctiv political" conomists could agu that conomic bhavio was th lction of a univsal individualist psycholog ath than socially constuctd instit utions an agumnt which could thn b usd to asst th natu alnss oflai ssfai pincipls Th univsaliing assumptions of conomics mad th study of conomic s vy psnt ointd a sult c onomic histoy was always lgatd to a mino plac in conomics cuic
18
HISTORICAL C
ONSTR CTION
EIGHTEENTH C
ENTRY TO
1945
1
ula, and the subdiscipline of econ omic history developed larg ely out of (and partially separated itself from ) history more than out of economics. The one major attempt in the nineteenth century to develop a social science that was neither nomothetic nor idio graphic but rather a search for the rules governing historically specic social systems was the construction in the Germanic zone o f a eld called Staatswissenschaften This eld covered (in presentday terms) a mixture of economic history, urisprudence, sociolog, and economicsinsisting on the historical specicit of dfferent states" and maing none of the dsciplinary distincti ons that were coming into use in Great Britain and rance The very name Staatswissenschaften ( sciences of th e state") indicated that its proponents were seeng to occupy somewhat the same intellectual space that political economy" had covered earlier in G reat Britain and rance, and therefore to serve the same funct !n of proiding knowledge that would be useful, at least in the longer run to the states. This disciplinary invention lourished part icularly in the second half of the nineteenth century but ultimately succumbed to attacks from ithout and cold feet from ithin. In the rst decade of the tentieth century, German social sc ience began to co nform to the disciplinary categories in use in Great Britain and ranc e . Someofthe leading younger gures in Staatswissenschaften such as M
invented name: sociolog. or the inventor, Comte, sociolog was to be the queen of the science s, an integrated and unied social science tha twas positi ist," another Comteian neologsm. In practice, however, sociolog as a dscipline deve lope d in the second half of the nineteenth century, principally out of the institutionalization and transformation thin the universities of the work of social reform ass ociation s, whos e agenda had been primarily that of deali ng ith the dscontents and dsorders of the muchenlarged ur ban worngclass populations . By mong their work to a universit setting, these social reformers largely surrendered their role of active, immediate legislative lobbing. But sociolog has always nonetheless retained its concern th orinary people and with the social c onsequences of modernit. Partly in order to con summ ate the break ith its srcins in social reform organizations sociologsts began to cultivate a positiist thrust, which, combined with their orientation towar d the present, pushed the m as wellinto the nomothet ic camp. Political science as a discipline emerged still later, not because its subje ct matter, the contem porary state and its politics, was less amenable to nomothetic analysis, but primaril y because of the resistance of faculties of law to eld their mono poly in ths arena. The resistance oflaw faculties m ay explain the importance given by political scientists to the study of political
Weber, too k the lead in foundi ng the German Soc iological So ciet. B the 1920', the term Sozialwissenschaften (social sciences" ) had displaced Staatswissenschaften t the same time that becoming an established discipline in the oriented and nomothetic a totally new discipline was being invented, ith an
ophy, sometimes under the name of political theory, at least until the socalled behaiorist revolution of the post945 pe� riod. Political philosophy allowed the new discipline of political science to claim a heritage that went back to the Greeks and to read authors that had long had an assured place in university curricula.
HSTORCAL CONSTRUCTON
EGHTEENTH CENTURY TO 94 5
Still, political phi losophy was not enough to justi ceating a new discipine; it could, afte all, have continued to be taught within philosophy depatments, and indeed it was. Political science as a sepaate isci pline accomplished a futhe objective: it legitimated economic s as a sepaate discipline. Political economy had been ejected as a subject matte because of the agu ment that the state and the maket opeated and should opeate by distinctive logics. In the long un, this logically equied as its guaantee the establishment of a sepaate scientic study of the political aena. The quatet of histoy, economics, sociolog, and political science, as they became unive sit disciplines in the nineteenth centuy (and indeed ight up to 945 not only wee pacticed pimaily in the ve counties of thei collective oigin but wee lagely concened with descibing social ealit in the same ve counties. It not that the univesities of these ve counties totally ignoed the est of the wold. It is athe that they segegated thei stud y into dieent disciplines . The ceation of the mo den woldsystem inv olved the uopean encounte with, and in most cases conquest of, the peoples of the est of the wold. In tems of the categoies of uopean expeience, they encounteed to athe diffeent inds of peoples and social stuctues . Thee wee peoples who lived in ela-
dopped ou t of use, because of its confusions with the othe use of ace s," efeing to athe lage goupings o f human beings on the basis of sin colo and othe biological attibutes). The study of these people s becam e the doma in of a new discipline called anthopolog. so ciolog had lagely begun as the activit of social efom associations outside the univesities, so had anthopolog lagely begun outside the univesit as a pactice of exploes, taveles, and ofcials of the colonial seces of the uopean powes. Like socio log, it subse quently became institutionalized as a univesit discipline, but one that was quite segegated om the othe social sciences, which studied the Westen wold. hile some ealy anthopologists wee attacted to the univesal natual histoy of humankind (and its pesum ed stages of development ) , just as ealy histoians wee att acted to univesal histoy, the social pessues of the extenal wold pushed anthopologists into becoming ethnogaphes of paticula peoples , usually chosen f om among those found in the intenal o extenal colonie s of thei county . This then almost ineitably implied a quite specic methodolog, built aound eldwok (theeby meeting the equiement of the scientic ethos of empiical eseach) and paticipant obs evation in one paticula aea (meeting the equiement of achieving he indepth
tively small goups, who had no system of witten ecods, who did not seem to shae in a geogaphically falung eligious system, and who wee militaily weak in elation to uopean technolog. Geneic tems to descbe uh people s came into use: in nglish, they wee usually alle In some othe languages, they wee called aces" (although this tem late
edge of the cultue equied fo undestanding, so difcult to quie in a cultue vey stange to the scientist) Paticipant obsevation always theatened toviolate the ideal of scientic neutalit, as id the temptation fo the anthopologist (simila to that of the missionaies) to become a mediato fo the people he/she studied with the uopean conqueing
22
HSTORCAL CONSTRUCTON
EGHEENTH CENTURY TO 945
wod, espec iay since he anhopoogis ended o e a ciien of he cooniing powe of he peope eing sdi ed ( e g , Biish anhopoogiss in easen an d sohen Afica, ench anhopoogiss in Wes Afica, U.S. anhopoogiss in Gam o sdying Ameican Indians, Iaian anhopoogiss in Liya I was hei anchoing in he sces of he nivesi ha was mos inenia in consaining anhopoogiss o mainain he pacice of ehnogaphy wihin he nomaive pemises of science hemoe, a seach fo he pisine peconac" sae of ces pshed ehnogaphes owad a eief ha hey wee deaing wih peopes wiho hisoy," in Eic Wofs pngen fomaion This migh have ned hem owad a pesenoiened, nomoheic sance ain o economiss, and afe 945 sca anhopoogwodake peciseyhis n Bwha ook pioi iniiay was he need o si he sdy of diffeence and o defend heoa egiimacy of no eing Eopea n And heefoe, fooing he sam e ogic as ha of he eay hisoians, anhopoogiss esised he demand o fomae aws, pacicing fo he mos pa an idiogaphic episemoog A nonEopean peopes cod no, howeve, e cassied as ie s" Eopeans had ong had co nac ih ohe socaed high civiiaions," sch as he aIsamic wod and China Thes e one s wee co nsideed high" civiiaions y Eopeans
hey meied espec, even someimes admiai on , and ye, o e se , pemen a s we In he nineeenh ceny, howeve, as a es of Eopes fhe echnooica advances, hese ciiiaions " wee made ino Eopean coonies, o a eas ino sem icoonies Oiena sdies, whos e oigina home was in he Chch and whos e oigina sicaion was as an aiiay o evangeiaion, ecame a moe seca pacice, evenay nding a pace in he evoving discipinay sces of he nivesiies The insiionaiaion of Oiena sdies was in fac peceded y ha of he ancien Medieanean wod, wha in Engish was caed he cassics," he sdy of Eopes own aniqi This was aso a sdy of a civiiaion ha was diffeen fom ha of moden Eope , iwas n o eaed in he sam e way as Oiena sdies. Rahe i was co nsideed o e he hisoy of hose peop es who wee dened as he ancesos of moden Eope, nike, say, he sdy of ancien Egp o of Mes opoamia The ciiiaion of aniqi was expicaed as he eay phase of a singe coninos hisoica deveopmen ha cminaed in moden Wesen" ciiiaion I was hs seen as pa of a singe saga s aniqi, hen ih aaian conqes he conini poided y he Chch, hen ih he Renaiss ance he eincopoaion of he GecoRoman heiage and he ceaion o f he
pecisey ecase hey did have iing, did have eigios sysems ha wee geogaphica y idespead, and wee oganied poiicay (a eas fo ong seches of ime in he fom of age, eacaic empies Euopesuy of hese ciiia ions had egn wih he medieva cl�s Beeen he hi eenh and he eigheenh cenies, hese civiiaions" wee si miiaiy sfcieny esisan o Eopean conqes ha
wod In his sense, aniqi had no aonomos ahe, i cons ied he pooge of modeni By co nas, foowing he same ogic , e ohe ciiiaions " had no aonomos hisoy eihe ahe, hey ecame he soy of hisoies ha we e foen , ha had no pogessed, ha had no cminaed in modeni Cassics was pimaiy a ieay sdy, ahogh i oviosy
HSTORCAL CONSTRCTON
EGHTEENTH CENTRY TO 945
overlapped ith the historical stdy of Greece and Rome In seein to creat e a discipline separate om philosophy (and theolo) , the classicists d ened their sbject ma tter as a combination o f all inds of literatre (not merely the ind which philosophers reconized) , th e arts (and its new adnc t, archaeolo), and sch history as cold be done in the mode of the new history (which was not too mch, iven the pacit of primary sorces ) This combination made classic s clo se in practice to the simltaneosly emern disciplines that focsed o n the national literatres of each o fthe ma or Western ropean states The bellettristic tone of classic s set the scene for the many varietes of Oriental st dies that bean to enter the niversit crricla. Given their premises, h owever, Orientalist scholars adopted a very special practice. hat became of intere st was n ot reconstrcn iachro nic seq ences, as for Eropean history, since this history was no� presmed to proress What was of interest was n derstanin an d appre ciatin the set of vales and practices t hat created civilizations which, althoh considered to be hih" ciilizations, were nonetheless thoht to be immobile. Sch nderstandin cold best b e achieved, it was ared, by a clos e readin of the texts that incarnated their wisdom; an d this reqired li nistic and phil oloical sills, qite ain to those that had been taditionally sed by the mon in
an important niche in the social sciences since, for a lon time, Orientalist scholars were irtallythe only on es in th e niversit who enaed in the stdy of social realities that related to Chin a, or Inia, or Persia There we re, to be s re, n addition a few so cial scientists who were interested in co mparin Oriental civilizations with Western ciilizations ( sch as Max Weber, Ar nold Tonbee , and, less systematically, Karl Marx). Bt these comp aratiist scholars, nlie the Orientalist scholars, were not concerned ith Oriental civlizations for their own sae Rather, their primary intellecal concern was always to explain why it was the Western world, and not these other cilizations, that went forward to mo dernit ( or capitalism ) word needs to be said as we ll of three elds that never qite made it as principal components of the social scienc es: eoraphy, psycholo, and law Georaphy, lie history, ws an ancient practice In the late nineteenth cen try, it reconstrcted itself as a new discipline, primarily in German niversities, which served to inspire dev elopments elsewhere hile th e concern s of eraphy were primarily those o f a so cial scienc e, it resisted cateorization It soht to bride the ap th the natral sciences throh its concern ith physical eoraphy, as well as ith the hmanities throh its concern with what w as called hman eoraphy (in some ways doin wor simil ar
the st dy of Christia n texts In thi s sense, Orient al stdies resisted modernit altoether and was not therefore caht p for the most part in the scientic ethos. Ev en more than the hist orians, th e Orientalist sch olars sa w no in social scien ce, and riorosly shnned asso ciation ith preferrin to consider themselves part of th e hm anities" Still, they lled
that of anthropoloists, thoh ith an emphasis on mental inlence s ) . rthermore, eoraphy was he one pline in the p eriod before 945 that in practice cons ciosly tried to be trly worldide in terms of its sbject matter This was its irte and perhaps its ndoin s the stdy of social realit became increasinly compartmentaliz ed in the late nineteenth
HSTORCAL CONSTRUCTON
EGHTEENTH CENTURY TO 945
century into separate disciplines, ith a clear diision of labor, geography appeared anachronistic in its generalist, synthesizing, nona naltic penchants. Probably in consequence, geography remained through all this period a sort of poor relat ion in terms o f numbers and pestige, often serving merely as a ind o f minor adjunct to history. a result, treatment of space and place was relatively neglected in the so cial sciences . The focus on progress and the politics of organizing social change made the temporal dimension of social existence crucial, but left the spatia dimension in limbo If proces ses were universal an d deterministic, spac e was theoreticaly irrelevant. If processes verged on being unique and unrepeatable, space became merely one element (and a minor one ) of specicity. In the former iew, s pac e was see n as merelya platfom upon which events unfolded or pro cesse s operated ess entially inert, just there ad no more In the latter iew, space becam e a context inluencing events (in idiographic history, in ealist international relations, in neighborhood effects, even in Marshallian ex ternalities ) . But for the mos t part, these contex tual effects were seen as mere inluencesresiduals that had to be taken into account to get better empirical results, but ones that were not central to the analysis. Nonetheess , s ocial science in practice based itself on a par-
macroeconomists national economy, the political scientists polity, the historian's nation. ach ass umed a fundamental spatial conguence between political, social, and economic process es. In this sens e, social science was very much a creature, i f not a creation, of the states , taing their boundaries as crucial social containers. Psychology was a different case. Here too , the discipline separated out of philosophy, seeing to recon stitute itself in the new scientic form Its practice, however, came to be dened as lying not in the social arena but primarily in the medical arena, which meant that its legitimacy depended on the clos eness of its as sociation ith the natural sciences. urthermore, the positiists, sharing the premise of Comte (the eye cannot look at itsel') , pushed psychology in this direc tion. or many, the only p sychology that could be scientically legitimate would be one that was physiological, even chemi cal. Hence these psychologists s ought to move beyond social science to become a biological science, and consequently in most univesities psychology eventu ally shifted its berth from faculties of the social scie nces to those ofthe natural sciences . There were, of course, forms of psychological theorizing which placed their emphasis on the analysis of the individual in society. These socaled social psychologists did try to remain !
