Not to be cited or given as reference without permission.
SOCIAL SCIENCE KNOWLEDGE: A Report on Institutionalization
by
© Richard Lee
(rlee@binghamton.edu)
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Paper prepared for the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, Lisbon, June 17-18, 1994.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I
Prelude:
From the Scholastics to the Nineteenth Century
PART II
The Disciplines
Anthropology
Economic History
Political Economy/Economics
Geography
History
Orientalism
Political Science
Psychology/Psychiatry/Psychoanalysis
Sociology
Statistics
PART III
Epilogue:
Current Pressures on the Social Sciences
WORKS CITED
PART I
Prelude:
From the Scholastics to the Nineteenth Century
Universities date from the late 11th and 12th century and flowered throughout Europe from the 13th. Instruction was dispensed unevenly, in locally varied mixes, from the seven liberal arts of the trivium--rhetoric, grammar and logic (dialectic)--and the quadrivium--arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy--which continued the classical tradition, and professional faculties of medicine, law and theology. With the language of scholars, Latin, a dead language, the key discipline of classical education, rhetoric, had given way to grammar in medieval schools.
But the recovery of Greek learning in the original during the period of feudal expansion, of Plato and Aristotle and his Arab commentators, set the tone for the university as an institution with two functions which exist in tension down to the present: the dissemination of existing knowledge and the creation of new understanding. Logic replaced grammar as the key discipline, but the quadrivium remained subordinate as had been the case in medieval schools. Concerns of theologians about the secularization of knowledge represented by the liberal arts were not new; however, these came to a head during the 13th century as the empty labels of classical knowledge were filled in from new-found texts and the disparities with church doctrine became apparent. The reconciliation proposed by Thomas Aquinas eventually became doctrine, but not until long after the Condemnations of the 13th century.
Scholastics either ignored the obvious contradictions between Platonic and Aristotelian thought or sought to reconcile them in the spirit of the age which continued to recognize an overarching truth to which all knowledge finally belonged. But beginning in the 13th century our story is one of the gradual rejection of the bulk of this long-term structure of knowledge through the 18th century culminating in the late 20th century with the questioning of the independence of the disciplines (which Aristotle had advocated) and the absolute supremacy of logic based on the law of the excluded middle.
The 14th century Scholastics found that Aristotle was not always right and made important advances, particularly in logic and methodology, examining such concepts as
space, time, and mass; force and energy; motion and velocity; the "natural tendencies" of bodies; impenetrability; rarity and density; and gravity and inertia ... Buridan's analysis of inductive reasoning and the laws of nature ... Bradwardine's use of the mathematical function, and ... numerous discussions of probability and of infinitesimals (Sargent, 1982, 15).
But since they were working from the standpoint of metaphysics and ontology rather than physical theory, relying on logic and eschewing measurement, they did not question basic principles; however, without this reworking the new world view based on mechanical and mathematical principles could not have emerged two centuries later. This late scholastic natural philosophy had promulgated a
new attitude toward nature. It is the first attempt at an independent analysis of nature, one that is initially developed on a purely philosophical level and results, to a certain extent, in a metaphysical and epistemological rediscovery of nature, although not in a mathematical and physical reformulation. This development occurs contemporaneously with the incipient metamorphosis of poetry and visual art that used to be regarded as the first harbinger of the coming Renaissance; it is undoubtedly a component of this process. ... From this standpoint, its achievements consist less in transforming the content of the traditional view of nature than in discovering new ways of conceptualizing and comprehending nature. In short, what changes is the method of knowing nature. The attempt is made for the first time to find principles that permit a direct, individual, and empirical perception and understanding of nature, independent of authority (Maier, 1982, 146-47).
It was on such a foundation that Baconian empiricism could rest.
Although remaining subordinate to Aristotle, the revival of Plato and the Pythagoreans with their heritage of mathematical rationalism yielded "a conception of scientific inquiry and of artistic composition as cognate arts of the soluble" in which "theoretical analysis and rational design must precede material analysis and construction" (Crombie, 1980, 235). Here were foundations for Cartesianism; Descartes, drawing on Euclid in his search for first principles and finding them in reason alone, formulated the dominant model for 17th century science.
The Platonic ideals of the mathematical and technical arts were reflected in successes in solving limited problems which supplied a workable model for the understanding of nature and its mastery. Indicative of the intersecting, overlapping interests of fields resulting from the revival of Greek and Roman learning was the concern for precise anatomical description in both medicine and the plastic arts and the concern with musical theory by mathematicians. Perspective crept into the quadrivium during the scholastic period. Leonardo studied both anatomy and optics. At the turn of the 17th century, Kepler made the first major physiological discovery by isolating an answerable question; he solved a fundamental problem of vision, how the eye formed an image on the retina. In a similar manner musical pitch was analyzed on the model of the resonating strings of a lute later in the century. Galileo, mathematician, and lutanist and draftsman, "was an exemplary man of virtù, the rational experimenter" in a time when "the defining capacity of both art and science to solve specific problems drew in operation upon the suggestive sources alike of the analytical and the constructive imagination" (Crombie, 243, 1980). It should be noted also that Galileo valued explicitly the objectivity of enquiry furnishing results in concordance with real world experience.
Measurement was the key. Scholastics had not measured, but not because they lacked the ability; it was rather a predisposition, a matter of theological doctrine. Natural philosophy remained philosophy. But as of the 15th century, from astronomical observation to the voyages of discovery, practical success depended on accurate measurement (Landes, 1983, 103-13). With time in the denominator the reality of the observable world became one of change and "science" moved away from natural philosophy. And if the natural world was knowable, by extension, was not the world of man also?
Seventeenth century thinkers, faced with economic, religious and political crises and the epistemological repercussions of contact with non-European peoples, responded in the affirmative. One characteristic of much of this work was its programmatic intentions; however once promulgated, in the longer term it often supported ideals quite different from those intended by the authors. Secondly, against the backdrop of material crisis in the world and the collapse of the cosmological order post-Copernicus, intellectuals sought to insure the truth claims of their analyses borrowing the attribute of "disinterestedness" from the law--to be accomplished through a "scientific" method, whether the dominant one of Cartesian clarity and logical rigor based on deductive, "geometrical" arguments, or one of Baconian experience and induction. Finally, works dealing with social, political, or economic analysis were secular in outlook; religion was not denied, but the social context could be adequately understood through its human sources.
In his 1792 Rapport et projet de décret de l'organization générale de l'instruction public to the French National Assembly outlining his plan for the organization of public instruction, Condorcet proposed for each of the Instituts
three instructors in the moral or social sciences. Each of the instructors was to deal with social issues from a particular methodological perspective. The first would begin with the analysis of sensations and ideas, particularly the generation of moral ideas, and then move to an analysis of the implication of these ideas for the creation of political structures, that is, he would explore the psychological tradition. The second would discuss the elements of commerce and political economy and their implication for legislation in the new republic, that is, he would cover the economic tradition. Finally, the third would deal with geography and "the philosophical history of peoples," that is, with the way in which different communities develop special customs and patterns of organization in response to the particular environments in which they are placed (Olson, 1993, 194).
This was an accurate reflection of the historical development of three separate traditions and forms a suggestive warp on which the three great ideologies were loomed. These major analytical traditions and the theoretical and methodological approaches which informed them were established and nurtured in concrete studies with clear social agendas.
With the revival of Roman Law there developed a debate over the theoretical or causal nature of law itself in the context of specific solutions to contemporary social conditions. In a defence of absolutism and monarchy, Hobbes (influenced by Euclidean geometry and concerned with the civil disorders in Britain during the first half of the 17th century) argued that since the law was an expression of natural reason which was in all men the same, then law was subject to scientific, causal, analysis. This "rationalist" Cartesianism of Hobbes and Spinoza (in the "psychological tradition"), however, assumed that in an analysis of the state, its individual components, citizens, had to be understandable independent of their function. It thus subverted the ideology of orders and was "transformed during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries into the chief buttress of radical social and political positions, including secular socialism and individualistic feminism" (Olson, 1993, 2), but eventually the definition of liberty as absence of interference became a foundation stone for classical liberalism and later, modern conservatism.
The political arithmetic of James Petty (natural laws of human activity, aggregate data, importance of labor as against land and therefore treatment of human beings as commodities), had the aim of enabling government to manage resources better for the larger welfare of its citizens with an eye to distributive justice. But it also laid the foundations for the liberal doctrines of political economy which argued limitations on the role of the state to the simple protection of private property. Education in medicine inclined Petty as well as Locke, Quesnay and Becher to view economics as the active removal of impediments to a normally functioning society. The first three, however, were trained in Cartesian anatomy; Becher the cameralist was trained in the tradition of Paracelsus to value experience and experiment. The tradition of 17th century German Cameralism which linked paternal government with the (collectivist) interests of society and tied well being to commerce culminated in inefficiency and bureaucracy.
The line forming philosophical history espousing republicanism went back to the work of James Harrington (Baconian empiricist who refuted Hobbes on methodological grounds) in the 1650's. Montesquieu (l'Esprit des lois, 1749) belongs to this ("sociological") tradition. Both natural history, in the noble savage tradition, and naturalistic, historical interpretations of law as science served as inspiration. Environmental determinism, Bodin's thesis (1566 and 1576) that national variations could be studied comparatively in order to discover universal principles, was especially important, contributing by the end of the 18th century to the use of this same philosophical history as justification for reactionary politics.
Certainly during the 17th and 18th centuries the idea of a science of society, as well as a notion of the variety of human social relations independent of biological basis, became pervasive. The concept of structure was established, borrowed from the physical and biological sciences, in studies of the state beginning with Hobbes and in economic writings of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. Also the idea that human society changed and developed out of conditions and causes inherent in society itself rather than as acts of God or simple chance became well established.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment reevaluated the legacy of Descartes and 17th century rationalism which had "identified science substantially with physics and mathematics, correlatively privileging categories and procedures of an abstract, systematizing, deductive, and nomological type". They built on the work of Locke who proposed methods based on empirical description, speculative hypotheses, analogy, and probability and set limits on possible knowledge, and that of Newton who used heuristic hypotheses (his Optiks included a set of programs for further research--the "Queries"), defended descriptive science even in the absence of explanation, and valued simplicity and inclusiveness. This "epistemological liberalization" refused to privilege the mathematical method, pluralized cognitive strategies, redirected interest towards empirical and inductive construction of explanatory models and factual-empirical description, and rehabilitated sense observation (Moravia, 1980, 147-8). The emphasis on comparative method and the rejection of dualism and acceptance of the corollary of a self-motivated human whole, infeasible according to the man-machine model with an external prime mover, was realized in explicit discussions of the importance of the social aspect--"environment", "esprit"--in Helvétius and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment beginning with Adam Ferguson.
