The History of the History of Social Science

Abstract

The history of the sciences has slowly given rise to the writing of the history of the social sciences. There are now professional associations for the history of the social sciences, dedicated journals in English, German, and French, and a growing body of monographs, taking various forms: individual biographies; studies of schools, institutions, generations, and subfields; international comparisons and transnational studies; and handbooks and edited collections like the present one. Yet one should not imagine that this is a well-established area of study. The emergence of the practice of studying the social sciences historically and sociologically was not the result of a quasi-natural evolutionary process but of a series of conceptual ruptures. These intellectual turning points have reconfigured approaches to writing the history of the social sciences. This chapter will use these turning points as a starting point for asking a set of historical, theoretical, and philosophical questions about writing on the history of social science. Specifically, I will ask: when and how did the history of social science emerge? How have historians and others explained the genesis, development, forms, and contents of the social sciences? What political, ethical, and meta-scientific goals have scholars pursued in writing the history of social science? What are the ultimate contributions, the promise, of this research?