History Of Social Sciences Research Paper

First, the concept of social science appears only in the 1790s and its use presupposes a meaningful conceptualization of something called a society. This does not occur before the second half of the eighteenth century.

Second, in none of these cases can we talk of a discipline in the sense of a relatively coherent and delimited program of research and teaching that is consolidated and consistently reproduced in a university environment. This presupposes the existence of a university, but also that the university is seen as a primary vehicle for research activities. However, the research-orientated university does not emerge as a key societal institution until the second half of the nineteenth century.

Third, in none of the cases mentioned above is there an unbroken scholarly tradition that links these early efforts to present-day activities in university settings. Such intellectual and institutional continuities presuppose a degree of disciplinary consolidation that does not occur on a more general level until the early twentieth century. In this respect, developments in the 1930s are crucial although limited to Europe and the Americas. Elsewhere, disciplinary consolidation does not occur until after World War II.

2. The Rise Of The Social Sciences: From Moral And Political Philosophy To Social Science

The first recorded uses of ‘social science’ appear in France in the 1790s. Ever since then, these new forms of knowledge have been characterized by an effort to understand the world of modernity. They have tended to describe key features of this new world in terms of processes of industrialization, urbanization, and political upheaval, originating at the northwestern edge of the Eurasian landmass but eventually having global repercussions. In the self-understanding of the social sciences, accordingly, there is a longstanding and predominant view about the formation of modernity, which highlights transformations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It sees these transformations as a conjunction of a technological and a political transformation—the industrial and the democratic revolutions, respectively. This traditional interpretation, however, radically underestimates the deep-seated epistemic transformation that occurred in the same period.

In fact, in this period there is a fundamental transition from earlier forms of moral and political philosophy into social science. This transition is linked to an institutional restructuring not only in forms of political order but also in the forms in which human knowledge is brought forth and claims to validity are ascertained. One feature of this institutional transition is the emergence of a public sphere that gradually replaces arenas of a more closed nature such as aristocratic literary salons. Another is the rise of new or reformed public higher education and research institutions that come to replace both the laboratories of wealthy amateurs and the academies under royal patronage and partial control.

The rise of the social science disciplines must then be cast in terms of the fundamental transformation of European societies that the formation of modernity entailed. One intellectual and cultural transformation in this period pertains precisely to the concepts of society and history and to the new awareness of the structural and constraining nature of societal life. Pierre Manent has put forward the notion that society is a ‘post revolutionary discovery’ (Manent 1998, p. 51). It is true that the term ‘society’ underwent a long conceptual development in the French context in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Baker 1994)—with a dramatic increase in the utilization of the term in the mid-eighteenth century. However, even if there was a long process of gestation for the modern concept of society, the unique event of revolutionary upheaval requires that discursive controversy and political practice become joined in the formation of a distinctly modern era.

The late eighteenth century witnessed the creation of a political project encompassing the whole world and shattering the existing absolutist order. In this process horizons of expectation to use Koselleck’s term opened up that were previously unknown. This sense of openness and contingency also served as a forceful impetus to an examination of the structural conditions of the political body and entailed a passage from political and moral philosophy to social science. This transition required that four key problematics— which today are more acutely open to reinterpretation than they have been for decades—be formulated or at least fundamentally reformulated and enter into the new social-science discourse.

First, the role of historical inquiry becomes crucial. Historical reasoning becomes an integral part of the intellectual transition, and even abstract reason itself becomes historicized in early nineteenth-century philosophy. However, the moral and political sciences break up into a variety of new discourses that in the course of the nineteenth century coalesce and are reduced to a number of disciplines. This means that the stage is set for the divergence between a professionalized historical discipline and the other social and human sciences, a divergence that we still today experience as a major intellectual divide.

Second, interest in language and linguistic analysis enters into all domains of the human and social sciences. One outflow of this is the constitution of textual and hermeneutic modes of analysis. There is also an effort to historicize language and linguistic development itself, thereby providing a crucial link with the historic construction of the notion of different peoples.

This leads to a third problematic: that of constituting new collective identities. Membership in a collectivity could no longer be taken for granted in the life experiences of the inhabitants of a certain village or region. Nor could a relationship of obligation and loyalty between the princely ruler and his subjects continue to constitute the unquestionable core of the body politic. That, however, meant that even the most basic categories of societal existence were open to doubt. In the western part of Europe, categories such as ‘citizen’ and ‘compatriot’ came to play an even more important role at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Fourth, assumptions about what prompts human beings to act and how to interpret their actions within a broader framework are at the very core of any scholarly program in the social and human sciences. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the fundamental categories that we still largely draw upon were elaborated and proposed. We might describe these categories as follows:

(a) Economic-rationalistic, with a corresponding view of society as a form of compositional collective; (b) Statistical-inductive, with a view of society as a systemic aggregate;

(c) Structural-constraining, with a view of society in terms of an organic totality; and

(d ) Linguistic-interpretative, with a conceptualization of society as an emergent totality.