ticular iew of spatiality, albeit one that was unavowed. The set of spatial sructures through which social scientists assumed lives were organized were the sovereign territories that collectively dened the world pol itical map. yall social scientists assumed that these political boundaries ed the spatial paameters of other k ey interactions the sociolog ist's society, the
ithin the camp of social scienc e. But social p sychology was fo the most part not successful in establishing a full institutional autonomy, and suffered visis psychology the same ind of marginalization that economic histoy suffered visvis economics. In many cases, it suriv ed bybe ing absorbed as a subdis cipline ithin sociology. There were, to be sure, various inds of
·i:
HSTORCAL CONSTRCTON
EGHTEENTH CENTRY TO 945
psychology that were not postvstc for example, geisesis senschfiche psychology and Gesl psychology. The strongest and most inluential theorizing in psychology that might have turned it toward dening itself as a social sci ence, reudian theory, failed to do so for to reason s irst, it emerged out of medical practice, and second, its initially scandalous quality made it, as an activity, something of a parah leaing psychoanalysts to create structures of institutional reproduction totally outside the university system This may have preserved psych oanalysis as a practice and a sc hool of thought, but it meant that ithin the unversity reudian concepts found their berth largely in departments other than psychology egal studies was a third eld that never quite became a s ocial scence or one thing, there already was a faculty of law, and its curricula was closely linked to ts primary function of trainng layers The nomothe}ic social scientists regarded jurisprudence with some skepticism It seemed too normative, too little rooted in empirical investigaton. Its laws were not scientc laws. ts context seeme d too idiographic. Political science broke away from analysis of such laws and their history in order to ana lye the abstract rules which governed political behavior, from which it would be po ssible to derive appropriately rational egal systems
bg ques ton, and mos t answers to t were offered no t at th e leve of the sovereign states but at the level of comparative civlizations " (to which we have adverted previously) . It was Europe as Western" civilization that had demonstrated superior productive and military prowess , not just Great Britain or rance or Germany, whatever the sizes of their individual empires This concern th how Europe expanded to dominate the world coincided ith the Darinian intellec tual transition . The secularization of knowledge promoted by the Enlghtenment was conrmed by the theory of evolution, and Darinian theories spread far beyond their biological srcns lthough Netonian physics as exemplar dominated socal science methodology, Darnian biology had a very great inluence on social theorizing through the seemingly irresi stible metaconstruct of evolution, ith a great deal of emphasis on the concept of the survival of the ttest The concept of the surival of the ttest was subject to much use and abuse, and was often confused ith the concept of suc cess through co mpetition. loos e interpretation of evolutionarytheo ry could be u sed to provide scient ic legitimation to the assumption tha t progress culminated n the selfevident superiority of contemporary European society: stage theories of societal development culminating in industrial civilization, hi
There is o ne last aspect of the institutionalization o f socal scence that is important to noe. The proces s took place at th e very time that Europe was nally conrming its dominion over the rest of the world. This gave rse to obvious question why was this small part of the world able to all rivals and mpo se its wll on the Aericas, Africa, and Aia? This was a very
interpretations of history, climatologcal determinism, cerian sciology These early studies in comparative civiliza tion were, however, not as statecentric as fully institutionalized social science. They thus fell victim to the impact of the to wod wars, which together undermined some of the liberal optimism upon which the progressive theories of civilizations were
HSTORCA CONSTRCTON
EGHTEENTH CENTRY TO 1945
built. Hence in the twentieth century histor anthropolog and geography nally marginalized completely what remaned of their earlier universalizing tradition s and the statecentric trinit of sociolog economics and political science consolidated their po sitions as the core (no mothetic) social scienc es Thus between 185 0 and 1945 a series o disciplines came to be dened as constituting an arena of nowledge to which the name social science" was accorded. This was done by establishing in the principal universities rst chairs then departments oering courses leading to degrees in the discipline. The institutionalization of training was accompanied by the institutionalization of research: the creation ofjournals specialized in each of the disciplines; the construction of associations of scholars along discipli nary lines (rst national then internati onal) ; the creation o flibrary collections catal oged by disciplines An ess ential element i n this proc ess of institutionalizing the disciplines was the effort by each of them to dene what distinguished each from the other especially what dfferentiated each from those that seemed cl osest in content in the study of social realities Beginning ith Leopold von Ranke Barthold Niebuhr and Johann Droysen historians asserted their special relationship to a special tpe of materials especially archival sorces and similar text s They stresse d thatt hey were interested in re-
of peoples that were quite dfferent om the Western forms. They demonstrated that customs strange to Western eyes were not irrational but functioned to preserve and reproduce pop ulations. Orientalist scolars studied explicated and translated the texts of nonWestern high" civilizations and were instrumental in legtimating the concept of world religions" which was a break with Christo centric views. Most of the nomothetic social s ciences stressed rst wh at dfferentiated them from the historical discipline: an interest in arriving at general laws that were presumed to govern human behavior a readiness to perceive the phenomen a to be studied as case s (not individualities) the need to segmentalize human rea lit in order to analyze it the possibilit and desirabilit of strict scientic methods (such as theoryrelated formulation of hypotheses to tested against evidence v strict and if possible quantitative procedures) a preference for systematically produced evidence (e g survey data) and controlled observat ions over received texts and o ther residuals Once social science was distingished in this way from idiographic histor the nomothetic social scientistseconomists polit ical scientists and sociologists were also anxious to stake out their separate terrains as essentially dfferent one om the other (both in subject matte r and in methodolog )
con structing past realit by relating it to the cultural needs of the present in an interpretative and hermeneutic ay insisting on studing phenomena even the most complex ones like whole cultures or nations as individualities as moments ( or parts) of diachronic and synchronic Anthropologists reconstructed mod es o f social organizat ion
did this by insisting on the validit of a ceter paribus tion in studying market operations Political scientists did it restricting their concerns to formal governmental structures So ciologists did it by insist ing o n an emergent social terrain ig nored by the eco nomists and the political scientists. Al this it may be said was largel y a success story The estab
2
STRCAL CONSTRUCTON
lishment of the disciplinary structures created able, productive structures of research, analysis, and training, which gave birth to the considerable literature that today we consider the heritage of contemporar y social science. By 1945, the panoply of disciplines comprising the social scienc es was basically insti tutionalized in most of the major universities of the world There had been resistance to (indeed, often refusal of) these classications in the fascist and communist countries. With the end of the Secon d World War, German and Italian institutions fell into line fully th the accepted pattern, and the Soietbloc countries did so by the late 1950' s. urthermore, by 1945 the social sciences were clearly distinguished on the one hand from the natural science s, which studie d nonhuman systems, and on the other from the humanities, which studied the cultural, mental, and spiritual production of civ ilzed" human s ocieties. ter the Sec ond Wrld War, however, at the very moment when the institutional structur es of the social s ciences seeme d for the r st time fully in plac e and clearly delineated, the practices of social scientists began to change. This was to create a gap, one that wold grow, beteen the practices and intellectual poitions o f social scientists on the one side and the formal organization of the social sciences on the other
Debates Within the Social Sciences� 1945 to the Present Discipes costitute a system o cotro i the productio o dscourse, its mits throuh the actio o a ietit taki the orm o a permaet reactivatio o the rues. Miche Foucaut
T
hree developments after 1945 profoundly affected the structure of the social sciences that had bee n put into place in the preceding hundred years. The rst was the change in the world political sructure The United States emerged from the Second World War th overwhelming economic strengh, ithin a world that was p olitically dened by to new geopolitical realities: the socalled cold war beteen the United States and the US.S.R, and the historical reassertion of the nonuropean peoples of the world The second development was the fact that, in the tentve years folloing 1945, the worl had the largest expansion of its pro ductive capacit and popul tion that it had ever known, one that involved an expansion in scale of all human actities The third was the consequent extraordinary quantitative and geographic expansion of the univer . Miche Foucaut, The Arch aeo logy ofKnowledge and the Discourse on Language (NewYork Patheo, 92), p. 22
34
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCA SCENCES
sit system everwhere in the world, which led to a multiplication of the numbers of professional social scientists. ach of these three new social realities posed a problem for the social sciences, as they had been historically institutionalized. The enormous strenh of the U. S. visvis all other states affected profoundly the denition of what were the most urent issues to be adressed, and what were the most suitable ways of addressin them. The overwhelmin economic advantae of the U . S. in the fteen to twentve years folloin the Se cond World Warmea ntth at, for a while at least , social scientic activ it was located primarily within U.S. institutions to an unusual deree, and this of course affected how priorities were dened by social scientists. On the other hand, the political reassertion of the nonuropean peoples meant that many assumptions o f social science would be called into question on the rounds that they relected the politcal biases of an era which was now over, or at least endin. The rnaway expansion of the universit system worldide had avery specic oranizational implicatio n. It created a struc-
tural pr essure for incr eased s pecialization simply be cause scholars we re in se arch of niches t hat cou ld dene their oriinalit or at least the ir socia l utilit The most imm ediate effect was to e ncourae recipro cal int rusions by soci al scien tists in to neihborin disciplinary domain s, i norin in the process the various le itimations t hat each of the social sciences had erected to justi their spe cicities as reserved realm s. And the economic expansion fueled this specialization by p
'n the resources that
made it po ssible. There was a second oranizational implication. The world
1945 TO THE PRESENT
35
economic expansion involved a quantum leap in scal e for the state machinerie s and for the economic enterpris es, to be sure, but also for the oranizations of research. The major powers, larely stimulated by the cold war, bean to invest in bi science, and this investment was extended to the social sciences. The percentae allocated to the social sciences was small , but the absolute ures were very hih in relation to anyhin that had previously been available. This economic input encouraed a further, fuller scientization of the social scie nces. The result was the emerence of centralized poles of scientic development ith a concentration of information and s ll, ith nancial resourcesthat werepro videdprima rilybytheU. S. andother major states, by foundations (lare ly U.S based) , but also, to a le sser extent, by transnat ional corporations herever the institutional structurin of the social sciences was incomplete, U.S. scholars and institutions encouraed, di rectly and indirectly, folloin the established model, ith particular emphasis on the more nomothetic tendencies ithin the social sciences. The massive public and private investment in scientic research ave these poles of scientic development an unquestionable advantae over orientations that seemed less riorous and polic oriented Thus, th e economic expansion re inforced the worldide leitimation ithin social science scientic paradims that underlay the technoloical ments behind it t the same time, however, the endin of political dominion of the Western world over the rest of the world meant that new voices were enterin the scene not only of politics but also of social science. We shall discuss the conseuences of these chanes in the
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCA SCENCES
1945 TO THE PRESENT
world for three successive issues: the validit of the distinctions among the social scienc es; ) the degree to which the heritage is parochial; ( 3 ) the utilit and realit of the distinction beteen the to cultu res ."
There were three clear lines of cleavage in the system of disciplines erected to structure th e social sciences in the late nineteenth century: the line beteen the study of the modern/ civilized world (history plus the three nomothetic social sciences) and the study of the nonm odern world (anthropolog, pus Oriental studies ); ithin the study of the modern world , the line beteen the past (history) and the present (the nomothetic so cial sciences ) ; ithin the nomothetic soci al sciences , the sharp lines beteen the study of the market (economics ) , the state (politica l science), and civil socie (sociolog). ach of these lines of cleavage came to be challenged in the post1945 world. Probably the most notable academic innovation after 1945 was the creation of area studies as a new institutional category to roup intellectual work. This concept rst emerged in the United States during the Secon d World War. It was widelyiplemened in the United States in the ten years folloing the end
sia, Southeast sia, astCentral urope, and, much later, Western urope as well. In som e countries, the United Stat es ( or North America) also became the object of area studies. Not every universiy adopted exactly these geographic categorie s, of course. There were many variations . Area studies was suppose d to be an arena of both scholarship and pedagog, one which brought together all those perso ns primarily from the various social sciences , bu t often o m the humanities as well, and occasionally even from some natural sciences on the bas is of a shared intere st in doing work in their discipline about the given a rea" (or a part of it) . Area studies was by denition multidisciplinary." The political motivations underling its srcins were quite explicit. The United States, given its worldwide political role , needed owledge about, a nd therefore specialists on, the current real ities of these various regions, especially since these regions were now bec oming so po litically active. Aea studies programs were designed to train such specialists, as were subsequent parallel programs rst in the U.S.S.R. and in western urope, and then in many other parts of the world (e.g., Japan, India, ustralia, and various Latin Aerican countries) . rea studies brought within a single structure (at least for part of their intellectual ife) persons whose disciplinary
of the war, and it subsequently spread to universities other parts o f the world. Th e basic idea of area studie s was very simple. A area was a large geographi c zone which had s ome supp ose d cultural, historic, an d often heene Th e list as it emerged was very heterodox in haracte: the U.S.S.R. China (or ast sia), Latin merica, the Middle ast, rica South
tions cut acros s the three cleavages we have mentioned: the his torians and nomothetic so cial scientists f ound themselves face to face with the anthropologists and the Orientalist scholars, the historians face to fa ce ith the nomothetic social scientists, and each tpe of nomotheti c s ocial scientist ith the othe rs. In addition, there were occasionally geographers, art historians, stu
The Validity of the Distinctions mong the Socil Science s
3
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
945 TO THE PRESENT
39
dents of national literatures, epidemiologists, even geo logists. These peopl e constructed curricul a together, sat o n the doctoral committees of each other's students, attended conferences of area specalists, read each other's book s, a nd published in new transdisciplinary journals specializing in the areas. hatever the intellectual value of this crossfertilization , the organizational consequences for the social sciences were immense. Although area studies was presented in the restricted guise of multidisciplinarit (a concept that had already been under discussion the interwar period) , its practice exposed the fact that there was con siderable articialit in the sharp institutiona separations of social science knowledge. Historians and nomothetic social scientists were for the rst time ( at least in any numbers) engaging in the study of nonWestern areas. This intrusion into the nonWestern world of disciplines preious y oriented to the study ofte Western world undermined the logic of the previous arguments justi ing separate arenas calledethnog raphy and Oriental studi es . It s eemed to imply that the methods and the models of history and the nomothetic social scienes were applicable to nonWestern regions as well as to urope and North America. Withi n to decades, anthropologists began to renounce ethnography as their dening activit, seeing alternative justications for their eld. Orientalist scholars went fur-
Area studies aected the structure of the departments of history and the three nomothetic social sciences as well. By the 1960' s, a signicant number of members of the facult of these departments had become committed to doing their empirical work on no nWestern areas of the world. The percentage was largest in history, smallest in econo mics, wth political science and sociolog som ewhere in beteen. This meant that inte rnal discussions within these disciplines were ineitably affected by the fact that the data they were debating, the courses they were asing students to take, and the subjects of legitimate resech had become considerablyider in geographical terms. W hen we add to this geographic expansion of the subject matter the geographic expansion of the source o f recruitment of the s cholars, the social situation ithin the intitutions of knowledge may be said to have undergone a signicant evolution in the p ost945 period. The disintegration of the intellectual segregation beteen the study of Western and nonWestern areas po sed a fundamen tal intellectual question , with some larger political implication s. Were the to z ones ontologically identical o r dierent? Th e predominant preious assumption had been that they were sufciently different that they required dfferent social science disciplines to study them. W as o ne now to make the opposite assump
ther; they surrendered their very name, merging themselves variously into departments of history, philosophy, classics, and religion, as well as into newly created departments of regional cultural studies that covered nem cultural production as well as the texts Orientalist scholars ha traditionally studied.
