Discipline Formation in the Social Sciences

Abstract

The history of the social science disciplines may be highlighted in terms of four epochal transformations. First, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a deep shift occurred from broad genres of discourse on moral and political philosophy into proto-disciplines of a more delimited nature. Inherent in this shift was the constitution of a set of new basic conceptualizations of human agency and human society that came to be of perennial importance. Second, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a range of inquiries into the social question and into the conditions of institutional and administrative reform were gradually and unevenly transformed into university-based social science disciplines. Third, in the 1920s and 1930s several of these disciplines went through a process of intellectual and institutional consolidation. In this process research programs were formulated that came to serve as focal points for decades to come. Other research programs, often of a transdisciplinary nature, came to occupy a prominent position as intellectual points of reference without finding a secure institutional basis either in an increasingly authoritarian European setting, or in the discipline-based American academic landscape. Fourth, the first three decades of the period after the Second World War were characterized by secular processes, often inspired by American examples, towards disciplinary internationalization as well as professionalization. The social science disciplines also became increasingly subjected to demands to demonstrate their policy-relevance in a broad sense. In the present academic landscape, finally, the social science disciplines are more firmly entrenched institutionally than ever before. At the same time their intellectual and scholarly rationale is being re-examined and there is renewed interest in a dialog about their relationships to each other, to other scholarly and scientific pursuits and to society at large.