The transition from a discourse of moral and political philosophy to a social science entailed a decisive shift from an agential—some would say voluntaristic—view of society to one that emphasized structural conditions. In economic theorizing this also entailed a shift away from a concern with moral agency. During the nineteenth century, the context of ‘average economic man’ became a web of structural properties and dynamic regularities rather than a moral universe of individual action.

Thus, fundamental categories of agency and society that came to be elaborated and refined during much of the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be discerned in rudimentary form already during the great transition. So too, however, can some of the features that came to affect these endeavors.

One such tacit but crucial feature concerns the abandonment of the truly universal heritage of the Enlightenment project in favor of forms of representation and endowment of rights based on territoriality or membership in a linguistically and historically constituted and constructed community. Another feature was an emerging and growing chasm between moral discourse and other forms of reasoning about society. Thus, an earlier encompassing conception of the moral and political sciences was gradually replaced by social sciences that marginalized moral reasoning or consigned it to the specialized discipline of philosophy. Third, historical reasoning, which had been at the core of the intellectual trans-formation at the end of the eighteenth century, became a separate discipline and, toward the end of the nineteenth century, a permanent divide emerged between history and the social sciences.

The end of the eighteenth century was a formative period in the rise of the social sciences in conceptual terms. It is possible to discern, across all confrontations and divergences, a fundamental acknowledgement of the idea that agency, reflexivity, and historical consciousness might help construct a new set of institutions but that this takes place within a complex web of interactions that jointly constitute a society. Thus, there existed a limited number of thematic foci underlying the cultural constitution of a new set of societal macroinstitutions.

3. The Institutionalization Of The Social Sciences: The Social Question, The Research University, And The New Nation-States

Relatively early in the nineteenth century, economics (or rather political economy) became differentiated from moral philosophy. It is also in this period that history emerges as a scholarly field with its own canon of rules, but the full disciplinary formation of history is a highly extended process.

However, social science as an institutionalized scholarly activity performed within a series of disciplines is largely a phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is an activity that directly and indirectly reflects concerns about the wide-ranging effects of the new industrial and urban civilization that was rapidly changing living and working conditions for ever-larger parts of the population in many European nations during the nineteenth century. These changes, often collectively referred to as ‘the social question’ (die soziale Frage), were gradually forcing themselves upon the agendas of parliamentary bodies, governmental commissions, and private reform-minded and scholarly societies. Often the impetus for the search for new knowledge came from modernizing political and social groupings that favored industrialization but advocated more or less far-reaching social reforms. These groupings gradually came to embrace the notion that political action to alleviate ‘the social question’ should be based on extensive, systematic, empirical analysis of the underlying social problems. In country after country, the political agenda of the nineteenth century was being formed by two macro-projects: the search for a solution to ‘the social question’ and to the question of national identity and nationhood within new or reformed nation states (Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1996, Wagner et al. 1991a, 1991b).

Between 1870 and the turn of the century, all signs seemed to indicate that new social science approaches would gain access to the scientific institutions. The thinking of their proponents was widely diffused among the intellectual and political elites. This occurred at a time when traditional liberal economics was undergoing a crisis. Thus traditional political economy was seen to be unable to deal with the ‘social question’ and the widespread deterioration of living and working conditions due to urbanization and industrialization.

However, another important, and indeed competing, field of study and training, whose concerns overlapped those of the new social sciences, was that of the legal sciences. The strength of the legal scholar’s position in continental Europe arose from two factors. First, the training function of the universities for the state service produced officials and judges. This meant that legal scholarship came to exert a considerable impact on the general outlook of the servants of the state. Second, legal scholars sought to provide a doctrine, a body of concepts that was based on elaborate technical distinctions and would enable lawyers and judges to act with promptness and precision, clarify the deliberations of the law-maker, and bring coherence and/order into the legal system (Dyson 1980, p. 112). This doctrine was legal positivism, which was first developed for private law and later for public law (in the latter case known as the legal theory of the state). Legal scholarship remained an important alternative to social science and, in fact, strengthened its position towards the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, the so-called ‘state sciences’ in the German and Nordic states did not really develop into anything that might be labeled ‘political science.’ Rather they became increasingly embedded in the legal constitutional scholarship that was expanding in Germany in the wake of German political unification. Conversely, in the Nordic countries a similar tradition of ‘state sciences’ in the late nineteenth century was characterized by a dual legacy of constitutional legal scholarship and, as in Britain, of studies of philosophy and political history.