tion, that there was no dfference of any ind that would warran some special form of analysis for the nonWestern world? The nomothetic social scientists debated whether the generalizations (laws) that they had been establishing were equally applicable to the study of nonWestern areas. or more idiographic
4
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
1945 TO THE PRESENT
historians, the debate was posed as the question, one that was seriously asked : does rica have a history? or do n y historic nations" have histories? The intellectual respo nse to these queries was es sentially an uncertain compromise. It might be summarized as the argument that nonWestern areas were analyically the sam e as Western areas but not quite The primary form that this argument took was modernization theory. It of course built on many discussions and premises (explicit and implicit) in the earlier social science literature, bu t nonetheles s modernization liter ature too a particular form and became very important in social science theorizing. Th e key thesis was that there exists a c ommo n modernizing path of nations/peoples/areas (hence they were the same ) but that nation s/peoples/areas nd themselves at fferent stages on this path (he nce they were not quite the same ) . In terms ofpublic polcy, this was translated into a worldide concern ith development," a term that was dened as the proce ss by which a country advanced alon g the universal path of modernization. Organizationally, th e concern with modernization/development tended to bring the multiple s ocial scienc es together in common projects, and in a common stance visvis public authorities The political commitment of the states to development became one of the great justications for expending
thetic so cial scientists began to nd a justicatio n for using data that were not contemporary, despite the factthat such data were more incomplete, whie historians began to consider whether some of the generalizations put forth by nom othetic social scientists might not help to elucidate their understanding ( even their hermeneutic understanding) of the past. The attempt to bridge the gap beteen idiographic history and nomothetic social science did not begin in 1945. It has an earlier trajectory. The movement called new history" in the United States in the earlytentieth century and the movements in rance (Annaes and its predeces sors) were explictly such attempts. However, only in the post1945 period did such attempts begin to attract substantial support among historians. Indeed, it was only in the 1960' s that the quest for clos e coop eration and eve n mixing beteen (p arts of) history and (p arts of) the social scien ces became a very noticeable and noted phenomenon. In history, the conviction gained some ground that the received prole of the discipline n o lon ger fully served mod ern needs . Histo rians had been better in stud ing past politics than past so cial and economic lif e. Histoical studi es had tended to con centrate on events, and on the moties of individuals and institutions , and they had been les s well equipped for analyzing the more anonymous pro cesses and structures that were
public funds o n research by social s cientists. Mo dernization/development had the characteristic that this model could be applied to Western zones as well, by inter preting the historical development of the world as the progresThis prosive and precocious achievement of vided a basis on which the previo usly presentori ented nomo
in the ongue dure Structures and processes seemed to been neglected. All this was to be changed by broadening the scope of historical studies: by adding more economic and social history, in its on right, and as a keyto understanding history in general. undamental changes in the discipline of history were advo
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
195 TO THE PRESENT
cated ith the help of the neighboring social sciences. The social sciences had tools to offer in the study of dimensions of the past that were beneath" or behind" historical institutions events and ideas (dime nsions such as econo mic change population growh social inequali and mobili mass attitudes and behavior so cial protest and voti ng patterns) tool s that the historians did not po ss es s: quantitative methods; analyic concepts lie class role expectations or status dscrepancy; models of social change Some historians sought now to use such mass data" as marriage registers election results an d tax documents and for this the turn to the social sciences proved indispensable. history (and anthropolog) became more open to quantitative research there was a process of circular reinforcement: money numbers of scholars and social legitimacy all fed each other and strengt hen ed the s ense of selfcondence in the intellectual warran of the conc eptual constructs o f social scien ce. Sometimes the quest for change in the discipline of history went hand in hand ith a desire to engage in social and cultural criticism It was argued that the historians had overstressed consensus and the fnctioning of institutions and had underestimated conlict deprivation and inequalities of class ethnicit and gender. Criticism of the received paradigms combine with challenges to established authorities inside and outside the pro-
ditions see med to o er specic to ols for developing a critical" history or rather a critical historical socia science" But in other countries like the US. which not only had other less historicist" traditions in history bu t als o a les s critical tradition in the social sciences radcal reisionist historians felt less attracted by social science approaches . Economics sociolog and political science lourished in the postwar period in part basing in the relection of the glories of the natural sciences and their high prestige and inluence wer e another reason why many historians found it interesting to draw on their wor. At the same time some social scientists were beginning to move into realms previously reserved to t he historians. This expansion of the nomothetic social sciences into history too however two quite dfferent forms On the one hand there was the a pplica tion o f relatively specic and narrow social science theories models and procedures to data about the past (s ometimes eve n from the past ) for example studies o n voting patterns social mobili and economc growh. Such data were treated like other variables or indicators in the empirical social sciences that is they were standadized (in time series) isolated and correa ted. This was sometimes called social science history." These social scientists were expanding the loci from which they drew their data but they did no t thinki t nece ssary
fesion. Sometimes as in Germany such a revisionist mood reinforced the turn of historian s toward the social science s. Using analyical concepts and theoretical approaches was in itself a way of expressing o ppo sition to and lan paradigm which stressed hemene guage as close to the sources as possi ble. Some s ocial science tr a
desirable to change their procedures in any way; they did not become traditiona historians. Most of them neither expected nor found much that was dfferent about the past. Data about the past seemed ather to corroborate or at most modi slightly the general laws in which they were basically interested Still sometimes the results of such work became very important
3
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
1945 TO THE PRESENT
for hisorians and conriued o a eer undersanding on heir par of he pas. There was however a quie dieren ur owrd hisory on he p of some oher socia scieniss hose who were ineresed in descriing and expaining argescae socia change someimes in a Weerian someimes in a Marxian radiion ofen som ewhere in eeen. They produced various pes of wha came o e ced hisorica socioog" They were criica of he ahisoricism of heir coeague s who hey fe had os ouch ih many of he es earier adiions in he socia sciences. The work hey did was es s scienisic" and more hisoricis." They ook specic hisorica conex s s eriousy and paced socia change ino he cener of he sory hey od Their work s did no aim primariy a esing modiing and formuaing aws (for exampe of moderniai on u raher used genera rues o expain compex and chging phenomena or inerpre hem in he igh of hose genera paerns. In he 1960 'S, his criicism of ahisoricism ega n o e increasingy expres sed y younger socia scieniss as hey rned o socia criicism. Their criicism of mainsream" socia sciences incuded he asserion ha hey had negeced he cenai of socia change favoring a mhoogy of consens us and ha hey showed a naive even arrogan sefassuredness in apping Wesern conceps o he
voved a criique of prevaiing mehodooges. A simiar moive was a pay among many of he hisorians who were caing for he use of socia scienc echniques and generaiaions. There was a convergence of he riings of he hisorica (or hisoriciing socia scieniss i h hose of he srucurais" hisorians which seem ed o hi is sride in he 19 70 s ahough here usuay si remaned cerain differences in se: proximi o he so urces eve of gener aiaion he degree of narraive pre senaion and even foonoi ng echniques This move oward a coser cooperaion eeen hisory and he oher socia sciences remained non eheess a minori phenomenon Furhermore in addiion o he his orysocioog discussion here seemed o e separae ones eeen hisory and each of he oher socia sciences: economics ( eg. he new economic hisor y" poiica science (e .g. he new insiuionaism " anhropoog (hisorica anhropoog" and geography (hisorica geog raphy" In a of hese eds some of his convergence cam e ao u in he form of simpe expans ion of he daa domain of a paricuar socia scien ce radiion and s ome o f i ook he form of he reopening of fundamena mehodoogica issues The groing overap among he hree radiiona nomoheic socia scienceseconomics poiica science and
anaysis of very ifferen ph enomena and cures In he case of socia science hi sory" socia scieniss w ere moving oward hisory as a conseq uence o f he ogic and he expansive dnamics o f heir were seeking ess o arger daa as es ridge he gap" ih hisory han o This was no rue of he h isorica socioogiss" who se work in
was es s charged wih conoversy The socioogiss ed he way mkng oh poiica socioog" nd economic socioog" ino imporan and sandard su eds wihin he discipine as ery as he 1950'S The po iica scieniss foow ed sui They expanded heir concerns eyond forma governmena insiuons redening hei r suec maer o incde a socia pro
44
45
DE ATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCEN CES
95 TO THE PRESENT
cesses that had political implications or intentions: the study of pressure group s protest movements c ommunit organizations nd when some critical social scientists reived the use of the term political econo my" other less critical political scientists responded by tring to give the term and the subject matter a more classically nomothetic lavor. The common result however was to engage the political scientists in a fuller concern with economic proces ses . For the economists th e early postar dominance of Keynesian ideas reved concern ith macroe conomic s " whereupon the diiding line ith political scienc e became le ss clear since the object of analysis was largely the policies of governments and intergovernmental agencies . Later on some nonKeesian economists began to argue the merits of using neoclassical economic analytic models for the study of subjects traditionally considered sociological such as the family or s ocial deance. l three disciplines were increasing the degree of their commitment to quantitative techniques and even mathematical modeling in the early postar years; as a result the distinctiveness of their methodological approaches seemed to diminish hen so cial criticism began to f uel the interna l debates of these disciplines the limitations that the critical social scientsts in each discipline found in the positiist doctrines prevailing in
The multiple overlaps beteen the disciplines had a double conse quence . Not only did it beco me less and less simple to nd clear distinguishing lines beteen them in terms of either the domain of concern or the ways in which the data were treated but each discipline also became more and more heterogeneous because of stretching the boundaries of acceptable subjects of inquiry. This led to co nsiderable internal questioning about the coherence of the disciplines and the legitimacy of the intellectual premises each had use d to argue for its right to a se parate existence. One way of handling this was the attempt to create new interdisciplinary" names like communications stuies administrative sciences and behaioral scie nces . Many consider the groing emphasis on multidiscipl inarit as the expression of a lexible respo nse by the s ocial science s to problems encountered and intellectual objections raised to the structuring of the disciplines. They feel that the convergence of parts of the social sciences and parts of history toward a more comprehensive so cial scienc e has be en a creative approach that has involved a fruitful crossfertilization and deserves to be further advanced and developed. Others feel less sanguine about what has been achieved They believe tat the concession of interdisciplinarit" has served as much to salvage the legitimacy of the existing disciplines as to overcome the waning
their discipline seemed about the same in each. Once again there is no point in exaggerating. Organizationally the three disciplines remained quite distinct and there was no lack of voices to defend this se paration. owever the years in the case of both the mainstream and the critical of each there began to be in practice an increasing overl ap in subject matter and methodolog among the three nomothetic disciplines.
of their distinctiveness The latter have urged a more radical construction to overcome what they perceive as intelectual confusion. However one appreciates the very clear tren d to the the me o f multidisciplinarit the organization al co nsequen ces see m evident. hereas the number of names used to classi social science knowledge actiit had been steadily reduced beteen 850
7
DEATES WTHN THE SO CAL SCEN CES
195 TO THE PRESENT
and 195 ending up ith a relatively small list of accepted names for discipline s, the period after 195 saw the curv e move in the reverse irection, with new names constantly comin g into existence and nding appropriate institutional bases: new programs or even new departments within the universit, new scholarly asso ciations , new journals, and new categories in the classication of books in libraries The validit of the distinctions among the social s ciences was probably the major focus of critical debate in the 1950 and 1960's. Towards the end of the 1960's and then very clearly in the 190' to other questions that had arisen in the postar period came to the fore: the degree to which social science (indeed all of nowledge) was Euroc entric" and therefor e the degree to which the social science heritage could be considered parochial; and the degree to which the encrusted dision of modern thought i nto t!e to cultures " was a use ful mode of organizing intellectual actiit It is to these to questions that we now turn.
