History plus the social sciences: This has been a common formula for more than a century. It has produced extensive discussions and an enormous literature, often quite repetitive, seeking to explain what the relationship between history and the social sciences should be, could be, and cannot be. Still, the terms of the debate have not stabilized. At once epistemological and methodological, the debate also involves power struggles among disciplines and the social representations that they nourish and reflect. For this reason, experiences differ from one country to another. This essay will concentrate on three principal experiences, those in Germany, France, and the United States.

THE PROBLEM POSED

Despite some distant precedents, the problem was not attacked directly until the period when the social sciences were recognized as autonomous disciplines and institutionalized in academia. This was the period from the 1870s to the 1880s – the American Gilded Age – For the sciences of politics and economics and to a lesser degree for sociology, and from 1880 to 1900 in France’s Third Republic, where university reforms opened the way for the scientific disciplines of geography, sociology, psychology, and economics. In both America and France, these new sciences embodied the demands for objectivity, method, and positive knowledge, and they expressed the dominant ideologies of progress. The German disciplines provided models for many other countries, but the German social sciences developed in the Humboldtian university within a cultural system built around philosophy, and their ascent appeared threatened at the end of the nineteenth century by the unity of the ideal of Bildung, or cultivation.