By and large, approaches to a social and political science did not succeed in institutionalizing themselves in European academia. In some cases, they tried but failed. In other cases, they did not perceive the relevance of academic institutionalization, but blossomed during a passing period of a favorable political climate and decayed with the changing societal situation. For example, the term ‘sociology’ had been coined early in the nineteenth century, but the key sociologists of the late nineteenth century (Weber, Durkheim, and Pareto) remained broad social science generalists. Their contributions and professional allegiances traversed a range of fields, including politics, economics, education, history and religion, and the term sociology often referred to a broad historical comparative study of society. However, it was a type of study that saw itself as scientific and separate from reform-orientated activities of a more general nature.

In the United States, social science research originally had the same characteristics of associational organization and ameliorative orientation as in Europe. For example, the American Social Science Association (created in 1865) embraced the notion that the social scientist was a model citizen helping to improve the life of the community, not a professional, disinterested, disciplinary researcher. During the final cades of the nineteenth century, however, this model was gradually replaced by the emerging disciplinary associations such as the American Economic Association (1885), the American Political Science Association (1903), and the American Sociological Society (1905) (Furner 1975, Haskell 1977, Manicas 1987, Ross 1991). They did not have to face the kind of entrenched opposition or ideologically motivated hostility that many similar efforts in Europe met with (even though it would be misleading to portray these processes as the harmonious unfolding of disciplinary consolidation).

By the turn of the century, a particular pattern of differentiation and professionalization had emerged in the US and proved to be compatible with an active role in government service early on. Economists and psychologists were, for instance, able to play a role in government service as early as World War I, just as demographers were able to do through the Bureau of the Census. At the same time, disciplinary and professional recognition was being achieved within the setting of American universities which started to become ever more orientated towards research undertakings (Geiger 1986, Rothblatt and Wittrock 1993)

This process of successful disciplinary consolidation marked the beginning of a divergence between American and continental European social science. Late nineteenth century American social scientists, many of them German-trained, defined their intellectual projects in a society undergoing a process of rapid transformation: industrialization, urbanization, and concomitantly emerging massive social and political problems. As social scientists with a professional legitimacy, they tried to mark out their own scientific territory and establish their own systems of accreditation. These ambitions entailed the establishment of separate social science disciplines (Manicas 1987). In Europe, on the other hand, the professorate often already had an established position; one writer (Ringer 1969) even uses the term ‘a Mandarin class’ to describe the situation of the leading German academics at the turn of the nineteenth century. The situation in some other countries, such as Sweden and Norway, was no different.

The social sciences emerged as forms of knowledge about societies undergoing fast and deep societal transformations. The relative success of given research programs largely depended on the intellectual coherence and viability of these programs. The cases of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim are exemplary in this respect, but so is the ability of marginalist economics programs to assert themselves even under political conditions which may have appeared as far from advantageous. However, the institutionalization of the social sciences was also clearly related to two other forms of institutional processes.

First, the late nineteenth century was the period when the idea of the university as a key vehicle for research became predominant in a number of countries across the globe, from California in the west to Japan in the east. This process created the possibility for the new social sciences, if in a highly uneven way, to find a relatively stable basis for continued research and training.

Second, the late nineteenth century was also a period of deep institutional change in the political and administrative order in a number of countries. Administrative reforms were undertaken and new objectives assigned to the state. Furthermore demands for wider political representation meant that institutional reforms of the state, not least the demand for a culturally coherent nation-state, created demands upon the social and historical sciences to contribute to these reform processes. The particular forms of interaction between research programs, efforts to deal with the social question, and the relationship of that question to the restructuring of universities and of the state, differed greatly across countries. However, in a number of cases, opportunities arose for the successful institutionalization of some of the social science disciplines in ways that came to structure disciplinary developments in these countries for many decades.

4. Research Programs In The Interwar World

The end of World War I saw the triumph of liberal democracy and the reorganization of the political order across the European continent as well as a decisive weakening, if not the end, of European global predominance. Soon it became evident that the triumph of democracy was being replaced by its crisis and the emergence of new forms of political and social order with claims to represent the future of humankind in Europe and beyond. It was in this period that preeminent representatives of a range of social science disciplines engaged in a self-critical reflection on the history of their own disciplines. Based on such historical reflection, however, they were able to formulate research programs that came to serve as focal points for scholarly endeavors for decades to come.