The claim to universalit, however qualieduniversal relevance, universal applicabilit, universal validitis inherent in
tential cas es i s, for all pra ctical purpose s, endless To be sure, any such contentions are rarely con incing once and for all. The three major divisions of contemporary knowledge (the humanities , the natur al sciences, and the social sciences ), as well as the disciplines considere d to be located ith in each of the m, have all struggled continuously on a number of dfferent fronts intellectual, ideological, and politicalto maintain th eir various claims to universalit. This is because all such claims are of course historically specic, conceivable only from within a particular social system, always enforced through historical, and therefore perishab le, institutions and practices. The universalism of any discipline or larger grouping of disciplines rests on a particular and changing mix of intellectual claims and social practices. These claims and practices feed on each other and are, in turn, enhanced by the institutional reproduction of the discipline or division. Change takes most often the form of adaptation, a continuous ne tuning of both the universal lessons supposedly transmitted and the ways in which they are transmitted. Historically, this has meant that once a discipline was instit utionalized, its universalist claims have be en hard to challenge successfully regardless of their current intellectual plausibilit. The expectation of universalit, however sincerely
the justication of all academic isciplines. That is part of the requirement for their institutionalization. The justication may be made on moral, practical, aesthetic, or political grounds, or some combination thereof, but all nowledge proce eds on the presumption th at the of the c ase at hand ha ve signicant bearing on the next cas e, and tha t the list o f po
has not be en fulled thus far in the historical development the social sciences. In recent years, critics have been severe in their denunciations of the fa ilures and inadequacie s of the so cial sciences in this pursuit. The more extreme of the critics have suggested that universalit is an unrealizable obje ctive. But most social scientists still believe it is a worthy and plausible ob
2
The Degree to Which the Heritge Is Prochil
49
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
194 TO THE PRESENT
jective, even if up to now social science has been unacceptably parochial. Some would argue that the recent criticisms made by groups preiously excluded from the world of social science itself creates the conditions that ill make true universalism possible. In many ways, the mo st severe problems have bee n ith the three more nomothetic s ocial scien ces. In taing the natural sciences as a model, they nurtured three inds of expectations that have proved impossible to fulll as stated in universalist form: an expectation of prediction; an expectation of management; both in turn premised on an expectation of quantiable accu racy. hereas matters o f debate in the domain carved by the hu manities were som etimes thought to res t on the subjective pref erences of the researcher, the nomothetic social sciences built themselves on the pre mises that social achi evement can be measured, and that the easurements themselves can be agreed upon universally. The wager that nomothetic social science could produce universal knowledge was in fact, we see in retros pect, qute risky. For, unlke the natural world as dened by the natural sciences, the domain of th e so ial sciences not only is one in which the object of study encom passes the rese archers themselves but also is one in which the persons they study can enter into dialogues
ered this intrusion un welco me. The intrusion has increasingly taken the form of a challenge to universalist pretensions. Dissi dent voicesnotably but not only) feministshave questioned the abilit of the social sciences to account for their realit. They seem to have been telling the researchers: Your analysis may have been appropriate for your group. It simply does not t our case ." Or even more sweepin gly, the dissidents have questioned the very principle of universalism. They have all eged that what the social sciences presented as applicable to the whole world represented in factthe ews of a minuscule minorit ith in humankind. Furthermore, they argued, the views of that minorit had come to dominate the world of nowledge, simply because the same minorit was also dominant in the world outside the universities. Skepticism about the virtues of the social ences as unbiase d interpretations o f the human world prece ded their institutionalization and surfaced in the works of prominent Western intellectuals from Herder and Rousseau to Marx and Weber. In many ways, the current denunciations of these disciplines as Eurocentric/masculinist/bourgeois endeavors are, to some extent, merely a repetiti on of earlier criticism s, both implicit and explicit, by pract itioners and outsiders alike, b u the earlier criticisms were largely ignored.
or contests of various kinds ith these researchers. Matters of debate in the natural sciences are normally solved ithout re course to the opinions of the object of study. In contrast, the peoples (or their descendants) su by social scientists have entered increasingly into the dcusi whether or not their opinion was sought by scholars, who, indeed, frequently consid
It is hardly surprising that the social sciences constructed Europe and North America in the nineteenth century were Erocentric. The European world of the time felt itself culturally triumphant, and in many ways it was. Europe had conquered the world, both politically and economically. Its technological achievements were ess ential elemen t in this conquest, and it
0
1
DEATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
1945 TO THE PRESENT
seemed logical to ascribe the superior technolog to a superior scienc e, a su periorworldiew. It seemed pa usible to identi the European achievement ith the thrust toward universal progress . The period of the to world wars was a rst shock, seeming to belie Western claims to moral progre ss , but in 1945 the West ern world took heart again. It is only when the political domi nance of the West began to be signicantly challenged after 1945, and when East Asia became a new, very powerful locus of economic actiit in the 19 70's, that the challenge to the cul tural universalit of Western ideas began to be taken seriously. Moreover, this challenge was being made not merely by those who felt left out in the analyses of social science but ithin Western so cial science as well. The selfdoubts of the West, which had existed only among a small minorit before, now loomed much larger.
number, who were profoundly cognizant of the current thinking of nonWestern social scientists and were deeply inluencedbyit. On the whole, in the period om 1945 to 19 70 the social scientic views that were dominant in Europe and North meri ca remained dominant in the nonWestern world as well. Indeed, this period was one n which social science scholarship expanded considerably in the nonWestern world, often under the aegis ofo r ith the help of Western institutions, which preached the acceptance of the disciplines as they had developed in the West as being universally normative. Social scientists, no less than political or religious leade rs, have missio ns; they seek the universal acceptance of certain practices in the belief that this ill maximize the po ssibilit of achieng certain ends, such as oing the truth. Under the banner of the universalit of science, they seek to dene the forms of knowledge that are scientically legitimate and those that fall outside the pale of acceptabilit Because the dominant ideologies dened themselves as relecting and inca rnating reaso n, both presiding over action and determining presumptively universal paradigms, to reject these ews was said to be choosing adventure" over science" and seemed to imply opting for uncertaint over intellectual and spiritual securit. During this period, Western
It is thus within the context of changes in the distribution of power in the world that the issue of the cultural parochialism of the social sciences as theyha d his torically developed came to the fore. It represented the ciilizational correlate to the l oss of unquestioned political and economic dominance by the Wes t in t he world arena. The ciilizational question did not, however, take the form of a straightforward conlict. Attitudes were deeply ambiguous, and neither Western nor nonWestern scholars formed group s that h ad a unie d position on this question (a fortiori one in opposition to tha t of the other g roup). O rganizationally, the links beteen them were complex. Many nonWester n scholars had b een tra ined in Western
and many m ore
method considered themselves committed to ologies, and theorizing associated ith Western scholars. Conversely, there were som e Western scholars , to b e sure few in
53
science continued to have a strong social position and economic advantage and its spirit ual preeminence to propagate its views as exemplar y social scie nce. Furthermore , this missi on of Western social science proved enormously attractive to social scientists in the rest of the world, who saw adopting these iews and practices a s joining in a universal communit of scholarship. The challenge to the parochialism of social scien ce since the
54
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
195 TO THE PRESENT
55
late 1960's was initially, and perhaps most fundamentally, a challenge to its claim to represent universalism. The critics argued that it was in fact parochial. This critique was made by feminists challenging a masculinist orientation, by the various groups challenging Eurocentrism, and later by multiple other groups raising questions about still other biases that they saw as built into the premises of the social science s. The form of the arguments tended to be parallel, even if the historical details d fered: demonstrations of the realit of the bias, assertions about its consequences in terms o f topics of research and subjects studied, accusations conce rning the historically na rrow social base from which re searchers were recruited, an d questioning of the epistemological underpinn ings o f the analyses I t is important in analyzing these critiques t o istinguish the epistemological challenge from the political challenge, even if the to were linked fo many persons on both sides of the intellectual debate. The political challenge had to do ith the recruitment of personnel ( students, profess ors) within the universit structures (going in tandem th a similar challenge in the larger political world) It was alleged that there are all sorts of forgotten" groups in the social scienceswomen, the nonWest as a whole, minorit" groups ithin Western counries, and other groups historically dened a s politically and so cially
ned themselves, and even those studing others" had tended to dene the others as relections of or contrasts to themselves. The solution that was advocated followed quite clearly: ifwe expanded the scope of recruitment for the scholarly communit, we would probably expand the scope of its objects of study. nd so in fact it proved, a s can be seen by a quick comparison of the titles of papers at current scholarly conferences or the titles of books being published currently ith equivalent lists of the 1950 's . In part, this was the natur al result of the quan titative expansion of the number of social scientists and the need to nd niches of specialization, but it was also clearly the consequence of pressures to establish a idened social base in recruiting scholars and an increased legitimati on of new areas of research The challenge to parochialism has, however, been deeper than the questi on of the s ocial srcins of researchers. The new voices among the social scientists raised theoretical questions that went beyond the question of the topics or subjects ofl egitimate study, and even beyond the argument that evaluations are made ifferently from different perspectives. The argument of these new voices was also that ther e have been pres uppositions built into the theoretical reasoning of the social sciences (and indeed into that of the natu ral sciences and the humanities as well) , many of which in fact incorporated a pri ori prejudices
marginal. One of the main arguments made in favor of ending the personnel exclusions in the structures of knowledge was potential At the most implications for the acquisition simple level, it was said, most s ocial had stuied themselves over the pa st to centuries , however it was they had de
modes or reasoning that have neither theoretical nor justication, a nd that these a priori elements ought to be eluci dated, analyzed, and repaced by more justiable premi ses It is in this sens e that these de mands were part of a demand to open the social sciences. It does not mean that e very newproposition put forth in the nam e of such new theorizing is correct o r
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
945 TO THE PRESENT
justiable. It does ague that the enterprise of submitting our theoretical premises to inspection for hidden, unjustied a pri ori assumptions is eminently worthwhile and constitutes in many ways a priority for the social sciences today These new modes of analysis call for the use of scholarship, analysis, and reasoning to engage in relection concerning the place and weight in our theorizing of difference (race, gender, sexualit, class) . In 9 78, Engelbert Mveng, an frican scholar, rote: The West agrees with us today that the way to truth p ass es b ynumerous path s, other than ristotelian, Thomistic logic or Hegelian dialectic. But social and hu man sciences themselves must be decolonized." 8 The call for inclusion, the call for elucidation of theoretical premises has been a call for decolonization, that is, for a transformation of the power relationships which created the particular form of stitutionalization of the social sciences that we have non The dfferent theories of modernizati on identied aspects of traditional societies which contrast w ith those of modern so ciet, but in the proce ss they tended to overlook the complexit of their internal orders There exist alternative iews of such key social science co ncepts as power and identit It is pos sible t detect in a number of non Western disc ourses concepts and logics
tion of the c oncept of maya" to the state, the powerf ul, and the ruling clans disproves the omnipresence of the logic of power, predominant amon g the monotheist discou rse s The Daoi st concept of the legitimat e path" dao) conceives legitimacy as an existential association with the chaotic realities beyond the bureaucratic legitimacy of Confucianism. A for identit, Mahayana Buddhists believe that identit is not absolute and must always be accompanied by an acceptance of the othe r communities. In the Caibbean (and e lsewhere in the oerica s) the boundaries beteen linguistic, religious, and musical forms on the one hand and ethnoracial categories on the other have been luid, and indiiduals have moved across them ith some ease hile some Western social scientists have referred pejoratively to the generation of inordinate numbers of cases of multiple idntit, local populations have tended to view this as an advantage rather than as an impediment. The point is not to argue the merits of altenative views of power or identit, but rather to suggest the need for the social sciences to intrude this debate into the very foun dations o f their analyical constructs If social science is an exercise in the seach for universal nowledge, then the other" cannot logically exist, for the other" is part of us " the us that is studied, the us tha t is engaged in studing
proposing that power is transient and unreal, or tha t legitimacy must come from the substantive content rather than from the formal procedure For example, the Mahayana Buddhist applica
Universalism and particularism are, in short, not opposed. How do we go beyond this limiting framework? The tensions beteen universalism and paricularism are not a new discovery, but the center of a recurring deba te in the social sciences over the last to centuries in many dfferent guises Uni
�
8. Enele rt Mven Rc ents d de la tholoie afr caine Bulltin ofAfican Theology, no 9 9) I.
57
DEATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
1945 TO THE PRESENT
versalism has been attacked as being a isguised form of particu arism and as such quite oppressive Certainly some things are universally true The problem is that those who hold social power have a natural tendency to see the current situation as universal since it benets them. The denition of universal truth thereby has changed with changes in the constellation of power. Scientic truth is itself historical The issue therefore is not simply what is universal but what is evolng, and whether that which is evoling is nec ess arily identiable ith progres s. How can the social sci ences deal ith the fact that they must describe , formulate true statements about, a n unequal world in which the social scientists thems elves are rooted? The claims of universalism have always been claims made by particular persons, and these clamants usua lly have found thems elves in op position to persons ith competig claims The fact that there are compet ing particularist ews ofwhat is universal forces us to take seriously questions about the neutrali of the scholar The natural sciences have long accepted the reali that the measurer intrudes on the measured And yet this statement has remained controversial in the social sciences where, if anhing, it might seem more obious ere it may be us eful to note that the recent discuss ion about
hind universalism and particula rism as categories : a s objec ts, as objectives, as languages, and as metalanguages. Bringing the metalanguages to the fore and subjecting them to critical ra tionali may be the only way in which we can choose our mix of the universal and the particular as objects, objectives, and languages If universalism, all universalisms, are historically contingent, is there anyway to construct a relevant single universalism for the prese nt time? the solution to contingent universalism that of ghettos or that of social integration? Is there a deeper universalism which goes beyond the formalistic universalism of modern societies and modern thought, one that accepts contradictions ithin its universali? Can we promote a pluralistic universalism, on the analog of the Indian pantheon, wherein a single god has many avatars? Those ith less power are always in some sense in a double bind: there is no good answer to the prevailing universalisms. If they accept the isdom o f those universalisms , they nd themselves excl uded or demeaned by the very premises of the theorizng But if they hes itate to act ith regard to the prevailing universalisms, they nd themselves unable to function adequately ithin the system, either politically or intellectually, and thee· fore impede ameliorating the situation The consequenc
universalism has blended three questions: the distinction beteen descripti ve and anali statements (bot h of which ca n simultaneously be true) ; the validi of statements relecting com peting interest s (all of which may valid and equally selfinterested); and critical rationali the basis of scholarly communication We may ish to distinguish what is hidden be
that, initially, those who are excluded move back and forth, politically and culturally, beteen integration and separaion hen this b ecomes too wearin g, they sometimes turn to tearing down the current universalisms altogether. The social sciences are currently faced th such attempts. The questi on before us is how to open the social sciences s o that the y may respond ade
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59
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
1945 TO THE PRESENT
quately and fly to the legtimate objections to parochialism and thereby justi the clam to universal relevance or applicabilit or validi. We start from the very strong belief that some ind of universalism is the necessary goal of the communi of scourse. At the same time, we recognize that any universalism is historically contingent in that it prodes the medium of translation while at the same time setting the terms of the intellectual dscussion and is thus a source of intellectual power. We recognize further that every universalism sets offrespon ses to itself, and that these responses are in some sense determined by the nature of the reigning universalism (s ). And we believe that it is important to accept the coe istence of diferent interpretations of an uncertain and complex world Only a pluralistic universal ism ll permit us t grasp the richness of the social realities in which we live and have lived
There have been to striking developments ithin the structures of knowledge since the 1960's. They come from opposite ends of the universit's disions of knowledge, but both have called into question the realit and the validit of the distinction
growth which was plaing its role in the turmoil of the so cial scienc es. But, more importantl y, itwas the outcome of the increas ing inabilit of the older scientic theories to offer plausible solutions to the fculties encountered as scientists sought to solve problems concerning evermore complex phenomena. These developments in the na tural scie nces an d mathematics were important for the social sciences in to ways. First, the model of nomothetic epistemolog, which had become ever more dominant in the social sciences in the post1945 period, was bas ed precisely on applng the isdom of Netonian concepts to the study of social phenomena. The rug was being pulled out om under the use of this model in the social sciences. Second, new developments in the natural sciences emphasized nonlinearit over linearit, compleit over simplication, the impossibilit of remoing the measurer from the measurement, and even, for some mathematicians, the superiorit of qualitative interpretative scope over a quantitative precision that is more limited in acc uracy. Most important of all, these scientists emphasized the arrow of time. In short, the natural sciences were begnning to seem closer to what had been scorned as so ft" so cial science than to wh at had been touted as hard" social scienc e. This n ot only began to change the power balance in the internal struggles in the social sciences, but also served
beteen the to cultures" The longsimmering discontents ith Newtonian assumptions in the natural science s, which can be traced at least to Poincar in the late nineteenth centur y, began to explode : in intellectual in numbers o f adherent s, in public vsibilit. This was no part a result of the same ind of pressure for diferentiation om sheer numerical
reduce the str ong distinction beeen nat ural sc ience and science as superdomai ns. " This lessening of the contradicons be een the natural sciences and the social sciences did not now imply, however, as in previous atempts, conceiving of humanit as mechanical, but rather instead conceiing of nature as active and creative.
