Sociology and social anthropology form part of the social sciences, which all grew in the nineteenth century. But compared to other disciplines included in the category of social sciences, these were late to arrive on the scene. The story of the birth and growth of social sciences is nicely summed up in the Report of the Gulbenkian Commission, chaired by Immanuel Wallerstein. The Commission’s Report is entitled Open the Social Sciences.2 The first part of this Report shows how ‘social science was historically constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was divided into a specific set of relatively standard disciplines’.
The Gulbenkian Commission Report suggests that the nineteenth century was marked by the ‘disciplinarization and professionalization of knowledge, that is to say, by the creation of permanent institutional structures designed both to produce new knowledge and to reproduce the producers of knowledge’ (p. 7).
… creation of the multiple disciplines of social science was part of the general nineteenth-century attempt to secure and advance ‘objective’ knowledge about ‘reality’ on the basis of empirical findings (as opposed to ‘speculation’). The intent was to ‘learn’ the truth, not invent or intuit it (p. 13).
There were five main locales for social science, and five disciplines included in the social science category. The locales were: Great Britain, France, Germanies, the Italies, and the United States; and the subjects were history, economics, sociology, political science and anthropology.
In order to achieve autonomous institutional existence, History moved from mere hagiography. Rather than justifying kings and their regimes, historians engaged in ‘justifying “nations” and often their new sovereigns, the “peoples”’ (Gulbenkian Commission Report, 1996: 16). History’s new emphasis was on wie es eigentlich gewsen ist—what really happened?
The discipline of Economics also began in the nineteenth century ‘sometimes within the faculty of law, but often within the faculty … of philosophy’ (Gulbenkian Commission Report, 1996: 17). At that time it was called Political Economy. The adjective ‘political’ prefixed to this branch of knowledge was dropped in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Its practitioners argued that ‘economic behaviour was the reflection of a universal individualist psychology rather than of socially constructed institutions’ (ibid.). This made the study of economics present-oriented; economic history was given a back seat.
Political Science emerged later as it succeeded in breaking its ties with law and political philosophy. Its emergence also ‘legitimated economics as a separate discipline’. This subject continued to be taught in many universities as ‘Government’ or ‘Politics’. After its renaming as Political Science, this is the only subject that carries the word ‘science’ as a suffix.
‘At the same time that economics was becoming an established discipline in the universities—present oriented and nomothetic3—a totally new discipline was being invented, with an invented name: sociology’ (Gulbenkian Commission Report, 1996: 18–19). However, Sociology as a discipline developed:
principally out of the institutionalisation and transformation within the universities of the work of social reform associations, whose agenda had been primarily that of dealing with the discontents and disorders of the much-enlarged urban working-class populations …. Partly in order to consummate the break with its origins in social reform organizations, sociologists began to cultivate a positivist thrust, which, combined with their orientation toward the present, pushed them as well into the nomothetic camp (ibid.: 19).
The Report interestingly observes that the:
… quartet of history, economics, sociology, and political science, as they became university disciplines in the nineteenth century (and indeed right up to 1945), not only were practiced primarily in the five countries of their collective origin but were largely concerned with describing social reality in the same five countries.
The European encounter with countries of the Third World broadened the horizons of the social sciences through inclusion of the study of different cultures and social structures. The discipline of Anthropology distinguished itself from the original quartet by focusing on the study of other cultures and societies.
Three other fields—Geography, Psychology and Law—did not succeed in becoming principal components of the social sciences in the West. In fact, in the twentieth century, History and Anthropology were also marginalized, and ‘the state-centric trinity of Sociology, Economics, and Political Science consolidated their positions as the core (nomothetic) social sciences’ (Gulbenkian Commission Report, 1996: 30).
Leave a Reply