During the Reformation and Counter-Reformation university faculties were politicized and expected to toe the line on religious doctrine, Protestant or Catholic, resulting in conservative policies with regard to new knowledge. The foundation of the University of Halle by Lutherans in 1694, marked a departure: Latin was abandoned as was religious orthodoxy in favor of rational and objective inquiry. The formula was repeated at Göttingen in 1737 and in 1809 the University of Berlin established the model for the modern research university with its emphasis on empirical and laboratory methods.
From the middle of the 16th century until about the middle of the 17th, universities all over Europe enjoyed a boom; the large number of students was accompanied by expansion, economic security and social prestige. It was during this period that universities were initially founded in the colonies: e.g., Santo Domingo 1538, Michoacàn (Mexico) 1540, Harvard 1636. There then followed a period of stagnation and with it financial difficulties. At the same time Enlightenment ideas and the creative scholarship in the sciences, mathematics and history were being promoted in the new academies of arts and sciences such as Berlin (1700), Göttingen (1751) and Munich (1759)--the primary function of the university remained teaching. Although the debate over the proper function of the professoriat, and thus the university, as knowledge creating versus knowledge propagating was periodically revived, legal restraints and corporate values mitigated against the formation of professional disciplinary communities until the late 18th century. These "can be traced in the emergence of self-conscious schools, the propagation of specific research techniques, and the proliferations of specialized journals" (Turner, 1975, 510); they were international in scope and depended on scholarly criteria to distinguish their members from the larger group of practitioners of the discipline. For instance, in Germany, Lorenz Crell and his Chemisches Journal (1778) were central to the formation of the chemical community and although long an established university discipline, Germany's first professional disciplinary community in mathematics coalesced around the journal Archiv der reinen und angewandten Mathematik (1795). But corporate, collegiate, values continued to outweigh disciplinary values; local interests prevailed.
Most writers would have agreed that the demands of scholarship ought to take second place to the more pressing needs to stimulate enrollment and funding, to create a more competent system of state administration, and to improve student life and morals (Turner, 1975, 516).
However, the emphasis on teaching as the dominant function did not completely rule out original scholarship. Nevertheless, only with professionalization was knowledge creation thrust to the forefront. It grounded the very "criteria of a profession: institutional apparatus (an association, a learned journal), standardized training in esoteric skills, leading to certification and controlled access to practice, heightened status, autonomy" (Novick, 1988, 48).
New expansions came along with the Humboldtian reforms after the Napoleonic wars then again after 1860. The new university ideology regarded research, and its regime of specialization and publication as presentation, as a duty quite apart from the old pedagogical outlook which valued synthesis, breadth and clarity. In 1862 the Morrill Act giving land grants to agricultural and mechanical schools fueled the expansion in the United States. Universities were secularized in Italy in 1870, in Spain in 1876, and in France in 1896.
Individual scholars, artists and literati had begun to gather together and organize themselves into groups with interest in classical learning, new vernacular literatures and scientific inquiry outside the universities from the 15th century. Italy supplied the models with the Accademia Napoletana, later Pontaniana, of 1433 and the Accademia Platonica founded in Florence in 1474 by Lorenzo de' Medici. The Accademia della Crusca (1583) was dedicated to the purification and preservation of Florentine Italian and edited its influential dictionary in 1612. Galileo was an early member of the scientific Accademia dei Lincei founded in Rome in 1603, the name for which referred to the lynx, and its fame as an intensely curious observer. The Reale Accademia delle Scienze dates from 1757.
The natural-science oriented Royal Society was chartered in London in 1662 but its roots go back to a proposal by Bolton in 1616 or 1617. The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science was established in 1857 and through its sections developed practical relations between social studies and public affairs. In France, the Académie française was formed originally in 1635 with the goal of producing a dictionary. The Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres was founded by Colbert in 1663 for the study of historical and archeological questions. The Académie des sciences was founded in 1666, also by Colbert, for the study of mathematics and the natural sciences. In 1795 the Académie des sciences morales et politiques was created by the Convention to study questions of philosophy, political economy, law and general history. Local academies and societies proliferated throughout France but all were suppressed in 1793 only to be reconstituted one by one under the umbrella of the Institut de France founded in 1795. In Germany, Leibnitz prepared the plan for the Societas Regia Scientiarum founded in 1700. In Russia, the Académie Impériale des Sciences de Saint-Petersbourg was established in 1725. The American Philosophical Society founded by Franklin in Philadelphia in 1727 encompassed all learning. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences was founded in Boston in 1780 and an Academy of Natural Sciences was established in Philadelphia in 1812. The Association of American Geologists, 1840, became the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1848. Congress chartered the National Academy of Sciences in 1863 and in 1865 the American Social Science Association was organized in Boston.
Up through the mid-nineteenth century such organizations were characterized by closed memberships consisting of scholars with wide interests. This set
them off from the newer, professional, organizations with open memberships of scholars, mostly from academia, and lay members with narrow interests in
delimited fields of knowledge which were to become the norm.
PART II
The Disciplines
ANTHROPOLOGY: from Gr.; in English originally in the widest sense as the science of man or mankind, e.g., 1593; but generally confined to more restricted meanings until the 1860's.
Hobbes began writing about man and society as a search for laws in the spirit of natural science; however, it was the line of Pufendorf, Locke and Spinoza which affirmed that the human mind was formed by experience and that society as a human invention should be analyzed as such, with Vico the first and most explicit exponent of the idea that society was man-made. Vico was convinced that change itself obeyed laws and set out to discover historical origins of very long-term regularities of change. But it is not through his work that the key concepts of a man-made society, historical perspective, contextual explanation, and the inclusion of nonliterate peoples were propagated; this was due to Montesquieu (with the exclusion of the emphasis on the long term) whose theories were based on environmental determinism (de Waal Malefijt, 1974, 78ff). A recognition of symbolic language as the method of transmission of a cumulative culture is present in Turgot and both he and Condorcet espoused a vision of progress.
Such reflections would be relevant to any of the social sciences; however, in the wake of the French revolution two perspectives began to emerge: one which would lead to sociology and another which would lead to anthropology. The universalist thrust of Enlightenment thought had highlighted questions engendered by the contact with non-European peoples, such as whether all "men" were of the same species; whether, in fact, all possessed souls. The discrediting of "reason" culminated in the romantic valorization of diversity. This also resulted in the quest for an idiographic (universal) "history of mankind" in which every society could be fitted, creating a window on the evolutionary (cultural) history of mankind.
Racism and phrenology played a part in the founding of the Société Ethnologique de Paris in 1838. The Société d'Anthropologie de Paris was established in 1859, with the accent on physical anthropology, as an alternative to the 1799 Société des Observateurs de l'Homme.
The British Ethnological Society was founded in 1842 along the lines of the Paris model of 1838 as an offshoot of the Aborigines Protection Society (1837) to privilege the scientific over the humanitarian elements. The BES was monogenist, espousing the essential unity of the human race, and the "model of explanation was diffusionary and historical emphasizing the environmental influences modifying human physical characteristics" using the comparison of languages as the major methodological tool (Stocking, 1971, 372). But differences over the "Negro question" moved James Hunt (a polygenist who championed the cause of the Confederate south) to establish the Anthropological Society of London in 1863, under the banner, however, of the "whole matter of the origin and development of humanity, with the aid of the geologist, archaeologist, anatomist, physiologist, and philologist"--a whole science of man. He also cited a Paris model, that of 1859. For the ASL, "anthropology would be empirical, rejecting unproven hypotheses, and busying itself with the collection of facts. But it would also be practical, uncovering the 'laws [that] are secretly working for the development of some nations and the destruction of others'" (Stocking, 1971, 377). The ASL was anti-Darwinian while the ESL saw environmental circumstances shaping human development, a pre-Darwinian evolutionism--Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared in 1859. The "marginal" anthropologicals argued that Negroes were a different species incapable of civilization and better off as slaves while mainstream British science (an intellectual aristocracy, including Huxley and Galton) was embracing the "ape theory" of the origin of man.(1)
The two (and their various journals) were merged in 1871 as the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the same year as the publication of Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. The ethnologicals won out intellectually but it was clear that what was at stake was "man's place in nature", more adequately expressed etymologically in the term "anthropology". E. B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871; Anthropology, 1881) became Reader in anthropology at Oxford in 1884 and the first chair in social anthropology was created at Liverpool in 1908. Tylor never held a university degree; nonetheless, his 1889 paper, "On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions, Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent", launched the method of cross-cultural comparison, frequently statistical, which, in a greatly extended way, became so characteristic in the twentieth century, especially after 1945 with the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University.
Theoretically, "functionalism" marked the first half of the century; it informed not only anthropology, but architecture, psychology, sociology, and even the philosophy of mind.(2) Research was based on direct, intensive ethnographic documentation and when the functional rather than evolutionary perspective was applied non-European societies could no longer be viewed as primitive but took on the aspects of complex, highly-integrated systems. In contrast to the Enlightenment ideal of man the autonomous agent, Durkheim (in a bid for disciplinary recognition for sociology based on its own set of independent, scientific principles) posited an interaction between individual and a sui generis society--an expression of the exterior and constraining nature of "social facts". For Durkheim, "function" was a "social phenomenon".
It is this concept that separates Durkheim most sharply
from later British functionalists. The latter often transferred Durkheim's social functions to an individual level, and discussed them in terms of biological, psychological, or personal human needs. His French followers understood him better. Henri Hubert (1872-1927) and Marcel Mauss (1972-1950) absorbed their teacher's notion of function as a social phenomenon, and they also turned to the analysis of nonliterate societies as a starting point for the understanding of universal social conditions (de Waal Malefijt, 1974, 190).
In England, Radcliffe-Brown promoted a nomothetic, "true science", social anthropology--a sociology of the nonliterate which could also be called up in the service of British colonial policy--accepting verifiability and the establishment of universal laws as paramount, as against idiographic ethnology, of little practical use. He recognized that functional consistency and logical consistency in social systems were not the same, even often at odds (this conceptualization would eventually offer the possibility of addressing change) and realized that "function" itself needed explanation. His synchronic comparative method did not rule out diachronic studies. But he did tend to concentrate on structures and slight analyses of change, as did later functionalists who emphasized solidarity and functional consistency--"structural-functionalists" to differentiate them from Malinowskian "functionalists".
Bronislaw Malinowski, on the other hand, claimed to be the "father" of functionalism. He related functions to the individual and his psychological needs and ultimately to biological imperatives. Functionalism was for him a heuristic method for the understanding of culture as a survival mechanism. Absorbed with the present, Malinowski was intent on comprehending observed realities, unlike Radcliffe-Brown who sought laws.