60
3 The Relity nd Vlidity of the Distinction Between the "'o Cultures
61
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
945 TO THE PRESE NT
The Cartesian view of classical science had described the world as an automaton, which was determin istic and capable of total des crption in the form o f causal laws, o r laws of nature " Today many natural scientists would argue that the world should be described quite dfferently. It is a more unstable world, a much more complex world, a world in which perturbations play a big role, one of whose key questions is how to explain how such compleit arise s. Mos t natural scientists no longer believe that the macroscopic can simply be deduced in prncpl e from a simpler microscopic world. Ma ny now believe that complex systems are selforgani zing, a nd that cons equently nature ca n no longer be consider ed to be p assive It is not that they believe Netonian physics to be rog, but that the stable, timereversible systems which Netonian science described represent only a special, limited segment of realit Newtonian physicsdescribes, for example, the motion o the planets but not the development of the planetary system It describes systems at equilibrium or near to equilibrium but not systems far om equilibrium, conditions that are at least as frequent, f not more equent, than systems at equilibrium The conditions of a system far om equilibrium are not timereversible , in which it is sufcient to ow the law" and th initial conditions in order to predict its future states Rather, a sys-
Consequently, irreversibilit is no longer considered to be a scientic misperception, the outcome of approimations resulting from the inadequacy of scientic nowledge. Rather, natural scientists today are worng to exted the formulation of the laws of dnamics to include irreversiblit and probabilit Only in this way, it is now thought, may scientists hope to understand the mechanisms which, at the fundament al level of description, drive the r estless universe in which we are e mbedde d Natural scence is hoping thereby to make the idea of laws of nature compatible ith the idea of events, of novelt, and of creativit In a sense, it could be argued that instabilit plays a role for physical phenomena analogous to that of Darin's natural selection in biolog Natural selection is a necessary but not sufcient condition for evolution. Some species have appeared only recently; others have persisted for hundreds of mllions of years. Similarly, the existence o f probabilities and the breaing oftime symmetry is a necessary condition of evolution The importance of complex systems analysis for the analysis of social science is farreaching Historical social systems are quite clearly com pose d of multiple, interacting units , characterized by the emerg ence and evolution of nested hierarchical organization and structure, and complex spatiotemporal behavior Furthermor e, in addition to the ind of compleit ehibi ted
te far from equilibrium is the expression of an arrow oftime," whose role is es sential an d constructive. In such a system, the future uncertain and the conditions are irreversible The laws that we can formulate therefore only possibilities, never certainties
nonlinear dynamic systems with xed, microscopic ofinteraction, historical social systems are composed ual elements capable of internal adaptation and learning as a re sult of their experien ce. Ths adds a new level of compleit (o ne which i s s hared with evolutionary biolog and ecolog) beyond that of the nonlinear dynamics of traditional physical syste ms
9 See ya Prioin e Les lois u chaos (Paris: Flammaron, I99)
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCAL SCENCES
1945 TO THE PRESENT
The method s o f complex systems analysis have already been applied in various areas such as th e problem of the relaionship beteen stochastically generated innovations and longterm economic luctuations which seem to display the characteristics of deterministic chaos. Furthermore it can be shon how competing technolog ies in the prese nce ofincreasing returns of various sorts may beco me locked in" despite the availabilit of superior alternatives. The conceptual amework ofered by evolutionary complex systems as developed by the natural sciences presents to the social sciences a coherent set of ideas that matches longstanding ews in the social science s particularly among those who have been resistant to the forms of nomothetic analysis inspired by the science of linear euilibria Scientic analysis based o n the dynamics o f noneuilibria ith its emphasis on multiple futures bifurcation and choice historical dependence and for some intrinsic and inherent uncertaint resonates well ith important tradit ions o fthe social sciences
shown strengh such that these iews are haing a maor inluence in the institutional arenas of knowledge production for the rst time in the to centu ries since scienc e a certan scence displaced philosophy a cert ain philosophy om the position of legitimator of owledge
The second great challenge to the tripartite diision of knowledge i nto three great domains emerged out of the humanistic" end of the tension beteen the to cultures This challenge came from what we may generically call cultural studies . Culture ," of course , was a term that had long een used both by anthropologists and by scholars in the humanities , but not usually ith this ne, rather more political, thrust. T he study of culture as a quasidiscipline exploded, wth its programs, its journals, its ass ociations, and its library collectio ns. There seem to be three main them es in this challenge. None of these themes is new. What is new is that they have become associated with one another, and collectively have
The three themes that have come togethe r in cultural studies are: rst, the central importance of gender studies and all kinds of nonEu rocentric" studies to the study of historical social system s; sec ond, the importance of local, very situated historical analysis, ass ociated by many with a new he rmeneutic turn" ; third, the ass essment o f the values involved in technological achievements in relation to other values. While the study of culture atracted people in almost all the disciplines, it was particu larly popular among three groups: among scholars in literary stu es of all kinds, f or whom it legitimated a conc ern ith the current social and political sce ne; am ong anhropolo gists, for some of whom the new empha ses offered a domain to replace (or at least compete ith) that of ethnography, which had lost its commanding role ithin the discipline; a nd among perso ns involved in the new quasidisciplines relating to the forgotten" peoples of modernit (t hose neglected by irtue of gender, ra ce, clas s, etc ) , for whom it pr oded a theoretical (p ostm odern ") framework for their elabora tions of dierenc e.
We have already discussed the attempts to overcome the
chial heritage of the social sc iences . Wha t does it add to this ithin th e framewor of questioning the validity of the distinction beteen the to cultures? In the framing of the issue of theto culture s, th ere had always been an unexpressed but quite real assu mption. It had been implied that science was more ra
DEBATES THN THE SOCAL SCENCES
945 TO THE PRESENT
tional, harder" and more precise, more powerful, more serious, more efcacious, and therefore more consequential than philosophy or arts and letters The latent premisewasthatitwas somehow more modern, more uropean, and more masculine It is to these unspoen assertions that the proponents of gender studies and of all the non urocentric stues have been reacting in putting forward their views and their demands ithin the amewor of a revalorization ofcultural studies . Basically, the sam e issue emerged in the questi on so metimes framed as the local versus the universal, sometimes framed as agency versus structure. Structures I the universal were asserted to be impersonal, eternal or at least very longlasting, and beyond control by human effortbut not quite beyond everyone's control: structures seem ed manipulable by r ational, scientic experts, but not by ordinary people, and not by groups that wer e less powerful ithin t structures sserting the continuing effectiveness of structures in the analysis of social phenomena was said to imply the irrelevance of social mobilization and therefore of atempts by the les s powerful to transform the social situation . The universal was said to be remote, whereas the local" was deemed immediate. In local arenas, the centralit of gender and race/ethnicit to analysis seemed selfevidently relevant The more worldide the arena, the more difcult it was thought to
technolog. It has taen po litical form in a ide array of ecological concerns and movements, and intellectual form in the return of values to center stage in scholarly analysis (what some might phrase as the return of philosophy) aced ith the ecological crisis, the clams of technolog to be universal were put into question. ostmodern septicism was replacing modern criticism, and almost all socalled grand theories came under attac in the name of a highly abstract mode of theorizing The culturalist impact made itself felt across the disciplnes. Hermeneutic approaches regained ground they had lost before. In ferent disciplines, language became a central locus of discussion, both as a n object of study and as a ey to the iscipline's epistemologi cal selfrelection Cultural studies has offered solutions for some existing problems, but it has also created others The stress on agency and meaning has sometimes led to a quasivoluntaristic neglect of real structural con strants on hu man behaior. mp hasizing the importa nce of local spaces can lead to a neglect of the broa der interrelations of the historical fa bric. ostmodernist septicism has s ometimes led to a sweeping ant itheoretical stance that condemned other perspectives that were equally crtical of the limitation s of a po sitiist approach e continue to believe that the search for coherence is a continuing obligation of a
organize eectively to present alternative perspectives, defend alternative interests, assert aternative epistemologies. The third element in the afrmation of cultural studies has bee n the expression o f septicism merits of techhas ranged om nological advance. The degree of moderate doubts to extreme rejections o f the pro ducts of this
structed historical social science. Still, th e rise o f cultual studies had an impact o n the socia scences in some ways analogous to the new developme nts in science . Just as the new arguments of the nat ural scientists undermined the organizational ii de beteen the superdomains of the natural and the social sciences, so the arguments of the ad
66
69
DEBATES WTHN THE SOCA SCENCES
1945 TO THE PRESENT
vocates of cultural stuies undermined the organizatonal divide beteen the superdomains of the social scences and the humanites . These culturalist projects have challenged all existing theoretica paradigms, even those that were thems elves critical of mainstream nomothetic s ocial scienc e. The support for such iews was to be found across the various disciplines of the humanities and the social s ciences , and ths brought about forms of intellectual cooperation that have ignored the traditional line beteen the humanities and the social scien ces Before 1945 the so cial science s were internally split beteen the to cultures , and there were many voices who urged the social scie nces to disappear by merging either into the natur al sciences or into the humanities , accordin to o ne's preferences. In a se nse , the social sciences were being called upon to accept the deep realit ofthe concept ofto cultures and to enter the one or the other on its ters Today, the discovery of common themes and approaches seems to be o ccurring on dfferent bases th an in the past atural scientists are taling of the arrow of time, which is what has always been central to the more humanstic ing of the social sciences At the same time, literary scholars are taling of theory." However hermeneutic such theorizing is and however hostile it proclaims itself to master narratives , theorizing is not wh at literary scholars used t o do o doub, this
tple expressions o f the to (or three ) cultures But the debates have aroused doubts about the clarit of the stinctions. nd we seem to be moing in the direction of a more no ncontraictory view of the multiple domans of knowledge. In a strange way, the shfts in iewpoint n all elds seem to be moing more toward than away om the tradtional standponts of the social sciences. May we then say that the concept of o cultures is in the process of being overcome? It s much too early to tell. hat s clear is that the tripartite diision beteen the natural science s, the s ocial sciences, and the humanites is no longer as selfeident as t once seemed It also now seems that the social sciences are no longer a poor relative somehow torn betee n the to polarized clans of the natural scie nces and the humanities ; rather they have becom e the locus o f their potential reconcilation.
6
is not the ind of theory that has always been central to work of the more scient istic ing of the social scienc es . on ethees s for a group to whom the use of term s is so important, i is at least to be noted that the proponents of studies have turned theory" into one of their code words. We cannot speak o f a real rapprochement beteen the mu
WHAT KND OF SOCAL SCENCE NOW?
What Kind of Social Science Shal We Now Build? n any social circumstanc e there are only a limited number of ways in which a clash of values can be dealt ith One is throuh eoraphical sereation nother more active way is throuh eit thrd way of copin ith indiidual or clt ral dfference throuh daloue Here a clash of val ues can in principle operate under a positive sinit can be a means of increased communi cation and selfunderstandin Finaly, a clash of values c resolved throuh the use of force or iolence . . . the lobalizin societ which we now live the rst two of these four options become astically reduced nthony Giddens
m
at are the implications of the multiple debates ithin the social sciences since 9 forthe ind of so cial science we no w should build? nd for what, exactly, are they implications? The intellectual implications of these debates are not entirely cons onant ith the organizational structure of the social science s that we have inherited Thus, a s we begin to resolve the intellectual debate s, we must decide what to do organizationally. It may turn out to be easier to do the former than the latter. The most immediate question is the organizational structure of the social sciences th emselves . They have, of course , been disto shape the ciplines, which meant that they training of future scholars, and this done eectively. nony GiddensBeyond Left and Right (Stanford: Stanford Universit re ss 995) p I9
But in the nal analysis, training of students has not been the most powerful mechanism of control. A stronger one was the fact that the disciplines have controlled the career patterns of scholars onc e they completed their tr aining. B oth teaching and research positions in universities and research structures have by and large required a doctorate (or its equivalent), and for most positions the doctorate has had to be in a specied iscipline. Publication in the ofcial and quasiofcial journals of the discipline to wh ich one is organizationally attached was, and for the most part still is, considered a necessary step for career advancement. Graduate students are still ad ise d ( and well adised) to secure their degrees in a discipline that is considered a standard one. Scholars have tended to attend primarily the national (an d international) meetings of thei r own discipline. Disciplinary structures have covere d their members ith a protective screen, and have been wary of encouraging crossing the lines. Yet disciplinary prerequisites have been breaing down in some scholarly arenas that have becom e important since 9 The worldide se ries of colloquia and conf eren ces, so central in recent decades to scientic communication, have tended to recruit participants according to specic subject matter, for the mos t part ithout too much regard for disciplinary afliations. There are today a groing number of major scientic reiews that consciously ignore the disciplinary boundaries. nd of course the multiple new quasidisciplines and/or programs" which have been emerging in the last half century are often, even usually, compos ed of perso ns who have degrees om multiple iscipl ines. Most impo rtantly, there is the eternal battle for resource allo
WHAT KND OF SOCAL SCENCE NOW?
WHAT KND OF SOCAL S CENCE NOW?
