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  1. Home
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  3. A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences
  • Cited by 28
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2014
Print publication year:
2014
Online ISBN:
9781139794817
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139794817
Subjects:
Economics, Economic Thought, Philosophy and Methodology
Information

Book description

A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences includes essays on the ways in which the histories of psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, history and political science have been written since the Second World War. Bringing together chapters written by the leading historians of each discipline, the book establishes significant parallels and contrasts and makes the case for a comparative interdisciplinary historiography. This comparative approach helps explain historiographical developments on the basis of factors specific to individual disciplines and the social, political, and intellectual developments that go beyond individual disciplines. All historians, including historians of the different social sciences, encounter literatures with which they are not familiar. This book will provide a broader understanding of the different ways in which the history of the social sciences, and by extension intellectual history, is written.

Reviews

‘… this volume could be better considered to be a reference work for the historiographies of the modern social disciplines, and, if so, one I do recommend.’

Marcel Boumans Source: Journal of the History of Economic Thought

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - Introduction
    pp 1-28
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter begins with a rise of the social sciences since the Second World War. It provides the background to their increased consideration in the historical literature in the past twenty five years. In particular, an important part of this history is that the social sciences achieved their more significant place in economic political, social, and cultural life, in large part, through cross disciplinary engagements guided by a common problem oriented approach. The chapter turns to the existing historiography, arguing that recent work has laid the foundations for moving from largely disciplinary histories of psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science to a history of the social sciences as a whole. In the chapter, the author argues for a comparative interdisciplinary historiography of the social sciences. Finally, it explains how the other chapters in this book are organized.
  • 2 - History and Historiography since 1945
    pp 29-61
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter reveals that certain tensions, methodological holists against methodological individualists, constructivists against realists, materialists against idealists, for example, have been more or less continually present, including within individual works. At the same time, the actual disposition of competing positions in terms of access to institutional power has varied greatly. The chapter focuses on the broader question of why grand narratives and turns have persisted in spite of awareness of their problematic nature. Historiography may involve critique of concepts, the chronology of interpretative fashions, or social or cultural histories of academic life. Political history was strongest in West Germany, where scholars had to define themselves against East German Marxism. By the early 1990s, historians across the discipline were evoking a cultural turn. Linguistic theory, poststructuralist or not, has been used relatively infrequently in general histories of historical writing.
  • 3 - History of Anthropology
    pp 62-98
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter concerns primarily with the literature on the history of sociocultural anthropology, which is by far the largest of anthropology's subfields. It emphasizes the anglophone anthropology, which dominated the entire discipline until relatively recently. The chapter indicates how the literature reflects and has often been intended to shape a particular disciplinary structure. Historians of science have their own subculture of inquiry. In the recent past, the most notable change affecting anthropologists' historical understanding was, of course, the era of decolonization, which stimulated a variety of intellectual responses. It examines what George Stocking termed "presentist" and "historicist" approaches, the diverse styles and viewpoints of scholars who have contributed to the literature, as well as the tendency to represent anthropologists as heroes and to rely on oral communications as much as on diverse sorts of written records.
  • 4 - Periphery toward Center and Back
    pp 99-143
  • Scholarship on the History of Sociology, 1945–2012
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Dividing the post-World War II era into three periods: 1945 to 1969, 1970 to 1999, and 2000 to 2012, this chapter describes the changing nature of scholarship on the history of sociology and the changing position of this scholarship in the discipline of sociology at large. To facilitate this description, it introduces the period divisions, data sources, and terminology, used in this analysis. The chapter clarifies the use of some terms to describe the historiography of sociology in the post-World War II era. It examines the practice and location of scholarship on the history of sociology in each of the periods identified. A historian of sociology comparing his or her subfield as it was in 1945 with conditions in 2012 would be struck, almost inevitably, by the prodigious growth and rich variegation of scholarship on the history of sociology.
  • 5 - History of Psychology since 1945
    pp 144-182
  • A North American Review
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the postwar period, American psychology experienced sustained exponential growth and its incorporation into nearly every facet of modern life. The history of psychology became a scholarly specialty in the 1960s, when American psychology became an influential if not the dominant idiom for professional discourse and practice in much of the world. This is the reason why this chapter, though it does draw in European work where necessary, concentrates on North American developments, focusing on scholarly contributions, with some attention paid to pedagogy and university textbooks. Intellectual developments within the history and philosophy of science, coupled with funding for research from the federal government and support for new university positions, led to the academic institutionalization of the two headed field in the United States. Critical history was aired at the annual meetings of the Cheiron Society during the 1980s.
  • 6 - Contested Identities
    pp 183-210
  • The History of Economics since 1945
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In 2007, when the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) proposed a new classification in which "history of economic thought" was moved from "economics" to "history, archeology, religion and philosophy", some in the field were up in arms, protesting that this amounted to its destruction. This chapter shows that the changing identity problem of the history of economics cannot be understood without taking account of the changes affecting economics from 1945, especially as the claim that the history of economics is economics has, for many of its practitioners, been central to the legitimation of the field up to the present. Until the 1950s or so, economists had usually attached importance to history, including both economic history and the history of economic theories, but as the discipline became more technical and acquired a more scientific self-image, this view found fewer and fewer supporters within the profession.
  • 7 - A Disciplinary History of Disciplinary Histories
    pp 211-236
  • The Case of Political Science
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the older wide and practical sense of political science gave way to a new, narrower, and professionalized sense that maps political science onto just one of the array of research-centered academic disciplines collectively labeled as the 'social sciences'. Disciplinary histories are, with varying levels of explicitness, informed by contemporary identities and agendas within political science, and concerned to inform the present and future of the discipline. Interwar convergence in America toward the freestanding political science department as a standard institution and the accompanying tying of the identity "political scientist" to location in such an institution neither assumed nor entailed a consensus on the substance, methods, or aims of political science. Globalization in disciplinary histories has involved, however, not only looking beyond America to other national contexts, but also resituating the history of American political science in transnational and global context.

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