Histories of Recent Social Science (original) (raw)
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.
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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.
Introduction: The Social Sciences in a Cross-disciplinary Age
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2015
As studies of the history of social science since 1945 have multiplied over the past decade and a half, it has not been unusual for commentators to present cross-disciplinary ventures as a byproduct of the disciplinary system and to contrast the stability of disciplines with the highs and lows of interdisciplinary relationships. In contrast, this special issue takes the view that cross-disciplinary ventures should be considered not so much as efforts to loosen up the disciplinary yoke, but as an alternative formof production and dissemination of social scientific knowledge. Paradoxically, the relationship between cross-disciplinary ventures and the disciplinary system appears as one of complementarity and not of dependence. The essays in the special issue provide examples of ways to reconsider what can be called the interdisciplinary chaos.
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