In the U.S., the American Ethnological Society was founded in 1842 and Anthropology was recognized as a scientific discipline from 1851 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The Anthropological Society of Washington was established in 1879; the American Anthropologist appeared in 1888; and the American Anthropological Association was founded in 1902. During the first half of the twentieth century the most influential figure in the discipline in the U.S. was Franz Boas (Columbia, 1896-1942). Born and educated in Germany in physics and mathematics before shifting to geography, he was cognizant of the Geisteswissenschaften/Naturwissenschaften distinction when he turned to anthropology. Advocating a historical rather than a comparative method ("historical particularism"--"cultures" not "culture") in reaction to the "cultural evolution" perspective, he eventually gave up any possibility of formulating any laws, general or particular, and became interested in the role of the individual.
Marvin Harris argues that the separation of "social" and "cultural" anthropology had no epistemological, methodological or theoretical significance; both simply meant non-physical and stemmed from the French social (which gained acceptance in Great Britain in the form of sociology of primitive societies instead of kultur identified with civilization by Malinowski in 1923) and German kultur traditions (transplanted to the U.S. by the German-American founders of twentieth-century American cultural anthropology)--both united through their roots in the non- and anti-Marxist work of Durkheim.
Durkheim's main ideological contribution was the development of a "scientific," state-supported system of morals, based on the notion of collective conscience and organic solidarity ... ideas about organic solidarity were much more useful in the postwar [post-1918] colonial context. Applied to "tribal" peoples, solidarism sanctioned a timeless ("synchronic"), homeostatic, explicitly organismic view of exploited colonial populations. ... Synchronic solidarist-structuralism was celebrated during precisely the same period and on a bigger scale in the United States. However, its dominion lay not within American anthropology, but within American sociology. Its chief exponent was Talcott Parsons (Harris, 1980, 395-6).
Lévi-Strauss, however, asserts that although "cultural anthropology and social anthropology cover exactly the same ground", there is a difference in the direction of the movement in analysis: the first
starts from techniques and material things and proceeds ultimately to the "super-technique" of social and political activity, which makes life in society possible and determines the forms it takes, while the other starts from social life and works down to the things on which social life leaves its mark and the activities through which it manifests itself (1963, 357).
The first begins with man the tool-maker, different from animals (the nature/culture distinction); the second with the group, and thus communication. Durkheim of course stipulated that the very stuff of the "social" were "things", social facts; just as tools, weapons or ritual objects form systems of representation.
Despite the seeming differences among the French structuralists (Lévi-Strauss in the lead) British and American structural-functionalists (Parsons, Merton) or American grammarians (Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, 1957), they, and even more-so their followers, risked being
equally ill-disposed toward the etic[(3)] actuality of flesh and blood human behavior. The idealist expropriation of culture ... fulfills the conservative bias inherent in university-sponsored American social science ... formal analysis and structural-functionalism are nomothetically convergent and functionally equivalent expressions of the same conservative thrust ... [and] the grammarians offer a consensus theory of social structure. ... Never has there been a sociocultural paradigm better calculated to avoid the study of conflict and political-economic process" (Harris, 1980, 404-5).
That said, the position of Claude Lévi-Strauss is both more complex and pivotal to the development of the discipline and the social sciences in general. In 1954 he cleared the air regarding the myriad of terms used in departments, institutes, journals, etc. He defined ethnography, ethnology and anthropology as simply referring to different stages of inquiry from observation to analysis, despite the institutional survival of usages reflecting local variations and past sectarian interests.(4)
There is certainly nothing revolutionary here, but Lévi-Strauss made two arguments and put them into practice, with vast epistemological and practical implications down to the present. First, no one better than he situated anthropology in relation to the social sciences or more clearly delineated its position in relation to the nomothetic sciences and idiographic history and the humanities; and second, he adopted and propagated structural linguistics as a general model applicable throughout the social sciences. On the relation between history and anthropology, he was able to write in 1949 that the
fundamental difference between the two disciplines is not one of subject, of goal, or of method. They share the same subject, which is social life; the same goal, which is a better understanding of man; and, in fact, the same method, in which only the proportion of research techniques varies. They differ, principally, in their choice of complementary perspectives: History organizes its data in relation to conscious expressions of social life, while anthropology proceeds by examining its unconscious foundations. ... Boas must be given credit for defining the unconscious nature of cultural phenomena with admirable lucidity. By comparing cultural phenomena to language from this point of view, he anticipated both the subsequent development of linguistic theory and a future for anthropology whose rich promise we are just beginning to perceive. He showed that the structure of a language remains unknown to the speaker until the introduction of a scientific grammar. Even then the language continues to mold discourse beyond the consciousness of the individual, imposing on his thought conceptual schemes which are taken as objective categories (1963, 18, 19).
Lévi-Strauss implemented the linguistic model developed in the work of Saussure, Troubetzkoy, and Jakobson to grasp the unconscious structures of social institutions and customs. It was generalization that supported comparisons. However, even the "analysis of structures ... requires constant recourse to history. By showing institutions in process of transformation, history alone makes it possible to abstract the structure which underlies the many manifestations and remains permanent throughout a succession of events (1963, 21). What the anthropologist must grasp is the range of the not unlimited, unconscious possibilities. "Unpredictable", but "never arbitrary", they offer the logical framework for historical developments. Building on Marx's insight, Lévi-Strauss asserts that "Men make their own history, but they do not know that they are making it" as the justification for one, history, and two, anthropology, showing at the same time that the two are inseparable" forming a "true two-faced Janus (1963, 23, 24).
Physical anthropology as the "natural" study of man--description and evaluation of physical variation--ties anthropology to the nomothetic sciences. Sociology failed to become a total science of man and instead advanced the social science of the observer while anthropology advanced that of the observed. From this perspective "it takes as a guiding principle that of 'meaning'" working from the linguistic model to become a "semeiological science" (1963, 364) in which it is the relations which matter not the terms. Linguistics,(5) "probably the only [social science] which can truly claim to be a science and which has achieved both the formulation of an empirical method and an understanding of the nature of the data submitted to its analysis" (1963, 31), then, provided a fresh link with the nomothetic sciences from the humanities!
Also during the 1950's, psychoanalysis and behavioralism spawned the relativistic "culture and personality" subfield which hardened into the more general psychological anthropology. By the 1960's, Marxism and ecology became influential. The ecological perspective (in opposition to Chomskian "innateness": cultures are not simply systems of communication but real adaptational situations) revolutionized archeological anthropology and led to stronger links of this latter with "cultural" anthropology. Marxism was associated with the "symbolic" and "cognitive" developments through a revival of the sociology of knowledge tradition in the form of "the social construction of reality" (Fox, 1985, 29, 30). In 1961 Evans-Pritchard, abandoning generality and universality, could declare that the difference between history and social anthropology was "one of orientation, not of aim" and in 1968 George Stocking's Race, Culture, and Evolution "made the first major break with the custom of ignoring external intellectual currents, showing the relevance of literary movements, broad political trends, and developments in other scientific disciplines" (Leaf, 1979, 2, xi). Both the physical and social/cultural wings felt threatened by the publication of E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology which made "a grab for a total explanation of all social behaviour from insect to man" (Fox, 1985, 31).
The position occupied by anthropology between the nomothetic sciences and the idiographic humanities and the exhaustion of nonliterate "societies" with the concomitant move of anthropologists into domains occupied by historians and sociologists (and the large-scale borrowing of ethnographic and linguistic methods by these latter) in developed societies accounts for much of the current tension and the tenuous alliances formed and dissolved between anthropological subfields and predicate disciplines.
ECONOMIC HISTORY: "the history of actual human practice with respect to the material basis of life", but not necessarily the history of economic thought; "a half-way house between the abstract and the concrete" which takes into account multiple causation, uses inductive method and practices generalization (Ashley, 1927, 1, 9).
Economic history is rooted in the concerns which gave rise to "mercantilism" and "political arithmetic": policy oriented explanations of the wealth and power of nations. Although Adam Smith rejected the deductivism of the Physiocrats and relied primarily on historical observation in formulating his principles, from Smith, economics traces its lineage through Ricardo to Jevons and Marshall. Their abstract deductive methods and the essentialist qualities of the behavioralist premise of "economic man" were criticized by Cliffe Leslie in the 1870's. In an effort to establish a reformist school of inductive, relativist economic history in England, he opposed the historical method to the deductive and favorably contrasted the new German historians with what he termed the "obsolete or decadent English school" and called for a return to the Adam Smith of "facts" (Price, 1906, 14, 15; Koot, 1987, 39-53). Here the historical approach was unsuccessful in the English round of the Methodenstreit. Following Marshall, English, and American, economics became more and more theoretical.
From the seventeenth century a long line of precursors may be cited (Gras, 1927), but it was in Germany with the emergence of the "historical school" of List, Hildebrand, Schmoller, Knies, and Roscher, and eventually Sombart and Weber, that a challenge to the universality of deductive theory in the classical approach in favor of the relativity of inductive history was mounted. The phrase "economic history" was first used in a book title in 1879, in German, by Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg. He also supplied a major impetus to the study in his 1877 address to the Vienna academy on the sources of German economic history. Menger's (1883) attack was initially beaten back by the already institutionalized historical approach which initially stood its ground in the German Methodenstreit.(6) As Irish problems focused Leslie (in opposition to the mainstream conservatism) and as the Revolution had kept the historical approach alive in France in work of Saint-Simon for instance, the crises of 1866 and 1873 and the controversy over the mark beginning in 1883 prompted German scholars to investigate the historical aspects of economic problems. The decade of the 1880's constituted a high point with the appearance of major works in England, the United States and on the Continent where national schools of economic history have tended to focus on periods perceived as key to the nation's history (at least until the post-1945 period), e.g., the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France and the nineteenth century in the United States.
Closely associated with the Methodenstreit was the Werturteilstreit, whether or not social science should be value-free. In Germany, Schmoller recognized explicitly the importance of responding to policy questions with the foundation of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1872. In Great Britain in 1878
the President [J. K. Ingram] of Section F of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science bluntly asserted that 'political economy at the present hour is undergoing a crisis' ... [and] urge[d] that the association turn Section F into a sociology section! Once done, social scientists could then be part of a more general science of social causality (Manicas, 1987, 125)
directly relevant to the "war of classes." Although an abstract, deductivist "science" as an autonomous discipline was tenaciously opposed in favor of a unitary historical science as in the case of Schmoller (Gesellschaftswissenschaft), Ingram, or Durkheim, by the turn of the century the "neo-classicists" had triumphed.