Within just a few years in the middle of the 1930s a range of path-breaking programmatic formulations occurred. At this time economists, most notably Keynes in England but also Gunnar Myrdal and the other members of the so-called Stockholm school in Sweden, took stock of the historical experience of their discipline and formulated a coherent long-term research program. In sociology, Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action was equally historically and programmatically orientated. Its influence extended far beyond the domain of disciplinary sociology and came to affect developments in a number of other fields, including political science and social anthropology. In statistics, Fisher was able to achieve an encompassing synthesis that became a landmark. In political science and sociology, scholars at Chicago and Columbia opened up new areas of empirical research. In Europe, the early work on electoral geography by Andre Siegfried in France was complemented by sociological and sociopsychological studies by Paul Lazarsfeld and his collaborators in Austria, and by Tingsten’s and Wold’s minor classic, The Study of Political Behaviour (1937).

The comprehensive philosophical programs outlined by the Continental logical empiricists and their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, despite their relative numerical weakness, came to set agendas for years to come. In this respect, Alfred Jules Ayer’s polemical and programmatic volume on Language, Truth and Logic (1934) became one of the most noted examples, as did Otto Neurath’s Empirische Soziologie published at roughly the same time. Meanwhile the French Annales School charted a completely new terrain of research that forever changed scholarly efforts in the historical and the social sciences. This was also the period when the first edition of the International Encylopedia of the Social Sciences appeared, as a further testimony to need for reflection, for stocktaking but also for the setting of new scholarly agendas.

Furthermore, research programs emerged in the 1930s that positioned themselves in conscious opposition to disciplinary developments in the social sciences and the humanities. One prominent example of this was the broad synthetic program associated with the so-called Frankfurt school. A very different one was the effort of philosophical phenomenologists, most prominently Husserl and Heidegger, to elaborate a conceptualization of human activity from a point of view at odds with that of both analytical philosophy and dominant forms of empirical social research.

Many of these efforts proved to be of lasting importance. However, in institutional terms, the devastating effects of the European political landscape in these years and the ravages of World War II mean that it is difficult to discern clear institutional continuities in the continental European case. Many of the developments in the interwar years were followed by deep ruptures sometimes tended to make the social sciences after World War II appear as a new phenomenon.

5. The Internationalization Of The Social Sciences: The Age Of International Associations, Public Policies, And Mass Higher Education

The full-blown institutionalization of the social science disciplines on a global scale is largely a phenomenon of the era after World War II. One manifestation of this was the establishment, originally under the auspices of UNESCO, of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and the International Sociological Association (ISA) in 1949. A process of professionalization was set in motion and came to exert a truly profound influence worldwide in the wake of the expansion of higher education systems in a range of countries in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The 1960s saw a dramatic expansion of higher education systems across Western Europe and North America but in many other parts of the world as well. In the same countries, sweeping processes of administrative reform also occurred, which often coincided with the coming to power of new political majorities. Major new public policy programs were launched across the board in these countries. In this context, the social sciences came to be finally and firmly entrenched as academic disciplines in university settings. In this same age of great public policy programs, disciplines such as political science and sociology were able to secure a firm basis in a series of European countries, in some cases for the first time; in others (as in Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Italy) in a renewed and greatly expanded form. This expansion was paralleled by a growth of the social science disciplines on a global level that for the first time tended to make the international associations truly international.

On all continents, the full array of disciplines and subdisciplines appeared. There was also an impressive expansion of research methods being utilized. Thus a previously predominant concern for institutions and processes on a national level was gradually complemented by a stronger research orientation towards the study and management of clearly quantifiable processes. In terms of research methods, the 1960s were the period of the breakthrough of the behavioral revolution; a revolution which had been largely foreshadowed by European scholarly efforts in the interwar period. No longer could historical, juridical, and philosophical reasoning alone or in combination be considered sufficient for the analysis of social and political phenomena. Methods and techniques previously elaborated in statistics, sociology, psychology, and economics were now being tapped by social scientists on a vast scale.

This shift in research methodology coincided with the numerical expansion of the social science disciplines and in Europe was often complemented by the introduction of more formalized graduate education programs, normally with compulsory courses in research methodology. At the same time it became possible to see the emergence of an informal ‘invisible college’ of younger scholars in Europe and in other continents as well, in marked contrast to the much more national orientation of scholars of older generations. In those universities and countries where this shift was most decisively pushed through, there were certainly instances where the older juridical, historical, and philosophical competence was either partially lost or could at least not be developed on a par with the new approaches. Thus it became gradually antiquated and lost touch with what had been the rationale for the use of these traditional methods in the first place.

