how to soal social science and history
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Why should we write the history and sociology of the social sciences? Some have suggested that putting science under the sociological microscope is self-indulgent and dangerously relativist. Others murmur that only those who can’t do science study science. Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann, a Nazi sociologist, wrote in 1934 that a science that makes itself into its object of study, that studies “its relations and boundaries with other sciences, its epistemology, methods, and history,” represents “the symptom of a profound sickness of an entire culture,” a “pathology of scientificity.”1
Few nowadays would be included to agree with a Nazi scientist. Yet these criticisms should not go unanswered, especially in an age when scholars are insistently called upon to demonstrate the usefulness of their work. The historical sociology of social science is useful. It is a necessary part of all social science. Before outlining the usefulness of this apparently useless form of knowledge, and sketching some of the methods currently being used to carry it out, I will briefly sketch its emergence.
The social study of knowledge and science did, as Eschmann’s comments suggest, emerge during a period of profound sociopolitical and cultural crisis in the first decades of the twentieth century. This period saw the stunning collapse of empires after World War I, the German economy’s plunge into hyperinflation, the hydra-like rise of fascist movements in Europe, and the first signs of organized resistance to colonial domination in Africa and Asia. There was also a widespread “devalorization of objective and rational life which … declares science to be bankrupt,” as Gaston Bachelard observed in 1938.2 The skepticism about science was an international movement, but it was stronger in Europe than the United States and especially powerful in Germany and the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. The precedents here included Karl Marx’s critique of political economy as an expression of capitalist class interests and his more general argument that social existence determines consciousness. Nietzsche described scientific ideas as instruments of a will to power. Social class, political power, and religion were central explanatory factors in the nascent sociology of knowledge. Discussions among participants in the Budapest “Sunday Circle,” who included György Lukács and Karl Mannheim, circled around the idea of the dependence of knowledge upon social position.3 A number of social scientists and historians in Weimar Germany (Ernst Grünwald, Karl Mannheim, Max Scheler, and Alfred Weber) developed the approach that came to be known as the sociology of knowledge.4
A key development in this intellectual movement was the turn to analyzing the physical and natural sciences sociologically. The idea of explaining science sociology had also emerged before World War I. In Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), Émile Durkheim traced the basic epistemological categories of thought, and modern science, including time, space, number, cause, and force, to religious social practices and structures. George Sarton created the journal Isis, dedicated to the history of science, in 1913; this was followed by Osiris (1936) and Journal of the History of Ideas (1940). But the history of science was not “established in academic departments, centers, and programs in Europe and North America” until the 1950s and 1960s. The early historians of science were less oriented toward explaining science sociologically than to celebrating its inexorable march toward perfection and linking it to “something called ‘the modern mentality’,” whose home was in the West.5 Some of these founding narratives of the history of science were also ambivalent about the destructive aspects of scientific modernity, as Lorraine Daston points out, but this did not lead their authors to a full-fledged sociological account of scientific change until the 1960s.
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