73
cation, which in recent years has gotten more ferocious ecause of budgetary constraints, after a lon g period of continuous budgetary expansion. newly emerging quasidisciplinary struc tures lay greater claims on universit resources and seek to con trol more irectly future appointments, they tend to eat nto the power of the eisting main disciplines In this battle, groups which are pres ently less well nanced seek to dene abstract intellectual justications for proposed shifts in resource alloca tion It is here that the main organizat ional pressure for restruc turing of the social s cience s will come The problem is that this pressure to realign organizational st ructures on the b asis of new intellectual categories is pursued country by country, universit by universit nd the initiative is often not that of working scholars but that of administrators, whose concerns are sometimes more budgetary than intellectual The perspective before us is that of orgazational dispersal, ith a multiplicit of name s, ain to the situation that existed i n the r st half of the nineteenth century That is to say, the process of establishing the disciplines bet een , say, 1850 and 1945 was one of reduci ng the number of categories into whi ch social science might be diided into a limited list ith which we have become familiar and which was largely adopte d worldwide We have recounte how and why the proc ess since then has begun to move in the other
sible reconguration of organizational boundaries within the so cial science isciplines , but of the po ssible reco nguration of the larger structures of the socalled faculties Of course, this struggle over boundaries has been a ceaseless one But there come moments in which what may be called for are major as opposed to minor realignments The early nineteen th c entury ushered in such a pattern of major realignments, which we have been describing here The question before us is whether the early tentrst century may b e another such momen t. There is a third level of pos sible restructurin g It is not only a question of the boundaries of departments ithin the faculti es and the boundaries of faculties ithin the universities Part of the nineteenthcentury restructuring involved the reival of the universit itself as the central locus of knowledge creation and reproduction The e normous expansion o f the universit system across the world in the period since 194 5, in terms o f numbers of institutions , of teaching personne l, and of students, has led to a ight of res earch actiities to ever higher" levels of the educational system Before 1945, some researchers still taught in secondary schools By 1990, not only was this no long er true, but many scholars even av oided, to the degree they could, teaching in the rst or lower levels o f the universit system Today, s ome are even leeing the teaching of doctoral students a
direction We mayis to reect on the rationalit of the emerging pattern These organizational problems are, of course, more than compounded by the blurring of the al patern of superdomains: the natural sciences, the sciences, and the humanities It thus becomes a question not merely of the pos
there has been a growth of instit utes of advanced studies " other nonteaching struc tures Similarly, the centra l ocus of intellectual communication in the nineteenth century was national scholarly meetings and national scientic journals As these structures became overcrowded, they were to s ome extent replaced by colloquia, which
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Isabelle Stengers have called for a reenchantment of the world. " The concept of the d isenchantment of th e world" represented the search for an objective knowledge unconstrained by revealed and/or accep ted wisdom or ideolog. In the so cial science s, it was a demand tha twe not reite history in the name of existing power structures. This demand was an es sential step in freeing intellectual actiity from disabling external pressures and om myholog, and remains valid. W e have no ish to return the pendulum and nd ourselv es once again in the preicament out of which the disenchantment of the world sought to
have ourished worldide since 945. No wthis eld too is overcrowded, and we are seeing the emergence of small, continuing structures of physically separated scholars, abetted, of course, by the great advances i n com munications po ssibilities offered by electronic netorks Al these developments at least open the question of whether, in the next fty years, universities as such ill continue to be the main organizational base of scholarly research Or are other structuresindependent research institutes , centers for advanced study, net orks, epistemic communities via electronic facilitiesgoing to substitute for them in a signicant way? These developments may represent very positive adjustments to the problems inherent in the enormous expansion of universit structures. ut if it is thought desirable or ineitable that research become separated to any signicant extent from teaching and from the universit system, there ill need to be a greater effrt to obtain public legitimation for this development, or else there may not be the mater ial bases to sustain schol arly research. These organizational problems, which are of course not limited to the social sciences, ame the context ithin which in tellectual clarication will take place There are probably three central theoretical/methodological issues around which t is necessary to construct new, heuristic consensuses in order to
rescue us. The call for a reenchantment of the world" is a dfferent one . It is not a call for mystication. It is a call to break down the articial boundaries beteen humans and nature, to recognize that they both form part of a single universe framed by the arrow of time. The r eenchantment of the world is meant to liberate human thought still further. The problem has been that, in the attempt to liberate the human spirit, the concept of the neutral scientist (put forward not by Weber but by positivist social science) oered an impossible solution to the laudable objective of freeing scholarship from arbitrary orthodox No scientist can ever be extracted from his/her physical and s ocial context Every measurement changes realit in the attempt to record
permit fruitful advances in knowledge. The rst concerns the relationship of the res earcher to the researc h. At the beginning of the century, M Weber summarized the tra jectory of mode rn To be sure, his thought as the disenchantment of phrase merely described a process evolved over several hundred years. In La nouvelle alliance Ilya Prigogine and
Every conceptualization is based on philosophical ments. In time, the idespread belief in a cti ve neutralit has become itself a major obstacle to increasing the truth value of our ndings. If this pose s a great problem for the natu ral scientists, it is an even greater problem for the social scientists. Translating the reenchantment of the world into a reasonable
WHAT KND OF SOCAL SCENCE NOW?
woring practic will not b asy. But for social scintists it sms an urgnt task Th scon d issu is howto rinsrt tim and spac as intrnal variabls onstitutiv of our analyss and not mrly unchanging physical ralitis within which th social univrs ists. If w considr that concpts of tim and spac ar socially constructd variabls which th world (and th scholar) us to affct and intrprt social rality, w ar facd ith th ncssity of dvloping a mthodology whrin w shall plac ths social constructions at th cntr o f our analyss, but in ways that thy ill not b sn or usd as arbitrary phnomna To th xtnt that w succd in this, th outdatd distinction btn idiographic and nomothtic pistmologis ill los whatvr cognitiv maning it still has. Howvr, this is asir said than don. The thirdissue before us is how to overcome the articial separations erected in the ineteenth century beteen supposedly autonomous realms of the political, the ec onomic, and the so cial (or the cultural or the socio cultural). In the current practice of social scintists, th lins ar d facto oftn ignord But th
current practice does not accord ith the ofcial viepoints of the major isciplines. T he question of the istence of these separate r ealms needs to be tac led directly, or rather, to be reopened q uie fully. Once that happens, and new formulations begin to take root, the intellectual bases for the restructuring of
th disciplins may bc om clarr On last caution If th rsarchr cannot b nutral" and if tim and spac ar intrnal variabls analysis, thn it follows that th task of rstructuring th scincs must b
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on that rsults from th intraction of scholars coming from vry clim and prspctiv (and taing into account gndr, rac, class , and linguistic cultur) , and that this worldwid intraction b a ral on and not a mr formal courtsy masing th imposition of th iws of on sgmnt ofworld scintists. It ill not b at all asy to organi such worldid intraction in a maningf way. It is thus a furthr obstacl in our path Howvr, ovrcoming this obstacl may b th ky to ovrcoming all th othrs hat, thrfor, can w conclud about th possibl stps that could b tak n in ordr to opn social scinc" ? Thr xists no asily availabl bluprint on th basis of which w can dcr any rorganiatio of th structurs of knowldg. W ar concrnd rathr ith ncouraging collctiv discussion and maing som suggstions about paths along which solutions might b found Bfor w considr proposals for rstructuring, thr sm to us svral major dimnsions worthy of fullr dbat and analysis Thy ar: () th implications of rfusing th ontological distinction btn humans and natur, a distinction mbddd in modrn thougt sinc at last Dscarts; (2) th implications of rfusing t o co nsidr th stat a s providing th only po ssibl andor primary boundaris ithin wh ich social action occurs and is to b analyd; ( 3 ) th implications accpting th unnding tnsion btn th on and th th univrsal and th particular, as a prmannt fatur of human socit and not as an anachronism; (4) th ind of objc tiit which is plausibl in th light of th volving prmiss of nc.
WHAT KND OF SOCAL S CENCE NOW? Humns nd Nure
The social sciences have been moving in the direction of an increasing respect for nature at the same time that the natural sciences have been moving in the direction o seeing the universe as unstable and unpredictable, thereby conceiving of the universe as a active realit and not automaton subject to domination by humans, who are somehow located outside nature The convergences beteen the natural and social sciences become greater to the degree one iews both as dealing ith complex systems , in which future developments are the outcome of temporally irreversible process es . Some social scientists have responded to recent ndings in behavioral genetics by urging a more biological orientation for the social sciences. Some have even been reiing the ideas of genetic determinism o the bas is o f inferences from the human genome project. We think that taing this path would be a serious mistake and a setback for the social sciences We feel that the principal lesson of recent developments in the natural sciences is rather that the complexit of social dnamics needs to b e taken more seriously than ever Utopias are part of t he conc ern of the social s cienc es, which is not true of the natural sciences, and utopias must of course be ba se d on eisting trends lthough we now are clear that there i s no future certaint, and cannot b one, nonetheless images of the future inluence how humans a ct in the present The universince certaint is sit cannot remain aloof in a world in excluded, he role of the intellectual ea changing and the idea of the neutral scientist is under severe challenge,
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as we have documented Concepts of utopias are related to ideas of po ssible progres s, but teir realization does not depend merely on the advance of the natural sciences, as many preiously thought, but rather on the increase in human ceatiit, the expression of the self in this complex world. We come from a social past o f conlicting certitudes , b e they related to science, ethics, or social systems, to a present of considerable questioning, including questioning about the intrinsic po ssibilit of certainties Perhaps we are witnessing the end of a tpe of rationalit that is no longer appropriate to our time The accent we call for is one placed on the complex, the temporal, and the unstable, which corre sponds tod ay to a transdisciplin ary movement gaining in igor This is by no means a call to abandon the concept of substantive rationalit As hitehead said so well, the poject which remains central both to the students of human so cial life and to the natural scientists is the intelligibilit of the world: to frame a coherent, log ical, ne ces sary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted" In the choice of possible futures, resources are very much a political question, and the demand for expanded participation in decision maing is worldide We call upon the social sciences to open themselves to these questions This is by no a call, however, as was made in the nineteenth century, for a cia physics Rather, it is a recognition that , though the explana tions we may make of the historical structuring of the natural universe and of human experience are by no means identical, II. . N. Wht ehead, Process and Reality, corrected ed (New York: Macllan, I978), p
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they are noncontradictory and are oth reated to evoution During the ast to centuries the rea wod has imosed current oiticl issues on intelectul activit ressuring schoas to dene articuar henomena as universas ecase of their imications in the immediate oitica sitation The issue is how to escae the ass ing constraints of the contemorary t o arrive at more ongterm durae and usefu interretations of socia reait. In the necessary ifferentiation and seciaiation of the so cia science s we may have aid too itte attent ion to one genera socia roem resting om the creation of now1 edg e how not to create a ga eteen those who know and those who do not The resonsiiit of going eyond these immediate ressure s is not that of the working socia scientists aon e; i t also is that of intelectua ureaucraciesniversit administrators scholay associations ndations government agencies resons ie for edcation and research It reqires the recognition that the maor isse s facing a comex societ cannot e solved y decomosing them into sm al arts that seem easy to manage anayticay t rather y attemting to treat these roems treat humans and natre in their c omexit and interreations 2
e Stte s n Anltic Building Block
The so cia sciences have een very state centric in the s ense that states formed the suosedy selfeident frameworks ithin which the roces ses analyed y the so cia sciences took ace This was eseciay tre for those tha ue (at east to 9 essentialy the Western world-his ry and the trio of nomothetic socia sciences (economics olitica science and
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8
socioog . To e sure neither anthrooog nor Orienta studies was statecentric t thi s was ecause the o nes th ese schoars studied were not considered to e oci of modern socia structures Modern socia structres were imicity ocated ithin modern states fter 9 ith the rise of area stdies and the consequent exansion of the emirica doman of histor and the three nomothetic socia sciences into the nonWestern word these nonWestern areas too ecame sect to statecentic anayses. The key ost9 concet of deveoment" referred rst and foremost to the deveoment of each state taken as an indiidua entit No dot there were aways some socia scientists who id not consider the statethe current state the historica state (shed acard into restate times the utative stateto e a unit so natra that its anayic rimacy was resmed not stied But these dissenters were few and not al that voca in the eriod om 80 to 90 The s efeident character of the state as constituting the natra oundary of socia i fe egan to e uestioned mch more seriousy eginning in the 90' This was the reslt of the connctre a n ot accidenta conunctre of to transformations The rst was a transformation in the rea word The states s eeme d to ose their romise as agents of moderniation and economic weeing in ouar and sho ary estee m n d sec ond there were the changes in the wold o knowedge we have een descriing which led scholars to look again at reiosy nqestioned resositio ns The certain knowedge that had een romised s y socia scientists seemed an eident conseqence of their faith in rogress It found exression in the eief in steady imrove
WHAT KND OF SOCAL SCENCE NOW?
WHAT KND OF SOCAL SCENCE NOW?
mens ha woud e impemened y expes" in which he e naing" sae woud pay a key oe in he effo o efom s ocie The socia sciences wee expeced o ae his pocess of aiona gadua impovemen. I seemed o foow ha he saes oundaies woud e aken as foming he naua cade ihin which o pusue such impovemen. Thee h ave een of couse coninua chaenges wihin he wod of nowedge in cudingwihin he socia sciences (fo exampe in he ae nine eenh cenuy) o an ovey simpe idea of pogess. Bu each peious chaenge seemed o me away in he face of coninuing echnoogca achievemens Fuhemoe he asic hus of democaiaion ed evehee o seadiy inceasing demands on he sae ugen cas fo i o uiie is sca and udgeay powes o ameioae and esiue. The sae as puveyo of po gess hus se emed heoeicay se cue Bu in ecen decad es as edisiuions inceased ess fas han escaaing demands fo edisiuion saes egan o e ewed as offeing ess saisfacion ahe han moe A ceain amoun of dsiusionmen egan o se in eginning in he 960s Insofa as he ansfomaions of he wod since hen have seved o nouish a deep skepicism in mos pas of he wod aou how eay i neiae he pomised impoveme migh e and in paicua whehe he saes efoms in fac
95 0s when oh odina y peope and schoas hough a he sae eve and aced a he sae eve. Given his shif om acion a he sae eve which was hough o guanee a ceain f uue o acion a goa and oca eves which appea s muc h moe unceain a nd difcu o manipuae he new mode s of anaysis of oh h e naua scie niss and of he popo nens of cuua sudes seemed o m any o offe moe pausie mode s B oh mo des o f anaysis oo k unceainies (and ocaisms ) o e cena an yic vaiaes no o e uied in a deeminisic univesaism I foowed ha he sefeden naue of saes as concepua conaineshe anayic deivaive in he socia sciences of oh idiogaphic hisoy and he moe univesaisic socia sciencesecame open o seious chaenge and o deae Saecenic hining had no of couse pecuded he sudy of eaions eeen saes inena iona eaions as i is co mmony (if eoneousy ) caed and sueds exised ihin each of he socia sciences devoed o he socaed inenaiona aena We migh have expeced ha i woud e paciiones fom wihin hese sueds who woud s espond o he chaenge ha he ising awaeness of anssae phenomena has pesened o he anayic f amewoks of he soc ia sc ience s u his was no in fa c he case The po em was ha inenaiona
ing aou ea impovemens he nauaness of he sae as he uni of anaysis has een seiousy undemined. Think goay ac ocay" is a sogan ha vey deieaey eaves ou he sae and epesens a wihdawa 0 aih in he sae as a mech anism of efom I wod have n ssle in he
sudies had een pemised on a saecenic famewok us as much as ohe pas of he socia sciences They ook he fom pimaiy of copaive sudies ih saes as he uni o e comp aed o of fo eign poicy" sudies in which he oecwa s o sudy he poicies of saes owads each ohe ahe han
WHAT KND OF SOCAL SCENCE NOW?