Whether Fustel de Coulanges, Schmoller and Knapp, or Cunningham, the alliance with institutional and political history was strong; also much of the best work of the period was done on classical, medieval or very early modern times. With the first two editions of Das Kapital (1867 and 1873), however, Marx beckoned both historians and economists into the contemporary world. And according to Gras,
it is to the clearer formulation from the pen of Karl Marx that we must look for real scientific influence. At least since the publication of the first volume of Capital (1867), the idea has been in the air that economic history is important because it is the key to other kinds of history (1927, 21-22).
Inspiration during the decade of the 1880's also came from a surge in the publication of documents (much as had stimulated eighteenth century work).
The decade of the 1880's witnessed the early work in economic history in the United States at Johns Hopkins where Ely insisted on the inductive method as well as Schmoller's historical approach, and at Columbia with Seligman's work on medieval guilds. Dunbar gave the first formal instruction in economic history at Harvard in 1883 where Ashley became the first professor of economic history in America in 1892. Similar chairs followed at Columbia and Yale. Manchester led in England with the first chair, 1910, (Cambridge, 1928; Oxford, 1931; the London School of Economics, lectureship, 1904), although economic history had had a place in the Cambridge curriculum since 1878. In France both the Sorbonne and Aix-Marseille emphasized regional and geographical concerns of the discipline.
The Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte with its Vierteljahrschrift (originally as Zeitschrift, 1893, the oldest journal of economic history) dates from the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1926 N. S. B. Gras founded the Business History Society and its Journal of Business History. In England the Economic History Society with its Economic History Review was established in 1927. In France the Revue d'histoire des doctrines économiques et sociales was founded in 1908 but changed its name in 1913 to Revue d'histoire économique et sociale to signal the relationship between the history of theories and the histories of institutions and promote empirical studies; Annales (d'Histoire Economique et Sociale, later Annales E.S.C.), began publishing in 1929. In the Netherlands the Economisch-historisch jaarbock saw the light in 1916. And finally in 1940 the Economic History Association with its Journal of Economic History was founded; Clough noted in 1970 that over the years, the profile of membership changed from about equal numbers with backgrounds in economics and history to a large majority with backgrounds in the former (1970, 12). Expressly to spread the discipline, the International Economic History Association was established in 1960.
In the U. S. the Carnegie Institution financed a series of co-operative studies beginning in 1904; from the 1920's the systematic study of business cycles by the National Bureau of Economic Research benefited economic historians as well as economists. Beginning in 1940 the SSRC sponsored the Committee on Research in Economic History and then during the 1950's a Committee on Economic Growth studying long-run, irreversible, trends rather than short-term fluctuations. Goodrich (1960) cites the strengths of this work in its central problem, economic development, its use and development of quantitative method, and its method of comparison among countries; and its weaknesses in its limitations to contemporary times and subject matters, and its neglect of social costs and the qualitative aspects of causation.
Developments of quantitative methods and the construction of national income accounts set the stage for the "new economic history" or "cliometrics" which Landes maintains was announced by Rostow's British Economy of the Nineteenth Century, 1949 (1978, 3). Purdue University sponsored its first Seminar on Quantitative Methods in Economic History in December of 1960. This "new" history attempted to do four things:
First to state precisely the questions subject to examination and to define operationally the relevant variables. Second, to build explicit models that are relevant to the questions at hand. Third, to produce evidence (frequently quantitative, but at times qualitative) of the world as it actually existed. And finally, to test the model (a logical statement of assumptions and conclusions) against the evidence (the world that did exist) and the counterfactual deduction (the world that did not exist) (Davis, 1966, 657).
In its preoccupation with becoming more scientific, the new economic history emphasized measurement and the relation of measurement to theory and typically made use of sophisticated statistical methods including regression analysis--in contrast with the descriptive techniques of Annales. However, its hypothetico-deductive method based on counterfactual propositions is the very basis on which it has been attacked as "anti-empiricist", "anti-positivistic" and resulting in "quasi-history" (Fogel, 1966).
POLITICAL ECONOMY/ECONOMICS: political economy, trans. of Fr. économie politique; "originally the art or practical science of managing the resources of a nation so as to increase its material prosperity; in more recent use, the theoretical science dealing with the laws that regulate the production and distribution of wealth"; economics, from Gr., originally "economy" in the narrow sense to manage a household.; in the wider sense especially from the nineteenth century, related to the development and regulation of the material resources of a community or nation; econometrics, from 1930's, application of statistical techniques to economic data (OED).
The most common reference for the birth of economics is the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776 in England. However, Montchrestien had used the term "political economy" to describe his discipline in 1615 in one of the first publications in which the term "political economy" appeared, his Traité d'économie politique, in much the way Smith did; and a decade before Smith, James Steuart had first used the term, in English, in the title of his An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy. Oxford created the Drummond Chair in Political Economy in 1825, although from 1805 and until his death, Malthus occupied a position with the East India (Company) College as Professor of History, Political Oeconomy and Finance.
In France the Journal économique published from 1751-1772. The Journal d'économie publique, de morale et de politique founded in 1796 lasted only two years and the Revue mensuelle d'économie politique was also short lived. Political economy became a required subject in the faculties of law in 1877 as a result of a long campaign on the part of, among others, the Société d'économie politique from its foundation in 1842. The Journal des économistes, founded in 1841, lasted almost a century as the organ of the Société.
In Italy the publication of Custodi's series Scrittori classici italiani di economia politica in 1803 was symptomatic of the pretense of (political) economists to offer a "complete picture of fundamental political problems"; along the same lines, Gioia's Nuovo prospetto delle scienze economiche ossia somma totale delle idee teoriche e pratiche in ogni ramo d'amministrazione privata e pubblica appeared in 1815. (Schiera in Wagner et al., 1991, 108). In polemic with this encyclopedic school, Ferrara founded the Biblioteca dell'economia in 1852. Courses in political economy were ubiquitous throughout the century and chairs in political economy were institutionalized in the general university reform of 1876.
In the United States, there was a profusion of university courses in political economy by the early nineteenth century. Harvard had the first chair, established in 1871, and courses primarily for graduate students from 1875. The first Ph.D.'s were awarded at Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins in 1875, 1877, and 1878, respectively. The American Economic Association was founded in 1885 and the Quarterly Journal of Economics began publishing in 1886 in Cambridge, Mass.
In his Principles of Political Economy of 1848, John Stuart Mill argues that political economy is not a science which teaches how a nation may become rich. He dismisses the analogy of the domestic economy of the family and the political economy of the state on the grounds that the one is an art and the other a science--an early distinction between the normative and the positive. Mill
is concerned to define political economy in such a way as to make it a science; and in doing so he provides one of the earliest treatments of the role of simplifying assumptions in economic analysis. ... His interest in methodology and his concern for separating science and art foreshadowed the modern separation of positive from normative economics. ... [I]t was this eagerness for the discipline to be more scientific that led one of Mill's successors to change its name (Wright, 1990, 61).
Neo-classical economics emerged with the so-called marginalist revolution from the 1870's of Menger (Austria), Walras (Switzerland), Jevons (England). Marginal utility (or cost) was differentiated from average utility (or cost). It was predicated on the increment to the total utility (or cost) of consuming (or producing) one more unit and based on the "laws" of diminishing utility or returns which go back to Turgot. Marshall's (England) Principles of Economics (1890) brought Mill's project of a "science" of economics to fruition and underlined it with a definitive change in name.
Indeed for Marshall the term "economics" was preferable to "political economy", broadening the domain, as he thought, to business and commerce, and stressing positive economics without, however, totally excluding the normative. Although
largely directed by practical needs, economics avoids as far as possible the discussion of those exigencies of party organization, and those diplomacies of home and foreign politics of which the statesman is bound to take account in deciding what measures that he can propose will bring him nearest to the end that he desires to secure for his country. It aims indeed at helping him to determine not only what that end should be, but also what are the best methods of a broad policy devoted to that end. But it shuns many political issues, which the practical man cannot ignore: and it is therefore a science, pure and applied, rather than a science and an art. And it is better described by the broad term "Economics" than by the narrower term "Political Economy" (Marshall quoted in Wright, 1990, 64).
For Marshall the "Mecca of economic science" was "economic biology" (Maloney, 1985, 28-32).
In Germany the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft began publishing in 1844 but the decades of the 1870's and 1880's formed a turning point. The Methodenstreit of the 1880's was
an ardent discussion over the proper method for economic studies. Schmoller's historical approach collided with the "pure" theory of the neoclassicist Carl Menger: the one emphasized the historically concrete, the other the abstract; the one relied on price history, the other on price theory; the one spoke of actual past economic behavior, the other of typical economic behavior; the one stressed lessons gained from descriptive history, the other worked with theoretical models applicable everywhere and at any time ... really a far-reaching dispute over the structure of reality. ... [As] Menger's followers opened the doors of economics even wider to psychology and mathematics ... economists preferred to theorize on the timeless and typical processes of the market and thereby moved ever closer to the ideals of the ahistorical natural sciences (Breisach, 1983, 299).
In the United States, the Methodenstreit was carried on between Richard Ely, who was inspired by Schmoller's Verein für Sozialpolitik, and Simon Newcombe, astronomer and "an able and articulate spokesman for the abstract deductivist conception of political economy which Ricardo had inspired and which J. S. Mill had tried to restrict" (Manicas in Wagner, et al., 49). The American Economics Association (1885) was formed out of this matrix to combat the view that economic problems would solve themselves. Ely, however, was treated as an anarchist and socialist; after Haymarket the ranks broke, and Henry Adams proposed giving up any claim to moral authority. From the other side Charles F. Dunbar of Harvard in the first issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics (1886), offered to make peace with the "revisionists".
Rid of its Germanisms and formally fitted with differential equations, economics was securely in the hands of descendants of 'the great masters of the deductive school.' As for the others who stayed, they were, like Veblen, derisively termed 'sociologists,' or perhaps more kindly ... 'institutional economists' (Manicas in Wagner, et al., 62).
At Harvard the term "political economy" was dropped in 1897 to be replaced by "economics"; this transition was fairly complete in most U.S. universities by 1900.
In the Italian debate over the role of the state in the economic sphere, the laissez-faire group (Adam Smith Society founded in Florence in 1874) who supported the journal L'Economista, was countered by those who wished to apply experimental methods to both economic and social enquiry, social science as broad and complex--they supported the Economist's Journal during its first run 1875-78. By the 1890's the Economist's Journal had passed into the hands of the marginalists who proclaimed the sovereignty of "pure economics". Although polemics among proponents of the theoretical movement and the historical school persisted during the later nineteenth century in the context of a crisis of liberalism and contributions by economists to the elaboration of the welfare state (but unlike the German model, state intervention was to be complementary rather than exclusive), economists of all stripes shared a loose attachment to empiricist ("experimental") methodology, pragmatic state politics, and the search for "economic laws".
