The Social Sciences

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2010

This compact volume covers the main developments in the social sciences since the Second World War. Chapters on economics, human geography, political science, psychology, social anthropology, and sociology will interest anyone wanting short, accessible histories of those disciplines, all written by experts in the relevant field; they will also make it easy for readers to make comparisons between disciplines. The final chapter proposes a blueprint for a history of the social sciences as a whole. Whereas most of the existing literature considers each of the social sciences separately from one another, this volume shows that they have much in common; for example, they have responded to common problems using overlapping methods, and cross-disciplinary activities have been widespread. The focus throughout the book is on societal pressures on knowledge production rather than just theoretical lineages.

2014

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.

Economic and political weekly, 2006

Journal of The History of The Behavioral Sciences, 2008

Historical accounts of the social sciences have too often accepted local or national institu-tions as a self-evident framework of analysis, instead of considering them as being embed-ded in transnational relations of various kinds. Evolving patterns of transnational mobility and exchange cut through the neat distinction between the local, the national, and the inter-national, and thus represent an essential component in the dynamics of the social sciences, as well as a fruitful perspective for rethinking their historical development. In this pro-grammatic outline, it is argued that a transnational history of the social sciences may be fruitfully understood on the basis of three general mechanisms, which have structured the transnational flows of people and ideas in decisive ways: (a) the functioning of international scholarly institutions, (b) the transnational mobility of scholars, and (c) the politics of trans-national exchange of nonacademic institutions. The article subsequently examines and illustrates each of these mechanisms. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

History of Social Science, 2025

A new journal offers a chance to name its object of study. There are social scientists and social sciences, but is there such a thing as social science? History of Social Science may seem puzzling given cogent challenges to the history of science set in the singular. Surely complaints that the word science implies a unity that does not exist can be extended to the term social science as well. We concede this point but have something else in mind. By History of Social Science we mean to signal that it is worth considering as a collective various approaches to the study of society that took form in the late nineteenth century, even if they continue to be identified with separate social sciences. Until recently, most accounts have centered on the pasts of individual disciplines and their specific concerns. Relatively little attention has been paid to parallels, connections, and differences among these pasts. For many decades the "history of the social sciences" was a hollow label, an umbrella term for a bundle of otherwise isolated disciplinary histories.

“Philosophy of the Social Sciences” (with Jon Elster), in Precis of Philosophy of Science, Oxford University Press, edited by Anouk Barberousse, Denis Bonnay, et Mikaël Cozic, forthcoming 2017 - Originally published in French as “La Philosophie des Sciences Sociales” in Précis de Philosophie des Sciences, edited by Anouk Barberousse, Denis Bonnay, et Mikaël Cozic Paris: Vuibert, 2011

Histories, 2022

In the past thirty years or so, the history of the social sciences since 1945 has become a more diverse research area. In addition to social scientists who write the histories of individual disciplines, a number of historians are now interested in the recent past of the social sciences, whose efforts emphasize extradisciplinary concerns. The time is gone, however, when this distinction could be summarized by the different approaches of disciplinary histories on the one hand and intellectual history on the other. Disciplinary historians have gone beyond disciplinary concerns and intellectual historians have paid more attention to the latter. More generally, a variety of historians have pointed out the role of social scientific ideas in the transformations of Western societies after World War II and noted the impact of these transformations on social science disciplines themselves. Finally, in the past twenty years, histories of recent social science have experienced a transnational turn.

Burdwan Journal of Sociology, 2020

The paper seeks to understand the nomenclature 'social sciences' as is commonly available to scholars and students of subjects like Sociology, Political Science, Social Anthropology and other sister disciplines including Economics. It begins by drawing upon the history of the development of the study of the social that is 'scientific' and therefore 'value neutral'. This is of course not entirely the case as is well established now in the modern social sciences. The very act of sifting evidence by canons set in the natural sciences has not only been critiqued but natural sciences themselves are critical about such claims. This paper draws attention to the controversies that surround our popular usage of the word 'science' and also seeks to understand the role of ideology in the art and craft of the social sciences. This paper argues that the exercise of weeding out ideology is by itself an ideological task and that matters are not as simple as such an argument makes it out to be. The paper draws heavily on the disciplines of Sociology and Social Anthropology and makes a case for inter-disciplinary approaches as well as the need to pay heed to 'lay' concerns.