WHAT KND OF SOCAL SCENCE NOW?
that of studin the emerent characteristics of transstate structures . In the institutionalized social scie nces, the study of the complex structures that exist at the more lobal level were for a lon time larely nel ected, just as were the complex structures that exist at more local levels . Since the late 1960's, there have been numerous attempts ithin each of the disciplines and across the dsciplinesto be les s statecentric. In most ca ses this has one in tandem ith historicization and, in p articular, ith the use o f loner time periods for empirical anal ysis This shift in the unit of an alysis has one under many labels, such as international political economy, the study of world cities, a lobal institutional ec onomics , world history, worldsystems analysis, and ciilizational studies . There has simultaneously been a renewed concern with re ions" both reions that are lar e and trans state (e .. , the recent co ncern ith East �a as a reion ithin the whole world) and reions that are small and located inside states (e.. the protoindustrialization concept in eco nomic history) . This is not the place to review each of these in their commonalities and their differences , but to note that each in its way challened the statecentric theoretical presuppositions of the social sciences as they had been traditionally institutionalized. It remains to be seen how far the loic of their positions ill push their propo-
tonomous system operatin larely throuh parallel processes. The limits of this ind o f simplication ouht to be even more eident in the study of complex historical social systems than they were in the stud y of atomic and molecular p henomen a, in which such methods are now considered a thin of the past Of course, rejection of the state as the indicated socioeoraphical container for social analysis in no way means that the state is no loner to be iewed as a key institution in the modern world, one that has profound inluences on economic, cultural, and s ocial processes . The study of al these processes clearly require an understandin of the mechanisms of the state. hat they do not req uire is the assumpt ion that the state is the natural, or even the most important, boundary of social action By challenin the efcacy of oranizin social nowlede amon units dened by state boundaries , recent developme nts in the social sciences imply some sinicant transitions in the objects of social scientic research. Once we drop the statecentric assumption , which has been fundamental to history and the nomothetic social sciences in the past, and accept that this perspective can often be a hindrance to makin the world intelliible, we ineitably raise questions about the very structure of the disciplinary partitions which have rown up around, indeed have been based on, this assumption.
nents. There are some who favor a clean break ith the traditional disciplines rather than remainin on their frine, wishin to join a new heterodox based upon lobal spatial ref erents. The statecentrism of traditional aene analyses was a �tl' theoretical simplication that involved he pepn of ho moeneous and equivalent spa ces, each o f which formed an au
3 The Univerl nd the Prticulr
5
The tension beteen the universal and the particular in the social sciences has always been a subject of passionate debate, since it has always been seen as hain immediate political impications, and this has impined on serene discussion. The
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Romantic reaction to, and reformulation of, nlightenment conceptions was centered around th is issu e, and that debate was not unconnected ith the political controversies of the Napoleonic era as the culmination of processes launched by the French Revolution. The issue has returned to the fore in contemporary iscussions of the so cial sciences, in large part resulting from the political reassertion of the nonWestern world, combined ith the p arallel politic al assertion o f groups ithin the Western world that consider themselves to have been culturally oppressed. We have already traced the various forms in which this debate has taken f orm ithin the social scienc es . One signicant organizational consequence of this reived debate has been the call for a so cial science that is more multicultural" or intercultural The effort to insert new premises into the theoretical frameworks of the social scieces, ones that respond to this demand for a more multicultural social science, has been met ith a reival under various guises of social Darinism. Social Dainism is a particular variant, and a rather inluential one, of the doctrine of ineitable progress. Its key argument has been essentially that progress is the result of a social struggle, in which competencywins out, and that interfering ith this social struggle is nterfering ith social progress These arguments
alternative projects critical of the belief that industrialization, modernization, and Westernization are ineitably linked. Technocratic rationalit, presenting itself as the most advanced version of modern rationa lism , has been in manyways an avatar of social Darinism. It also delegitimizes any concept which does not t a meansend model of rationalit, and any institution which has n o immediate functional utilit The framework that situates ini iduals primaril y ithin states has tended to treat actors who do not t in this framework as remnant s of premodern times, w ho ill be eliminated eventually by the advance of progre ss. Treating seriously the innumerable conc epts, values , beiefs, no rms, and institutions placed in this unwante d category has been deemed unscientic. In many cases , the very eistence of these alternative worldviews and their proponents has been forgotten, suppressed from the collecti ve memory of modern socie ties. hat has changed todayi s that many people, including many scholar s, now strongly refuse to accept this dismissal of alterna tive sets ofvalues, and this has been reinforced by the (re)discovery of major substantive irrationalities that are embedded in modern rational thought The question that is consequently before us is how to take seriously i n our s ocial science a pluralit of worldiews ithout losing the sense that there eists the
have sometimes been reinforced by the genetic determinism we have mentioned. The discourse of social Darnism labels any concept associated ith the losers in the surival ofhe ttest" evolutionary proces s as irrational This cate gorical condemnation has often all values held by groups who do not have powerful social positions, as well as
bilit of knoing and realizing sets of values that may in fact common, or become common, to all humanit The key task is to explode the hermet ic language used to describe perso ns and groups that are others," who are mere ly objects of social sci ence analysis, as opposed to those who are subjects havi ng full rights and legitimacy, among whom the analysts have placed
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thems elves There is an ineitable confusion or ove rlap here be teen the ideologc al and the epistemologcal. For a lge number of nonWestern social scientists the istinction beeen the political the religous and the scientic does not seem entirely reasonable or valid. Many of the critics of parochialism have hitherto emphasized the negative age nda that of denng false universalism s They have questioned the appropriateness of claimed universalist principles to a number of singu lar case s and/or the po ssibilit or desirabili of universalism and have offered in its place quasidisciplinary categories dened by social constituencies. The principal result up to n ow has be en largely the multiplicaton of particularisms. Beyond the obious argument that the voices of dominated (and therefore hitherto largely ignored) groups need to be acknowledged there is the more arduous task of demonstrating how icorporating the experiences of these groups is undamental to achieng objective nowledge of social process es. We would emphasize that universalism is always historically contingent. Thus rather than show once again what the social sciences have misse d by excluing a large part o f human experience we should move on to demonstrate what our understanding of social proce sses gains once we include increasing ly larger
ing new avenues for ialogue and exchange beyond (and not merely betee n) the eisting disciplines . We further strongly urge the fuller realization of a multilngual scholarship. The choice of language often predetermines the outcome To take a very obious example the concepts of the midle class the bourgeoisie and Brgertum (presumably approximately similar) in fact dene signicantly different categories and imply different empirical measurements. The minimum that we can expect of social scientists is an awaren ess of the range of realms of concptual meaning. A world in which all social scientists had woring control of several ma jor scholarly languages would be a wold in which better s ocial science was don e. nowledge oflangua ges opens th e mind of the s cholar to other ways of organizing nowledge. It might go a considerable istance towards creating a woring and fruitful understaning of the unending tensions of the antinomy of universalism an d particulaism But multilingualism ill only t hrive ifit bec ome s organizationally as well as intellectually legitimated: through the real use of multiple languages in pedagog; through the real use of multiple languages in scientic meeting s. Dialogue and exchange can oly exist where there is ba sic respect among colleagues. The angry rhetoric that now intrudes on these d iscussions s however a relection of u nderlng
segments of the world's historical experiences Nonetheless however parochial the preious versions of universalism have bee n it does not see m sen sible simply to abandon the terrain of the traitional disciplines to those in these pao chialisms Restoring the balance ll arguing the case ithin the esting isciplines while simultaneously establish
cial tens ions Merely calling fo r civil debate will not achieve Responing simultaneously to the demands of universal relevance (applicabilit validit) and of the continuing realit of a multiplicit of cultures ill depend on the imaginativeness of our organizational responses and a certain tolerance for intellectual experimentation in the social sciences. The social sci
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WHAT KND O SOCAL SCENCE NOW?
ences should embrace a very ide opening to research and teaching on all cultures ( societies, peopl es) in the search for a renewe d, expanded, and m eaningful pluralistic universalism.
intermeiate persons (preous scholars) and in favor of data about which the researcher would be expected to feel more uninvolved personally. This pushed them in the direction of data created in the past, and therefore about the past, and in the direction of qualitative data, where the richness of the context could lead the researcher to understand the fullness of the motivations involved, as oppos ed to a situation where the researcher simply extrapolated his own model, seen as his own prejudices , onto the data. There have always been doubts expressed abou t the degree to which either of these approaches allows us to obtai n objective data. recent decades , these doubts have been expresse d quite loudly, the result of the changing situation in the social sciences that we have been des cribing. O ne kind of questionthathasbeen posed is "whose objectit?" Pos ing the qu estion in th is way implies skepticism, even total doubt, about the possibilit of achieing objective owledge. Some have suggested that what is said to be objective knowledge is merely the knowledge of those who are socially and politically stronger. We agree that all scholars are rooted in a specic social setting, and therefore inetably utilize presuppositions an prejudices that interfere ith their perceptions and interpretations of social realit In this sense, there can be no neutral" scholar
4. Obje The question of objectit has been central to the methodol ogi cal debates of the social sciences om the beginning. We said at the outset of this report that social science was the attempt in the modern world to develop systematic, secular knowledge about reality that is somehow validated empirically" The term objectivit" has been used to represent appropriate attempts to achieve this objective. The m eaning of objectit has been very much tied to the sense that knowledge is not a priori that re search can teach us things that we d not know, can offer sur prises s vis our prior expectations. The opp osite of objective" was taken to be su bjective, " dened m ost oft en as t he intr usion o f the b iases o f the re searcher into the collection and interpretation of the data. This was seen as distorting the data, and therefore of reducing its va lidit. How then could one b e objecive? In practice, ifferent social s ciences took dierent paths in the search for this objective. To models were domin ant. T he more n omothetic social sciences emphasize d remoing the danger of subjectii by
maximizing the hardness" o f the data, that i s, thei r measurability and comparabili This pushed them in the irection of collecting data about the present moment, where the r esearcher was most li kely to be able to con trol the of the data. The
more idiographic historians analyzed the differently. They argued in favor of primary sources, untouched (unistorted) by
We also agree that a quasiphotographic representati on o f socia reality is impossible. All data are selections from realit, based on th e worldviews or theoretical model s of the era, as ltered through the standpoints of parti cular groups n each era In this sense, the bases of selection are historically constructed, and ill always ineitably change as the world changes. If perfectly
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WHAT KND OF SOCAL SCENCE NOW?
WHAT KND OF SOCA SCENCE NOW?
uninvolved scholas e poducing a social wold outside themselves is what we mean by objectit, then we do not thin such a phenomenon exists. But thee is anothe meaning to objectit Objectivit can be seen as the outcome of hum an leaning, which epesents the intent of scholaship and the edence that it is pos sible Scholas see to convince each othe of the validit of thei ndings and thei intepetations They appeal to the fact that they have used methods that ae eplicable by othes, methods whose details they pesent openly to othes. They appeal to the coheence and utilit of thei intepetations in explaining the lagest amount of available data, lage amounts than altenative explanations. In shot, they pesent themselves to the intesubject ive judgment of all those who do eseach o thin systematically about the paticula subject. We accept that this objective has not been ealized fully, o even fequently, up to now. We accept that thee have been systematic eos in the ways in which social scientists have poceed ed in the past, and that many have used the mas of objectiit to pusue thei subjective iews We have indeed tied to outline the natue of such continuing distotions . And we accept that these eos ae not to be epaied by simple appeals to an ideal of intesubjectit, but equie stengthening the ogani-
to insist the social sciences move in the diection of inclusiveness (in tems of the ecuitment of pesonnel, an openness to multiple cultual expeie nces, the sco pe o flegitimate mattes of study) is to futhe the p ossibilit of moe objective nowledge. We feel that to e mphasize the histoicit of all so cial phe nomena is to diminish the tendency to mae pematue, and ultimately naive, abstactions om ealit. We feel that pesistently to question the subjective elements in ou theoetical models is to incease the lielihood that these models ill be elevant and useful. We feel that aention to the thee i ssue s we have peviously discus se d a bette appeciation of the validit of the onto logical distinction beteen humans and na tue, a boade denition of the boundaies thin which social action oc cus, and a pope balance of the antinomy of univesalism and paticulaism ill all assist consideably ou attempts to develop the ind of moe valid nowledge that we se e to have In shot, the fact that nowledge is socially constucted also means that moe valid nowledge is s ocially pos sible The ecognition of the social bases of nowledge is not at all in contadiction to the concept of objecti On the contay, we ague that the estuctuing of the social sciences of which we have been spe aing can ampli this po ssibilit by taing into account the citicisms of past pactice that hav e bee n made and by
zaional undepinnings of the collective effot hat we do not accept is that social science is theefoe to be educed to a miscellany of pivate iews, ea ch equally valid in the diection of We feel that pushing the social also pushing it in combatting the fagmentation the diection of a meaningful degee of objectiit We feel that
stuctues that ae moe tuly plua list and univesal
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have tried in th is report to address three things. The rst is to show how social science was historically constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was diided into a specic set of relatively standard disciplines in a process that went on beeen the late eighteenth century and 95. The second is to reveal the way s in which world developments in the period since 195 rais ed questions about this intellec tual diision of labor and therefore reopened the issues of organizational structuring that had been put into place in the preious pe riod The third is to elucidate a serie s o f basic intellectu al questions
mulas, but primarily present a set of tentative propo sals that seem to us to move in the right direction. There is unclarit to day in the classication of the social sciences , the result of various blurrings whos e historical roots we have tried to explain. To sure, adustments can always made, and indeed are constantly being made, that can ameliorate some of the irrationalities. We certainly do not advocate abolishing the idea of diisions of labor ithin social science, and this may continue to tak the form of isciplines. Disciplines serve a function, the function of disciplining minds and channeling schol arly energ. But there has to be some level of consensus about the validity of the diiing lines , if they are to work. We hav e tried to indicate the ways that the historical trajectory of the institutionalization of the so cial sciences led to so me major exclusions of reali Discussion about these exclusions has m eant that the level of con sensus concerning the trad itional disciplin es has diminished. The classication of the social sciences was constructed around to antinomies which no longer command the wide support they once enjoyed: the antinomy beteen past and pres ent, and the antinomy beteen idiographic and nomothetic isciplines . A third antinomy, that bee en the civilized and the barbaric world, has few public defenders anmore, but in practice still inhabits the mentalities of man y sc holars.