In Germany, the two fields of science and politics were divided, but the support in terms of technical expertise and legitimation that science gave to politics was decisive. In Italy, there was no clear separation, the middle course triumphed as in all fields. As a consequence, science became much more directly political without politics becoming much more scientific in return (Schiera in Wagner, et al., 1990, 113).
The upshot of the Italian Methodenstreit essentially amounted to responding to the "social question" with soft methodology and theorizing situated somewhere between speculation and experience, theory and practice.
As codified by Say in France (formation, distribution and consumption of wealth), the transformation to "classical economics" was an outcome of a politics of liberalism and laissez-faire and a turn from mercantilism to markets and the "hidden hand" which tended to distance the state from the traditional "political sciences".
Economics then was not a "human science", developed by philosophers in the faculty of letters, and was no longer a "political science", developed by civil servants in relation to problems of state administration[, and could thus claim autonomy]. But economics was not a theoretical discipline either. ... [I]t was not until economics was institutionalized in the faculty of law that a more scholarly type of economic analysis emerged, for which the Revue d'économie politique (1887) served as an outlet (Heilbron in Wagner, et al., 1991, 87).
Thus in France economics came to occupy a position between the "political" and "human sciences". The Revue d'économie politique appeared to compete with the Journal des économistes and espoused a "science" which had already conquered socialism and protectionism. The new school emerging here in 1887 was not marginalism though; it was the historical school opposing the orthodox school grounded in the "natural right" of property. The classicists, going back to Say, distinguished between science (discovery of natural laws) and art; the historicists emphasized the historical character of economic categories and tended to abolish the science/art distinction in aiming for greater practicality in science. Hence
the historical school played a role in the abandoning of the classical definition and in the forming of the conception of economics as the science of "allocating decisions about scarce resources". ... Thus ... the debate on the conception of political economy ... opposes liberals (heirs of the classics) and historicists, with the marginalists (notably Menger) being seen in rather a good light by those of the orthodox school when setting forth their views (Alcouffe, 1989, 337).
In England the Royal Economic Society was established in 1890; the founding of the London School of Economics in 1895 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb was part of broad-based interest in extension courses in political economy. Commercial education has customarily been distinguished from economics through its "practical" intent such as that at the University of Birmingham (1902) which challenged Marshall and the tripos in economics at Cambridge.
In the U.S. the Rockefeller Foundation became a major player in the 1920's with the establishment of the National Bureau of Economic Research and subsidizing the International Commission on Price History; again the aim was to turn economics into a true science. But large-scale data sets were found to be necessary for any prediction which could lead to policy initiatives. Other centers formed with this (empirical and inductive) end in sight and benefiting from assistance from Rockefeller were the Harvard Economic Services and overseas, institutes in Vienna, Oslo, Rotterdam, Heidelberg, Kiel, and Oxford (see Craver and Leijonhufvud, 1987). The mathematization of economics was fulfilled with the foundation of the Econometric Society and the appearance of Econometrica (1933).
The world economic downturn of the late 1920's and 1930's, the "Great Depression", and its massive unemployment were inexplicable from a classical or neo-classical perspective. Keynesianism, a broad economic/political/social program to preserve capitalism in its crisis based on the technical/theoretical work of John Maynard Keynes, cast the state in a primary role in fostering the economic well being of its citizens. Liquidity preference leading to high interest rates and deficient aggregate demand resulting in unemployment (demand responding to income instead of price) suggested public policy programs based on active state intervention to realize full employment. In the U.S. this was exemplified in the New Deal and the political realignment of the Democratic Party coalition, and, after 1945, the limited corporatism of the labor-management understanding in which economic interests were assured while unions relinquished their demands for restructuring in the social and political spheres. In Great Britain corporatism went even further after 1945 with the Welfare State and included control over financial institutions and markets and public ownership and investment in industry.
During the 1970's Keynesianism was revamped and extended by Keynesians themselves at the same time as they came under attack from Milton Friedman and the Chicago school. Monetarism, which goes back to Hume and the idea that the rate of inflation is based on growth of the money supply, is associated with deflation and conservatism. It is believed that decreasing state spending controls the money supply by limiting state borrowing and stimulates private investment; however, controlling the money supply has proved next to impossible and public policy initiatives of the last two decades grounded in monetarism (IMF excepted, which continues to rely on control of the money supply in developing countries) boil down to an aversion to welfare spending and organized labor while promoting the deregulation of private capital.
Concerns germane to the tradition of political economy continued to remain prominent in Marxist analysis and presently inform the work of members of the Union for Radical Political Economy in the U.S. which publishes the Review of Radical Political
Economics and the Conference of Socialist Economists in England and its journal Capital & Class. Challenges to economic orthodoxy also regularly appear in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Critical Social Policy, and Race and Class.
GEOGRAPHY: Gr., for example in Strabo.; in English, 1542, "geographie, that is to saie, of the descripcion of the yearth".
The eighteenth century was rich in geographical works, constructed, Stoddart suggests, around new conceptions of time (its immensity--calendars, clocks, and the abandonment of any limitation on the age of the earth), space and scale (microscope, telescope, barometer, and developments in surveying and standardization of measurement), and the effects of man (drainage and engineering works, forest ordinances, and concerns over air pollution) which differentiate this intellectual tradition from its ancient and medieval predecessors. He situates a transformation, however, with Cook's voyage, 1769. Truth, science, through direct observation, relying on the techniques of classification and comparative method, entered the picture in contrast with the theological and philosophical questions engendered by the voyages of exploration of the preceding three centuries (1986, 30-32, 34).
In Germany, numerous journals were published from the late eighteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth, two masters, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter, brought to an end an age in which ideas of universal synthesis could be articulated in the work of individuals and at the same time contributed to the founding of modern geography. Institutionalization dates from Ritter's appointment to the first German chair in geography, at Berlin, in 1820; the Geographische Jahrbücher appeared in 1866.
In France, Annales de géographie dates from 1891, although Annales des voyages, de la géographie et de l'histoire had already appeared in 1807, and there were many in between. Annales de géographie was founded by Vidal de la Blache, the first geographer appointed (1898-1918) to the Sorbonne chair of geography established in 1809.
Geographical societies were established in Paris in 1821 and Berlin in 1828 but in England the establishment of the Royal Geographical Society was opposed by the Royal Society's Sir Joseph Banks (against growing specialization and guarding the R.S.'s monopoly, he had also opposed the establishment of the Geological Society of London in 1807). The R.G.S. incorporated the London Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa (1788) and the Palestine Association and published its Journal from its foundation in 1830. Its role in establishing the legitimacy of the discipline is paramount: from the beginning its composition reflected a social (not necessarily professional) elite of peers, and military and naval men. The acknowledgment accorded explorers and surveyors reflects the primacy of (travel) description and military cartography. The Ordnance Surveys of England, Ireland, and finally Scotland date from the 1830's and forties, in retard of those of Austria, Bavaria, Prussia, and France--accurate triangulation was invaluable not only for mining and military concerns but to expanding railroad interests as well. Systematic surveys were of particular importance in the United States early on, e.g., Lewis and Clark, 1803-1806.
But in fact, it "was not until 1858 that the president of the R.G.S. was unfailingly a scientific man, and not until 1860 that scientists actually formed a majority of its fellows" (Stoddart, 1986, 21). In light of their secondary status, academic geographers formed their own Geographic Association in 1892 and the Institute of British Geographers in 1933. In 1887 the first chair in England was created at Oxford; even though its establishment was opposed by geologists. Geology was already highly professionalized and when the Geological Survey cut its staff by half in the 1880's geologists were shaken; at the same time geographers were pressing claims within the universities (especially geography as a science of landforms) which geologists saw as a
further assault on an already beleaguered position. ... [T]he position in Britain differed radically from that in North America, where university departments of geography were largely created by geologists ... and frequently originated as sub-departments within departments of geology (Stoddart, 1986, 43).
The American Geographical and Statistical Society of New York published its Bulletin from 1852 and as the American Geographical Society, from 1859 but few others appeared until the 1880's and 1890's (see Harris and Fellmann (1980)).
The "New Geography" began in Germany and spread to Great Britain, France, Russia and eventually the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the work of Alexander von Humboldt, the consummate traveler, observer and innovator, and Carl Ritter, the teacher and communicator, epitomized both the culmination of the classical, encyclopedic approach of universal scholarship and opened the way to the specialization, generalization, and the large-scale institutionalization realized in the Prussian decision to establish a chair of geography in each of its universities in 1874 (stimulated by the needs perceived in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War and incipient German colonial efforts). Major advancements were made in mid-century: German cartographers led the field in which progress was dependent on improved printing techniques. August Petermann, in the cartographer-geographer tradition, founded Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen in 1855. Its maps set new standards in cartography. German academic geography became influential in France and the U.S. especially through the work of Friedrich Ratzel. In his Anthropogeographie, he first focused on the impact of the physical earth on human affairs (1882) then gave his attention to the "culture of human groups" (1891); in Political Geography (1897) he "compares the state to an organism ... 'attached to the land'" (Martin and James, 1993, 169-70).
In 1934 the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, divided Geography into Cultural, Human, and Economic sub-disciplines. Ritter's Die Erkunde... had stressed the relation of man and natural environment, that is, human activity as physically conditioned--man's adaptation. This human geography contrasted with a cultural geography which accented cultural factors which give character to an area. Around the turn of the century, in the wake of the work of Ratzel, human geography moved toward a narrow environmentalism, which, by ignoring social relations, "legitimated the persistence of European and American imperialism" by basing geographically varied physical and mental attributes on "differences in the natural environment" (Pred, 1993, 266). In England Halford Mackinder's thrust to both scientize and institutionalize geography furthered overt imperial ends. In France, however, determinism was tempered by Vidal de la Blache's possibilisme--nature "set limits and offered possibilities for human settlement, but the way man reacts or adjusts to these given conditions depends on his own traditional way of living" (Martin and James, 1993, 192). Indeed, in the English speaking world, geography came to be identified with human ecology to an extent that by the 1930's there was little cross-fertilization between continental and English speaking geographers.
