History and the social sciences: Emerging patterns (original) (raw)
Related papers
THE 'COMPLEMENTARITY' REALITIES BETWEEN HISTORY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
SOPHIA: An African Journal of Philosophy , 2006
In the past three or four decades, History and the Social Sciences have worked so closely together; especially with the rise of theoretical issues in history and the need for historical context in the Social Sciences. The Social Sciences which operate with theoretical generalizations inevitably require historical temporal dimension in its practice; while history needs the theories and generalizations (supplied by the Social Sciences) about the operations of society and process of change, which are the subject matter of history. This paper highlights the crucial nature of the relationship between History as a distinct discipline and the Social Sciences, especially in the areas of commonality of objectives and inter-dependence in sources and concepts required by both disciplines for effective practice. The need, therefore, is stressed for more intellectual harmony among historians and scholars in the Social Sciences as a result of the realities of interdependence (complementarity) and the inter-relatedness of History and Social Sciences' practice
Placing History Within the Social Sciences
Historyka, 2016
The article deals with the problem of whether history can be treated as a part of the social sciences. It focuses on the relation between the questioned scientific character of history and the philosophical problems regarding the foundation of scientific knowledge in general.
History in the Humanities and Social Sciences
History in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2022
This interdisciplinary volume explores the relationship between history and a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law, literature and anthropology. The relevance of historical approaches within these disciplines has shifted over the centuries. Many of them, like law and economics, originally depended on self-consciously historical procedures. These included the marshalling of evidence from past experience, philological techniques and source criticism. Between the late nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth centuries, the influence of new methods of research, many indebted to models favoured by the natural sciences, such as statistical, analytical or empirical approaches, secured an expanding intellectual authority while the hegemony of historical methods declined in relative terms. In the aftermath of this change, the essays collected in History in the Humanities and Social Sciences reflect from a variety of angles on the relevance of historical concerns to representative disciplines as they are configured today.
Pre-Modern History and Modern Social Science
Pre-Modern History and Modern Social Science Over the past few decades more and more history programmes have offered or required courses in historiography, to where this is now the case in more UK universities than not. Historians engaging explicitly with the ethics and philosophy of the field is surely a good thing. While such courses regularly focus on important issues of anachronism, orientalism, Whiggism, naratology, etc., to my knowledge the practical skills of justifiably using the Social Sciences to overcome some of these issues is not taught. That is, awareness of historiographical issues is taught, but more as a caveat to limit excessive proclamations about the past (especially causal ones) rather than as a precursor to being given the tools to make causal statements which are backed up with evidence – evidence provided by the social sciences but filtered through the skills of the historian. By 'social sciences', I am referring here to any discipline whose primary subject matter involves analysis of the actions of living humans, such as Sociology, Psychology, Law, Economics, Political Science, and any of the cognates, hybrids and specialisations of these.1 This is a distinction by subject matter, rather than by methods. I include both quantitative and qualitative work in this definition, and the full range of output from these fields, from broad social theories to minute statistical data and all in between. If it is researched data gather from living people about how they interact, then it is what I am referring to as the social sciences.
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.