about which there has been much recent debate and to suggest a stance that we think optimal in order to move forward. We now turn to discussing in what ways the social sciences might be intelligently restructured in the ligh t of and the recent debates. We should say at the outset we hav e n o simpl e, clearcut for
In addition to the intellectu al debates surrounding the logc of the present isciplinary diisions, there is the problem of resources. The princpa administrative mode of dealing with protests about the present divisions has been the multiplication of interdisciplinary programs of training and research, a pro cess that is continuing unabated, as additional claims are still con
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stantly being made. But such multiplic ation requires pers onnel and money. owever the realit othe world ofknowledge f the 1 99 0 ' S especially as compared to that of earlier decades is the constraint on resources i mpos ed by sc al crises in al most every state. hile social scientists because of the internal pressures generate d by their intellectual dilemma s are se eking to expand the number and variet of pedagogical and re search structures administrators are looing for ways to economize and therefore to consolidate. e are not suggesting that there has been too much multidisciplinarit. Far from it. Rather we are pointing out that organizationally this has gone less in the direction of uniing actities tha n in that of multipling the number ofuniversit names and programs
Let us remember a further realit of the present situation While we have been describing a general pattern in the social science s to day the detailed classications vary coun try by country often inst itution by insttution. Furthermore the degree of internal cohesivene ss a nd exibilit of the disciplines varies today both bete en discplines and amo ng the forms a discipline assumes around the world. The p ressure for change th erefore is not uniform. In addition the pressure for change varies according to the theoretical perspectives of various social scientists and according to the degree to which particular groups of social scientists are m ore or les s directly involved in public serice actities and concerns. Finally dfferent communities of social scientists nd themselves in different political situations national political situations universit political situations and the se dfferences afect their interests and therefore the degree to which they will favor or strongly oppose administrative reorganization. No doubt we co uld simply plead for more exi bilit. This i s the c ours e that we have in fact bee n folloing for thre e or four decades now. There has bee n a certain amoun t of success in this regard but the alleviat ion of the problem ha s not kept pace ith its intensication. The reason is simple. The sense of safet in the disciplines tends more often than not to in out in the
It is onl y a matter o f time for the t o contrary pre ssures to collide and c ollide severely. e ma y hope that working social scientists il l take a h ard look at their presen t structures and try to bring their re ised intellectual perceptions of a u seful dision of labor into line with the organizational amework they nec essarily construct. Ifworking social scientists do not do this it will no doubt be done for them by ad ministrators ofthe insti tu tions of knowledge. To be sure no one is or is lik ely to be in a posi tion to decree wholesale reorganization nor would it nee ssarily be a go od thing if som eone w ere. Non ethele ss the a lternative to wh olesale sudden and dramatic reorganization is not muddling through expecting that someho w things ill improve and work them selves out This is bec ause c onfusion overlap andres ourc e shortage are all
and to-
gether they can add up to a major bk the frtherance of nowledge.
group arenas that universit departments constitute and which much of the real power of daytoday decision maing is located. Foundations may give grants to imaginative groups of scholars but departments decide on promotions or course curricula. Good motivations pronounced by indiduals are not always very efcacious in constraining organizational pressures.
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hat seems to be called for is less an attempt to transform organizational ontiers than to ampli the organization of intellectual actit thout attention to current isciplinary boundaries. To be historical i s after all not the exclusiv e puriew of persons called historians It is a n obligation of all so cial scientists T o be sociolog ical is not the exclusive puriew of persons called so ciologists It is an obligat ion of all social scientists. conomic iss ues are not the exclusive purew of economists . conomic questions are central to any and all social scientic analy ses Nor it absolutely sure that professional historians necessarily know more about historical explanations, sociologists more about social issues, economists more about economic luctuations than other woring social scientists In short, we do not believe that there are monopolies of wisdom, nor zon es of knowledge reserved to persons ith particular universit degrees There are emergi ng, t o be sure, particular groupings of social scientists ( and indeed non social scientists) around specied interests or themat ic areas, om population to health to language, and so forth There are emerging groupings around the level of analysis ( concentration on indidual social action; concentration on largescale, lo ngterm social processes ) hether or·not the thematic distinct ions or the mi cromac ro" distinction are
spectrum. t one extreme lies the United States, with the largest densit of universit structures in the world, and also a very strong internal political pressure both for and against restructuring the social sciences. t the other extreme lies ica, where universities are of relatively recent construction and the traditional disciplines are not very strongly institutionalized. There the extreme paucit ofpublic resources has created a situation in which the social science communit has been forced to innovate. No doubt, there are particularities elsewhere in the world, which ll permit equally interesting experimentation One such arena is pe rhaps the post Communist countri es , where much academic reorganization is occurring. And no doubt, as Western urope builds its communit structures, there ll be openings for creative experimentation in the universit system In the nited States, universit structures are multiple, diverse, and decentralized The issues raised by the call for multiculturalism, as well as the work in science studies, have already become the subject of pub lic political debate Is sues raised by some of the new developments in science may possibly be caught in the political whirl by contagion. This proides an additional motive for woring social scientists to take the issues in hand and to try thereby to keep passing (an d passion ate political
ideal ways to organize the division of labor in social science knowledge today, theymay be at least as plausib le as distinguishing beteen the economic and the political, for example here do opportunities for e experimentation lie? There must be many which the reader can We can point to some that are found at quite dfferent loci on the academic
siderations from intruing too deeply in a process t hat is far consequential to be decided on electoral motivations United States ha s ha d a lon g history of structural experimen ta tion in the universit systems the inve ntion of graduate sch ools in the late nineteenth century, a modication of the German seminar system; the nvention of the system of free electives by
roo
CONCLUSION
RESTRUCTU RING THE SOCIA
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students also in the late nineteenth century; the invention of social science research councils after the First World War; the invention of core course" requirements after the First World War; the invention of area studies after the Second World War; the invention of women's studies and e thnic" programs of multiple kinds the r970 's We are not tang a position for or against any of these inventions but use them to illustrate the fact that there has be en room in the U S universit system to experiment erhaps the U.S social science communit can once again co me up ith imaginative solution s to th e very real organizational problems we have been describing In the p ostCommunist countries we are faced ith a situation in which many ersthile structures have been disbanded and certain universit categories discarded The nancial pressures have been such tha t many scholars have moved outside the universit structures to ctinue their work As a consequence here too there seem s much room for experimentation There is of course th e risk that scholars ill se k to adopt wholesale the existing structures of Western universities on the grounds that these represent a future that is dfferent from their own immediate past ithout recognizing the real difculties in which the estern universit systems are nding themselves Nonetheless there are some signs of experimentation For example in
Etudes en Sciences Sociales in aris there not ithin history but side by side as coeqal ith both history and s ocial anthropolog At the same time in a number of universities in various parts of the world physical anthropolog has come to be incorporated into human biolog The European Communit has placed considerable importance on strengthening links among its various universities through exchange programs and the encouragement of new panuropean research project s The universities are se ekng to face creatively the question of the multiplicit of languages in scholarly use and we may hope that the solutions they nd may restore the lngistic richness of social scientic actiit and offer some answers to one of the issues raised under the relationship of universalism and particularism. Insofar as there may be new universities created ith a specically European vocation (one example may be the EuropaUniversitt Viadrina in Frankfurt an Oder) there eists the opportunit to restructure the social sci ence s ithout hang the problem of transforming exsting organizational structures In Africa a process of experimentation has already begun The current situation in Africa which in many ways looks dismal has proided a foundation for alternative forms of scholarship which do not nece ssarily relect the disciplina ry approaches
ersthile East Germany at Humboldt Universit in Berlin the history department has become the rst one in Germany perhaps in Europe to create a subdepartment of European ethnolanthropolog attempting thereby to give og a dit de cit inside of history anthropolog has also become a formal category within the Ecole des Hautes
adopted in other regions of the world Much of the research about socioecono mic evolution has required that rese arch methods not be xed but rather open to accom modate new knowledge and has encouraged cutti ng across the divide beteen the socia l and natural sciences Experimentation has also occurred in other parts of the nonWestern world The same dilemma of
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limited resources and lack o f deep institut ionalization o f the social science isciplines led to the creation in the past thirt years of the very successful FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias S ociales) res earch and tran ing structures throughout Latin erica, which have operated as parauniversit institutions not be holden to tradtional categories of knowledge . The emergence ofindepe ndent rese arch institutions in frica and Latin merica, although they are still limited in number, has created an alternative avenue for undertaking research One of the interesti ng features o f some of these institutions is that they seek to oin together expertise f rom the social and the natural s cienc es, shong little regard for disciplinary boundaries They have also become major sources of policy ideas for government ofcials. This is now also occurring in the postCommunist coun tries. It has, of course, also occurred in Western countries. The Scien ce Policy esearch Uni t at Sussex Univer sit has a curriculum that is diided half and halfbe teen the social and natural sciences . hile it is not yet pos sible to be sure that the emerging social science rese arch in the se new frameworks ill result in coherent alternative groupings of knowledge, it is safe to say that in some parts of the world the old paradigms and the institutions that were set up to safeguard, nurture, and protect them never really
We are not at a momen t when the exsting isciplinary structure has broken down We are at a point when it has been questioned and when competing structu res are trng to c ome into existence. We think the most urgent task is that there be comprehensive iscussion of the underlng issues. This is the primary function of this report, to e ncourage such discussion and to elaborate the interconnected issues that have arisen In addition, we think there are at least four kinds of structural developments which administrators of structures of social science knowledge (universit administrators, social science research councils, ministries of education and/or research, educational foundations, NESCO, international social science organizations, etc.) could and should encourage as useful paths towards intellectual clarication and eventual fuller restructuring of the social sciences: The expansion o f instituons, within or alled to the uni
worked or have broken down. Such regons did not fully enter the old intellectual culdesacs and therefore they are now relatively more open spaces in which intellectual and institutional innovations are emerging This lforn trend, em erging � from relatively chaotic situations, may encourage us to support other such selforganizing trends outside the accepted paths of the world universit system.
thing is that such yearlong research roups sould be carefull prepared in advance and should reruit their membershi idely (in terms of disciplines, geography, cultural and linguistic zones, and gender), while still emphasizing enough coherence ith previous iews so that the interchange can be fruitful 2 The establishment of integted research progr ams within
versities, which would bring together scholars for a year's work in common around specc urgent tmes They already exist , of
course , but in far too limited a number One po ssible model is the ZiF (Zentrum f interdisziplinre Forschung) at Bielefeld Universit in Germany, which has done this since the 90' s Recent topics for the year have included body and soul, sociological and biological models of change, utopias The crucial
university structures that cut across tditional lines, have
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specc inteectual objectives, and have nds for a limited period oftime say aboutve yearsThis is dfferent from trai
tional research centers, which have unlimited lives and are expected to be fundraising structures. The ad hoc qualit of such programs, which would, however, last ve years, would be a mechanism of constant experimentat ion, which, on ce initially nded, would free the participants om this concern In the multitude of requests for new program s, instead o f immediately starting new te aching program s, perhaps what is needed is that the proponen ts be allowed to demonstrate the utilit and validit of their approaches by this kind of rese arch program 3 The compulsoryjoint appointment ofprofessors Today the norm is that professors are afliated ith one department, usu ally one i n which they themselves hav e an advanced degree. Oc casionally, and mor e or less as a special concessio n, s ome profes sors have a joint appontment" ith a second department Quite often this is a mere courtesy, and the prof ess or is not en couraged to participate too actively in the life o the se cond" or secondary" department. We would like to turn this around en tirely Wewould enisage a universit struture in which every one was appointed to to departments, the one in which heshe had his degree and a second o ne in which heshe had shown in terest o r done relevant work This would, of course, resul t in an incredible array of ifferent combinations urthermore, in or der to make sure that no department erected barriers, we would require that each department have at least2 percent of its mem bers who did not have a degree in If the pro fess ors then had rights in both the intellectual deate within each department, the curricula offered, the points
RESTRUCTRI NG THE SOCIAL SCIEN
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o f view that were considered plausible o r legitimate would all change as a result of this simple administrative deice 4. oint work for graduate students The situation is the same for graduate students as it is for profess ors They normally work within one department, and are often actively iscouraged from doing any work at all in a second department. Only in a few de partments in a few universities are students allowed to wander outside We would turn this around too hy not make it manda tory for students seeking a doctorate in a given iscipline to take a certain number of courses , o r do a certain amount ofresearch, that is de ned as being ithin the pur iew of a seco nd depart ment? This too would result in an incredible variet of combina tions dministered in a liberal but serious fashion, it would transform the present and the future hile the rst to recom mendations we make would requ ire nancial commitments on someone's part, they should not be too onerous as a percentage of tota l expenditures on the social science s The third and the f ourth recommendations would be irtually ithout any budgetary impact whatsoever We do not intend these r ecommendations to be limiting We intend them to encourage moves in the correct direct ion There are no doubt other deices that can also move in this rection, and we en courage others to propos e them hat is most important, we re peat, i s that the underl ing issues be debatedcl early, openly, intelligently, and urgently
Libry ofCongress CaJalgng-n-Pulcon Data Gulbenkian Commission on th Rstruturing of th Soia Sins Open th soia sins : rport of the Gubnkian Commission on the Rstruturin g of th Soia Sin e p m (Mstizo spas Espaes mtisss) Iuds bibiograpa rfrns SBN 0-8047-27260 (oth : a pape - BN 0-8047-2727-9 (pb : a papr I. Soia sins Tit II. Seies: Mstizo spas H61.c86 996 3d20
95-45759 CP @ his boo is printd o n aid, ryed pa p r Orgina printi996 Lat gur bow indiats yar of this pinting: 05 04 03 02 O