Apart from external political-societal reasons for this pattern of disciplinary development, a fundamental fact of a long period after World War II was that only in the United States did the social sciences have sufficient size and scope to make widespread international emulation appear feasible. Thus, for example, the American Political Science Association had more than five thousand members in the early 1950s, when corresponding figures for European nations were generally only on a scale of 1 percent or less of that number. Even in the early 1990s, the combined enrolment of West European political science associations was only a third of that of the American association.

Furthermore, only the American version of a science of society and of politics could present a clear institutional lineage dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this perspective, the history of the social sciences in a number of European countries constitutes exceptions to this general tendency only in a weak sense of the word. This is perhaps particularly clear in the case of political science. There has been a persistent notion that political science is intimately linked to the particular intellectual and institutional history of the United States. This can be discerned as early as 1923, in Charles Merriam’s presidential address to the American Political Science Association. The same theme recurred 30 years later in the presidential address of Pendelton Herring, and again in the one delivered by Samuel Huntington another quarter of a century later. Political science is then seen to constitute an originally American-conceived science that has successfully spread to a range of nations that (by virtue of their effective, if belated, acceptance of a pluralistic political system) had come to qualify as proper recipients of this intellectual heritage.

Even if such a perspective is understandable, it rests on a misperception. It identifies political science inquiry with one particular form of such inquiry— related to the concerns of liberal individualism. In this and many similar cases, a lack of historical perspective threatens to unduly narrow both the range of problems addressed and the theoretical traditions explored and advanced.

6. Continuities And Reassessments

Three key features stand out in the development of the social sciences in the late twentieth century. First, their professional consolidation has proceeded. Their institutional position in the modern mass higher education systems seems relatively secure. Never before have there been so many social scientists in the world, and never before have they been so well organized in professional terms, well trained in technical terms, and internationally linked through journals, networks, and research conferences. Many social science disciplines—political science, sociology, educational research, business administration studies, and public policy research—have to a large extent emerged and evolved as confederations of different practices. They have been held together by a common concern with broad substantive themes rather than by a core of theoretical assumptions.

Second, however, it is remarkable to what an extent truly innovative research contributions have resulted from work in scholarly settings outside of the structure of regular disciplinary university departments. Three types of such environments seem to have been particularly important to the intellectual advancement of the social sciences. First, especially in the major American research universities, the system of so-called organized research units has been of great importance in providing settings outside of the departmental structure designed to be hospitable to research of a trans-disciplinary nature. Second, research institutes, also normally of a trans-disciplinary nature, have been created both outside and inside of the structure of regular universities. In Germany, the institutes of the Max Planck Society have played a crucial role in this respect. Third, the important role of so-called institutes for advanced study has been steadily increasing during the second half of the twentieth century. Such institutes allow scholars, free from the normal concerns of a university department and coming from a variety of disciplines, to focus on their own research efforts during a limited period, normally one academic year. Whereas initially such institutes tended to be international in their scholarly orientation and national in their own organizational structure, there has recently been an increase in the number of such institutes set up within individual universities. The so-called humanities centers now found in a large number of American universities provide one example of this trend. The recommendation of the Gulbenkian Commission ( Wallerstein 1996) that every university create a trans-disciplinary institute for advanced study is another indication, a recommendation that now slowly seems to correspond to an emerging institutional reality.

Third, the demands upon the social sciences, from politicians, administrators, and the public at large, to demonstrate the usefulness of their contributions, do not seem to have subsided but if anything to have increased. Sometimes these demands have even resulted in the creation of new proto-disciplines such as social work, criminology, and migration research.

The foremost social scientists of the late nineteenth century had to demonstrate the intellectual and institutional legitimacy of their activities relative to competing forms of scholarship in law, economics, and philosophy. These competitors remain but have been complemented by management consultants, computer experts, and representatives of new trans-disciplinary fields such as that of the cognitive sciences.

There is no reason to believe that the social sciences will not be able to defend their current position. It is important, though, to recognize that advances in these sciences depend upon intellectual integrity in the face of an array of demands for immediate usefulness. At the same time, any truly innovative social science inquiry has to be contextually and historically sensitive. This also means that a search for a solution to most of the essential problems of the social sciences has to proceed with a high degree of openness to the contributions from outside of the field of a single discipline. This, however, should be seen as an asset rather than as a liability. In this situation, historical reflection is a necessary component of serious research efforts. Clearly, a number of assumptions concerning our deepest cultural and national identities and their relationship to the basic forms of political and social organization have to be examined anew with the same openness for foundational inquiry as social scientists have shown in earlier periods of fundamental change. In fact, social science scholarship may be crucially important to the possibility of a civilized community of human beings.

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