Cultural geography continued a line (back to the observational field tradition of physical geography) which considered man as a geomorphologic agent (concerned with the works of man inscribed into the earth's surface) and the comparative classification of regions--thus fundamentally historical. According to Carl Sauer (Berkeley, 1923-1957), it "asserts no social philosophy such as environmentalist geography does" (1934, 624); however, Pred notes that it also avoided the social by "adopting the superorganic view of CULTURE ... by assigning culture an independent ontological and determinative status, by removing it from the realm of human agency and conflict and by allowing it magically to generate its own planted-on-the-ground forms" (1993, 266). Concordantly, Sauer denounced European commercial imperialism and his moral "concern" favoring cultural diversity (particularism) resulted in an anti-modernism and an essentialist reification of non-European "cultures". By and large geographers did not come to realize until after 1945 that "culture, not nature, determined the significance of environment, site, and natural resources, in spite of the critique of environmentalism advanced by ethnologists since before 1900" (Martin and James, 1993, 341). But Sauer had been influenced by Boasian anthropological historicism; it "encouraged him to promote the Germanic 'transformation of the natural landscape into the cultural landscape' as 'a satisfactory working program' for geography" (Livingstone, 1992, 297) against any mono-causal environmentalism and simplistic regionalism.
Economic geography (name first employed by Götz in 1882) was more important in Germany than France and assigned "the scientific task of dealing with the nature of world areas in their direct influence upon the production of commodities and the movement of goods" (Sapper, 1934, 627).
The geography program at Harvard was terminated in 1948--as not sufficiently scientific--and "American geography 'never completely recovered.'" Although factious curricular interests between geology and geography, uneven production within the department and even personal and political differences contributed, the incident was indicative of the idiographic/nomothetic debate, personified in the Hartshorne/Schaefer exchanges of the early 1950's. Schaefer attacked Hartshorne's geography as essentially idiographic. Even though his article included erroneous data and, contrary to Schaefer, Hartshorne had not ruled out a nomothetic approach, the assault encouraged a search for "law-like statements that could explain spatial patterns" over the historical, and social, approach which had characterized the Harvard department under Whittlesey (Livingstone, 1992, 311, 312, 313).
The move to quantification after 1945 resulted in concerns with the statistically measurable rather than the simply observable. Statistical geography, an approach to the field rather than a subdivision, stressed quantitative methods deemed appropriate to the spatial, area-studies, man-land and earth-science traditions. It was included as a separate sub-entry under "Geography" along with the sub-disciplines of Political Geography, Economic Geography, Cultural Geography, and Social Geography in the 1968 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The first, the areal context of political phenomena, springs from the basic concept of a territorial base of communities organized by power relations. This work has contributed to the use of graphic techniques in the study of political phenomena. Economic geography emphasized the livelihood aspect from either a topical or regional perspective and from the 1950's concerned qualitative interpretation, quantitative classification, and hypothesis testing. Cultural geography (especially U.S.) dealt "with those elements of material culture that give character to area through being inscribed into the earth's surface" (Sauer quoted in Price, 1968, 129). Social geography--that is the social dimension in areal differentiation (from the perspective of human geography) or similarities and contrasts in places due to social dynamics (physical perspective) and their articulation--is characterized as holistic in nature.
In the 1970's some geographers began to integrate studies of spatial organization and differentiation with political-economic and social justice issues. Earth Day, 1970, gave new stimulus to physical geography linked to growing ecological concerns. In contrast to the positivism of the 1950's, during the 1960's a humanistic thrust began to embrace emotional dispositions and experiences in human geography. In the cultural and historical tradition, behavioral geography diverged from the quantification of the 1950's in the direction of incorporating human imagination and meaning into geographical analysis--"interviewing people and comprehending the meaning of questions and answers ... to use information on location decision-making" (Martin and James, 1993, 381). The past two decades have also seen a significant movement to trace the geography of capitalism, e.g., Richard Peet, who founded Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography in the late 1960's, and David Harvey. Dissent was also apparent in the founding of Socially and Ecologically Responsible Geographers (SERGE), and the belief that "a different foundation of values was a necessary prerequisite for erecting the alternative geography" resulted in the founding of the Union of Socialist Geographers (Martin and James, 1993, 458, 459).
Nor has geography been immune to assaults on "totalizing discourses", "grand narratives". The collapse of foundationalism and the epistemological certainty it guaranteed seems to have opened the way to postmodern inflections of ambiguity and relativism,
focusing on the local and specific through self-referential and historical lenses (see Soya, 1989).
HISTORY: from Gr., research, exploration, information; later an account. Both in contrast with Germanic Geschichte, from verb to take place, to happen.
In the nineteenth century Geschichte finally supplanted the term Historie and was used by German historians and philosophers to designate the collection of human facts and their evolution. In the twentieth century the term Historie regain[ed] ground. ... With the use of the ... term [Geschichte] the accent is placed on the event ... in the [term history] on the evocation, the evocative effort (Berr and Febvre, 1934, 357).
Although each came to be used in both senses, the one retained a more critical, and the other, a more subjective connotation.
Humanist historians undermined the biblically-centered models of medieval historiography placing emphasis on "the causal forces of events originating in the individual psyche: reason, passion, and will. ... [But] history's status among the disciplines remained unchanged. The accounts of the past were dealt with in grammar, rhetoric, and ... in moral philosophy" (Breisach, 1983, 161-2). In 1440 Lorenzo Valla used the technique of textual criticism to expose a political fraud. With Petrarca and Machiavelli, history took a turn away from the search for final causes and the uncritical transcription of earlier authorities to establish a secular interpretation of modern problems. Machiavelli, who went beyond humanist historiography to search for laws, was followed by the German Sleidan, the Frenchman de Thou and the Englishman Clarendon in using his model which established the nation as the unit of historical analysis. Guicciardini, followed by the Swede Chemintz and the Brandenburgeois Pufendorf, examined "the history of a country [Italy] within a large geographic area, not a city, strove to obtain a broad, interpretive framework, and showed some of the connecting features in various aspects of Italian experience" (Gilderhus, 1987, 28). During the Reformation and Counter-Reformation interest in history intensified as partisan use of interpretations of the past were employed to bolster the authority of positions taken in the present. These 16th century controversies also resulted in the establishment of some of the first university professorships in history, e.g., by the Lutherans at Heidelberg and the Calvinists at Leyden.
Already in 1566 Jean Bodin stressed the importance of primary sources. The French historians of the Enlightenment, particularly Montesquieu and Voltaire,
discarded the Christian interpretation of history as well as all its valuations and blazed the path for a scientific and critical interpretation of history. ... They endeavored to write universal human history by including Asia and America in the range of their survey, and in bursting the bonds of state and church history and aiming to bring within their orbit all phases of social life they laid the foundations for a general history of human culture (Goetz, 1934, 375).
But the practical consequence was of progress without development; turning medieval historiography on its head, Voltaire "put little stock in basing his claims on evidence. For him, reason and credibility, more than original documents, should provide the test of truth" (Gilderhus, 1987, 35). In contrast, Hume, who shared Voltaire's secularism, was rigorously empirical.
Vico, a professor of rhetoric who wrote with the aspiration to a chair in law, "proclaimed the principle of the intrinsic worth of each age and the role of each epoch in preparing the way for the succeeding one" (Goetz, 1934, 175). He rejected both Cartesian assumptions of truth through reason alone and the "contemporary preference for the study of nature and its methods."
What had been seen as a fixed human nature throughout time and was still affirmed by many contemporaries was really made and remade in the course of human events; and historians could understand the changes. At the core of Vico's work stood the assertion that large-scale changes in the collective frame of mind were the great events in cultural history (Breisach, 1983, 204).
On the other hand, Leibniz's view of the world as one of interacting monads which led to a dialectical relation between part and whole in which the universal was in no way separate or superior, "led to the assertion that historical study must concentrate on the actual and unique event or person. ... Hence the result of a historical inquiry can never be general laws, only a description and explanation of individual persons and events" (Breisach, 1983, 204).
By the end of the 18th century, measured by the multiplication of learned societies, journals and scholarly output, the center of historical scholarship was shifting to Germany. The University of Göttingen (1774) with its excellent library and liberal postal and travel privileges made it particularly attractive to scholars. It
built itself up as the leading German historical school, seeking to give the subject a scientific character, and making itself the centre for the study of method. ... Gatterer ... called for a history of historiography. ... [F]oreshadow[ing] Ranke in his argument that the mere history of the Emperors was not enough ... [he] urged the importance of medieval history for the study of the constitutions of the modern European states (Butterfield, 1955, 42-44).
The great importance attached to Universal History by Gatterer leads directly to Ranke who considered it the supreme objective.
Leopold von Ranke, originally trained as a philologist, was called to the University of Berlin in 1824 where he instituted the history seminar. He combined "fully in his work the methodological achievements of philologists, erudites, and legal historians with substantial interpretation and traditional narrative history." Much in the manner of Humboldt, he did not use facts to obtain generalizations inductively; critical research was to be followed by "a process appropriate to the spiritual realm that governed all" (Breisach, 1983, 233). Drawing on work of Wolf and Niebuhr, he instructed students to report the past "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist", but not as a "soulless positivist"--rather in the Humboldtian sense, forgotten by later followers, of the shared but tacit conviction that against empiricism
there is a deeper reality behind concrete historical phenomena, a reality which it is the task of the historian to discover ... as Ranke put it, that "the historian is merely the organ of the general spirit which speaks through him and takes a real form." (Manicas, 1987, 118).
Among historians up until 1848 the alliance of pure scholarship and moderate conservatism competed with the ideals of national unity and constitutional government; however, the failure of the revolutions of 1848 gave priority to nationalism. Ranke's generation witnessed the importance of Prussia in the defeat of Napoleon (to the detriment of French egalitarian ideas as well) and came to trust the state as a spiritual entity. In any case, German liberalism and constitutionalism suffered the weakness of a philosophical context which tended to subordinate individual rights to the social whole. With the collapse of 1848 this social whole easily translated into the destiny of the state "in which personal freedom was realized in public service" (Breisach, 1983, 234). Rankean history became primarily political history, and the universality of his historical vision, a cosmopolitan community of Europe, went forgotten under the weight of nineteenth-century nationalism.
Ranke's critical methodology based on detailed archival research checked against its own context for the establishment of "objective facts" became the mark of the professional historian. The Historische Zeitschrift, established in 1859 after a long campaign, achieved a central position among scholarly journals; it both championed the Rankean model and supported the Prussian point of view until 1896. However, the idealist/transcendental leg of Rankean methodology folded under the pressures of Realpolitik and scientific progress. Droysen tried to refashion the remaining antiquarianism with the introduction of a theory of interpretation from the point of view of the present.
In France the defeat of 1870-'71 marked deeply those who wanted to emulate the German model.
They aimed at wresting dominance from the amateurs or littérateurs who gave stirring lectures at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne--institutions that held no classes, gave no examinations, conducted no seminars, in short, offered no academic training in the modern sense (Breisach, 1983, 276).
The École Normale Supérieure was academically structured but kept the literary model. In 1868 the École Pratique des Hautes Études was established with a history and philology section and, with the appearance of Revue historique in 1876, France too seemed to have attained a science of the past.
In 1878, the German scientist Du Bois-Reymond called for a history based on a natural science model and in the 1890's Karl Lamprecht provoked a controversy by rejecting the Rankean approach because it left no room for causality along positivist lines--he proposed psychological forces of a collective psyche. However, the inclination in France was to regard German scholarship as tinged with idealism and the tendency in French sociology to treat history as simply the supplier of "facts", resulted in a backlash from historians and a move to bridge the gap by Henri Berr, and the founding of Revue de synthèse historique in 1900.
Between 1883 and 1910 sustained efforts were made to rethink theory and method in history, for which Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Windelband, among others are remembered. Dilthey found elements in the human realm absent from nature; methods which
fit the natural world of necessity but not the human world of freedom ... could not grasp the complex process in which intentions, purposes, or ends shaped human actions. ... A historian who looks at the past only from the "outside" (in the positivist manner) will grasp little. "We explain nature, we understand the human world, which is the world of the mind." Hence Dilthey classified history among the Geisteswissenschaften, a term best understood as referring to all those scholarly disciplines which deal with the world so far as it is a creation of the mind in freedom. ... Windelband found that history, like philosophy, needed a new axiological structure in order to have the possibility of arriving at binding truth (Breisach, 1983, 281-82).
Windelband grounded historiographical categories in values and was again able to specify the relationship between history and the sciences:
The reality confronting human beings could be studied in two ways: by the nomothetic approach aiming at general insights (typical for the Naturwissenschaften--natural sciences) and by the idiographic approach attempting to understand the unique, individual event (typical for the Geisteswissenschaften--humanities). The idiographic approach could still make use of the nomothetic approach as an auxiliary tool without surrendering to its generalizing aim (Breisach, 1983, 283).
Max Weber did not consider possible any vantage point of absolute truth. The result was that seeking to overcome the contingent relativism methodologically, through the use of "ideal types",
historians [were] separated completely from the world of values they investigated. They were totally detached observers who objectively created islands of explained actions in a landscape of total obscurity. Theory and practice had been separated as the price for keeping the human world distinct from the natural one and for still claiming a modicum of adherence to "scientific" precepts (Breisach, 1983, 284).
In the English-speaking world there was little taste for the debates; nonetheless J. B. Bury affirmed history as science in the name of positivist generalization and condemned history as literary genre or moral guide.
Reviews played a particularly important role in the institutionalization of history and offer sign-posts to its intellectual development (see Stieg, 1986). Some of the oldest are: the Archiv für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde founded in 1820; the Danish Historisk Tidskrift which appeared in 1840; the Archivio storico italiano which began publishing in 1842; and the Archiv für österreichische Geschichte established in 1848. In France, the Revue des questions historiques, founded to advance critical scholarship and the Revue critique d'histoire et de littérature--both inspired by Historische Zeitschrift--were established in 1866. Gabriel Monod founded the Revue historique in 1876 to further scientific history as well as a nationalist agenda. The Mitteilungen of the Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung and the Historisches Jahrbuch of the Görresgesellschaft both started publication in 1880. In Italy, the Rivista storica italiana founded in 1884 was bourgeois, liberal, and influenced by German thought. It was countered in 1917 by the Nuova rivista storica which favored the Entente powers. At Oxford, Modern History was finally emancipated from Law and awarded as a degree in its own right in 1871; the discipline moved even more slowly at Cambridge. In this context, for the lack of a common philosophy of history the English Historical Review founded in 1886 substituted documentary research and liberal politics, and the desire to professionalize the discipline. In Sweden, the Historisk Tidskrift appeared in 1889. The American Historical Association was founded in 1884 and the American Historical Review appeared in 1895 to become the official journal of the Society in 1905. As the scientific/academic/professional historians gained prominence, the amateurs withdrew from the Association and established their own Mississippi Valley Historical Association in 1907.
Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, the founders of Annales d'histoire économique et sociale in 1929, were much influenced by Henri Berr and the Revue de synthèse historique. In many ways they continued its work, particularly as regards the interdisciplinary
approach. This has constituted a major twentieth-century intellectual thrust manifested in the pages of journals such as Slavonic Review, Victorian Studies, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History among many others. A whole school developed around Annales
E.S.C. and was institutionalized in the VIth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, first under the presidency of Febvre from 1948[46], then Fernand Braudel from 1956. Annales E.S.C. was devoted to the unification of the social sciences, including
history, and opposed to the establishment exemplified in Revue historique. Past and Present founded in 1951 by Marxist historians, focused on change, economic and social history, internationalism, an interest in the social sciences, and a dissatisfaction with
historical scholarship as practices in English Historical Review. History Workshop (1976) emphasized bottom-up history. From the 1960's as the number of historians increased, so did the numbers of specializations which were opened up, and hence the
proliferation of more and more specialized journals.
ORIENTALISM: The Council of Vienne, 1312, instituted chairs in Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Syriac at the Universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon, and Salamanca; until the middle of the 18th century, Orientalists remained primarily biblical scholars.
The early insistence on language, and the study of non-European (particularly, near-eastern) peoples through indigenous texts and the concomitant establishment of schools for their study continued through the 18th century, e.g., Collegio di Propaganda di Roma, 1627; the Academy for Oriental Languages, Vienna, 1754. However, mid-18th century wholesale importation and translation of Sanskrit texts effected an upheaval in scholarship; biblical texts could no longer be regarded as revealed or primal. From the late 18th through most of the 20th century, philology (scientific, comparative) remained the lead discipline and until the last quarter of the 19th century Paris was the capital of the Orientalist's world--throughout Europe, students of Sylvestre de Sacy dominated the field.
In 1798 Napoleon availed himself of the special expertise of French Orientalists in preparing, executing and "scientifically" documenting his Egyptian campaign. The effort culminated in the publication of the grandiose Description de l'Égypte (1809-28). This work effected the displacement of
Egyptian or Oriental history as a history possessing its own coherence, identity, and sense. Instead, history as recorded in the Description supplants Egyptian or Oriental history by identifying itself directly and immediately with world history, a euphemism for European history (Said, 1978, 86).
Leading up to and in the wake of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, expansion by England and France coincided with the creation of the new institutions for knowing and appropriating the "Orient"; in fact, the geographic extension of orientalism and empire roughly corresponded. L'École des Langues Orientales Vivantes, Paris, was founded in 1795 and the Lazarev Institute for Oriental Languages, Moscow, in 1814. The Royal Asiatic Society, 1823, published its Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, from 1833; the Société Asiatique Française, 1822, published its Journal asiatique from 1823; the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1845, published its Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenl. Gesell. from 1847, its Abhandl. für die Kunde des Morgenlandes from 1857, and its Zeitschrift für Indologie und Iranistik and the Zeitschrift für Semitistik from 1922; the Società Asiatica Italiana, 1886, published its Giornale della Società Asiatica Italiana from 1887; and the American Oriental Society, 1842, (founded with the specifically political intention of following the example of the European imperialist powers) published the Journal of the American Oriental Society. By 1850, "every major European university had a fully developed curriculum in one or another of the Orientalist disciplines" (Said, 1978, 191). The first of the Orientalist Congresses took place in 1873 in Paris. Cairo and Damascus acquired centers too--academies--for the "scientific" study of Arabic; the Cairo Academy was set up with the assistance of five European Orientalists in 1934.
These institutions realized a coming-to-terms with the Orient as "Other", particularly in its Near-Eastern, Islamic form, and its special place with respect to European experience.
Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said, 1978, 3).
This relationship was and is one of power, including the non-reciprocal power of the European to be in the Orient and to speak for--represent--the Oriental (incapable of self-interpretation, who nowhere in Orientalist discourse speaks for himself), and expressing the fundamental idea of the superiority of the European identity over all others. Here philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, literature, and art came together in the service of imperialism in a geographically structured rather than intellectually defined discipline.
The expansion of empire marked a shift to an instrumental attitude from an academic one. Said describes the long-term consequences of Napoleon's enterprise as a scientific project, exemplified in Ernest Renan's Système et histoire générale des langues sémitiques completed in 1848, and a geopolitical project, represented by the opening of the Suez Canal 1869 and the English occupation of Egypt in 1882. When the Suez Canal obliterated the distance between East and West, the idea of "Oriental" became an administrative or executive one, that is, attached to the west and subject to the west (Said, 1978, 88, 92). But the explicit hierarchy of power underwriting suzerainty was maintained and after 1914 again shifted to a cultural stance--"to know the East for its own sake", leaving intact over the long term the essential, and essentialist, East/West dichotomy.
As such the main, but not exclusive, protagonists were originally France and England and later the U.S. After the defeat of the Franco-Prussian war, in compensation according to Said, France embarked on a program of territorial expansion: geographical societies proliferated and "the Société académique indo-chinoise reformulated it goals ... to 'bring Indochina into the domain of Orientalism.' Why? In order to turn Cochin China into a 'French India'" (1978, 218).
The crisis of Orientalism discerned by Anouar Abdel-Malek in the early 1960's came on two fronts: from the Third World where national liberation movements challenged the perspective of an unchanging object of study and from "specialists and the public at
large [who] became aware of the time-lag, not only between Orientalist science and the material under study, but also ... between the conceptions, the methods and the instruments of work in the human and social sciences and those of orientalism" (1964, 112).
POLITICAL SCIENCE: A "highly eclectic discipline ... [of] multiple paternity. ... 'The term "political science" is greatly in need of definition.' So reads the first sentence of the first issue of the first professional political science journal in 1886" and the inaugural lecture by Canada's first full-time political scientist in 1888 was titled "What is Political Science" (Andrews, 1982, 4, 1). It was still, in 1968, according to David Easton, "a discipline in search of its identity" (1968, 282). The terminology, even in English, shows no standard: e.g. Harvard and Cornell, "Government"; Princeton, "Politics"; and Columbia until recently, "Public Law and Government".
Political science was the last of the social sciences to emerge as an institutional complex of university departments, associations and scholarly journals. The founders of U.S. political science were trained in Germany in the historicist Staatswissenschaft tradition. Although the Johns Hopkins Historical and Political Science Association of 1877 preceded it, the School of Political Science founded at Columbia in 1880 by John W. Burgess became the formative model (in explicit imitation of the German prototype he had experienced abroad) and the Political Science Quarterly, 1886, the discipline's first journal. The curriculum covered economics, history, geography and politics; sociology was added in 1891. According to Burgess, history "[w]ith us ... is the chief preparation for the study of the legal and political sciences"; he wanted to teach
how to get hold of a historical fact, how to distinguish fact from fiction, how to divest it as far as possible of coloring or exaggeration. We send him, therefore, to the most original sources attainable for his primary information (quoted in Somit and Tanenhaus, 1982, 21, 20).
However, a major concern of early proponents of the discipline was to differentiate it from history. This, Burgess did, by stipulating that political science went beyond historical analysis by supplying a theoretical basis of its organization of data.(7) Both he and Munroe Smith were convinced that there existed fundamental laws which could be uncovered through comparative historical analysis and Jesse Macy found it inconceivable that the methods of Machiavelli be preferred over those of Darwin. Woodrow Wilson offered a corrective: the injunction to deal with real people and events. "Within a decade or two, then, the comparative approach had been recast to include a comparison of living people, real events, and functioning governments, as well as of documents, charters and constitutions" (Somit and Tanenhaus, 1982, 33). In 1896, articles in Political Science Quarterly sought to influence policy makers in Washington over the Monroe Doctrine and came out for sound currency during the free silver debate; following the Spanish-American War the same journal published articles critical of American foreign policy. Forming "good citizens for a democratic society" was always an important, if secondary, goal after the scientific pursuit of knowledge. Just how policy-oriented the discipline should be only became an important debate after 1945 when practitioners began to reflect on the possible incompatibility of these two goals.
After the turn of the century in the United States, the discipline underwent an "Americanization"--international issues receded in importance; in 1908 it was recommended that public school teachers be proficient in political science--and the ties with history were loosened while those with sociology were reinforced. Political science after the turn of the century fell into routine institutional description with little interest in theory; Arthur Bentley's theory of groups would have great influence, but only almost 50 years after its publication in 1908.
In 1921 another shift occurred with Charles E. Merriam in the lead: the advocacy of "a science of politics" especially geared to problem solving.
His extraordinarily influential essay on 'The Present State of the Study of Politics,' led to the appointment of an [APS] Association Committee on Political Research, to three National Conferences on the Science of Politics, and eventually, it is only a slight exaggeration to say, to the creation of the Social Science Research Council (Somit and Tanenhaus, 1982, 110).
The stress was on uncovering laws which
could be brought into 'better visibility' if the political scientist would give up his 'methodological affiliation' with philosophers and sociologists, 'whose company he has habitually been keeping to the detriment of his own quest for truth,' and adopt instead 'the methodology and objectivity of the scientists'" (Somit and Tanenhaus, 1982, 113).
For Merriam, laws were to come from psychology and statistics, but for G. E. G. Catlin from classical economics, and for William Bennett Munroe, from physics. Typical of the opponents of scientism was William Yandell Elliot:
Political science ... has no 'constant unit which lends itself to measurable variables,' cannot be treated in universalized abstractions, is concerned with phenomena which are in essential ways unique, does not permit of experimentation, deals with processes that are hopelessly complex, and must account for human beings capable of enough 'self-direction and ... novelty in social adjustment' to confound 'rigid deterministic laws' (Somit and Tanenhaus, 1982, 118).
These positions were also reflected in the debate over "value-neutrality" and prepared the ground for the behavioralism--a more scientific politics--of the 1950's and 1960's, and opposition to it in the late 1960's, for instance, in the Caucus for a New Political Science within the APSA (see Waldo, 1975).
The "crucial break" (Gunnell in Easton, et al, 1991, 19) assuring the status of the discipline was the establishment of the American Political Science Association in 1903 to "do for political science what the American Economic and American Historical Associations are doing for economics and history" (Willoughby, 1904, 109). The Canadian was founded in 1913; the Finnish in 1935; the Indian in 1938; the Japanese in 1948; the British in 1950 (Political Studies Association).
As Pierre Favre notes, despite the existence of the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, which however, prepared future civil servants with economic, juridical and historical material,(8)
[f]or a number of reasons political science could not appear in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Sociology, born in the Faculty of Letters, too absorbed in its conquest of legitimacy through its combat with philosophy and the humanities, left political science [that is, analysis within the arena of the political, RL] to the jurists at the very time that the latter were bringing the science of the state back to pure and simple study of juridical standards (in Andrews, 1982, 154).
After 1945 the École Libre des Sciences Politiques (1871) was transformed into the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques and the Institut d'Études Politiques. The Association Française de Science Politique was formed in 1949 and the Revue française de science politique appeared in 1951.
In England the founding of the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895 could have been a beginning--the first chair at Oxford was established in 1912--but the "philosophical and traditional study of politics was favoured and after World War Two the British response to American behavioralism was either lukewarm or outright critical. A 'modern' political science did not really develop in the United Kingdom until 1965", the date of the establishment of the Social Science Research Council (Berndtson in Easton, et al, 1991, 42).
In Italy the discipline had to fight law and history on one side and sociology on the other. It has remained primarily concerned with national issues and, reminiscent of early behavioralism, the input side of the political process. Recent growth has been enormous: when the Rivista italiana di scienza politica was founded in 1971 there was only one university chair, by 1991 there were thirty-five. The Società italiana de scienza politica was founded in 1981 (see Graziano in Easton, et al., 1991).
In Germany, the establishment was explicitly a matter of cold-war politics "'to build up democracy', and the support for the new discipline came from Social Democrats, while resistance to it among the established sciences was considerable" (Berndtson in Easton, et al, 1991, 41).
The development of the discipline on a world scale after 1945 was typical of all of the social sciences. The International Political Science Association was founded under the auspices of UNESCO in 1950 and it was through the combined efforts of UNESCO
(including direct grants) and the APSA that most of the other of thirty-nine national associations were established by 1982. These are predominantly European but an even better indicator shows the prevailing hegemony of the United States which has "75 or 80
percent of the world's supply" of political scientists (Andrews, 1982, 3). "American foundations not only funded most of the major international research projects (usually designed and built in the U.S.) but sent out ambassadors-at-large for American political
science in the Third World" (Trent in Andrews, 1982, 41).
PSYCHOLOGY/PSYCHIATRY/PSYCHOANALYSIS: Psychology, from the mid-seventeenth century, refers to the "science of the nature, functions, and phenomena of the human mind"; psychiatry, [psyche-iatros, healer of the mind] from the mid-nineteenth century, generally to the "medical treatment of diseases of the mind"; and psychoanalysis, from 1896, to the
therapeutic method originated by Freud for treating disorders of the personality or behavior by bringing into a patient's consciousness his unconscious conflicts and fantasies (which are attributed chiefly to the development of the sexual instinct) through the free association of ideas, analysis and interpretation of dreams and parapraxes, etc., and allowing him to relive them by transference. ... A theory of personality and psychical life derived from this, based on concepts of the ego, id, and super-ego, the conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious levels of the mind, and the repression of the sexual instinct; more widely, a branch of psychology dealing with the unconscious (OED, XII, 766, 758, 761).
Both an academic discipline and professional activity, psychology was, up until the latter part of the nineteenth century (David Murray, 1983, traces it back to ancient times) bound up with philosophy as that area of the study of man (anthropology) concerned with the mind or soul as opposed to physical description. The conventional date for the founding of modern psychology as a discipline is 1879, the year Wilhelm Wundt established a laboratory for psychological experimentation at the University of Leipzig, where he held the chair in philosophy. The laboratory become an Institut in 1882. Wundt founded the first journal dedicated to experimental psychology, Philosophische Studien in 1881. In light of the substance of the research, it changed its name to Psychololgische Studien twenty years later. In 1890 a second journal, Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane was founded by Ebbinghaus and König as an outlet for a growing flow of articles. "Henceforward, the core meaning of 'psychology' would be dominated by the adjectives scientific and experimental" (Koch and Leary, 1985, 8) and thereby was banished much of the stockpile of knowledge that had been built up in the humanities and social sciences. But Wundt's views were anything but fixed: in 1873-1874 (Grundzüge) he placed psychology in an intermediate position between Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften but by 1883 (Methodenlehre) he regarded it as the basis of the Geisteswissenschaften; he did, nonetheless, try to formulate actual laws of psychic causality.
This followed three-quarters of a century of accelerating work in Britain in the speculative tradition (mental philosophy) as well as in Germany in the experimental tradition (physiological psychology). The experimental approach was slow to overcome the philosophical tradition in Great Britain. A lab was not organized at Cambridge until 1897. Sully founded the British Psychological Society in 1901.
The natural science connection was pursued and expounded by Théodule Armand Ribod (with his book German Psychology To-day, 1879) and his followers, although his Revue philosophique was open to both psychologists and philosophers. Appointed to the first professorship of experimental psychology in France at the Collège de France in 1888, he stressed the method of "true science", contrasted the "metaphysical tendencies" of the old psychology with the positive spirit of the new and placed "empirical psychology" as a field by itself beside physics, chemistry, and physiology. In 1894 Alfred Binet founded L'Année psychologique.
The most important German laboratories were in Berlin (1886), Göttingen (1881), and Leipzig (1879). Stern, trained in Berlin under Ebbinghaus, was a pioneer in children's thought processes and linguistic development (one of the first to study Helen Keller); he founded the journal Zeitschrift für Angewandte Psychologie in 1907. Göttingen was perhaps the best equipped lab in the world with all sorts of experimental and measurement apparatus for work in psychophysics. The most influential, however, remained Wundt's institute at Leipzig which not only trained numerous German psychologists but had great impact through the work of young foreign students, particularly Hall at Johns Hopkins. This line went on to form the discipline both in Germany and overseas: e.g., Motora (Japan's first professor of psychology at Tokyo University where he founded the first experimental laboratory in Japan in 1888), Jastrow (founded the department at Wisconsin in 1888).
Psychology was established in the United States before coming under the influence of German scholarship: texts by Johnson (1752), Rush (1812), Buchanan (1812), Upham (1832), are significant as are Hickok's efforts to establish a system (in Rational Psychology, 1849, and Empirical Psychology, 1859). G. Stanley Hall received his Ph.D. from Harvard (in 1878 under William James, the most prolific writer on psychology of this period) on a psychological topic--a first, was appointed lecturer at Johns Hopkins in 1882 after studying with Wundt in Leipzig, then professor of psychology and pedagogy in 1884. There he founded the first laboratory in the U.S. in 1883. In 1887 he began the American Journal of Psychology, in 1891 the Pedagogical Seminary (which became the Journal of Genetic Psychology), in 1904 the Journal of Religious Psychology, and in 1915 the Journal of Applied Psychology. After moving to Clark University he arranged two influential conferences: the first in 1892 which gathered together the best known Americans and during which the American Psychological Association was founded, and the second in 1909 which featured Stern, Freud and Jung. A sampling of others associated with this line include Cattell who founded a lab at Pennsylvania in 1888 and Baldwin who founded the first lab in Canada at Toronto in 1889 before becoming professor of psychology and founding the lab at Princeton in 1893; together the two established the Psychological Review in 1894. Stratton established the lab at Berkeley in 1899.