"Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century"
by Immanuel Wallerstein (iwaller@binghamton.edu)
© Immanuel Wallerstein, 1999
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[chapter of UNESCO, World Social Science Report, 1999]
To write about what will, or even may, occur is always hazardous. It involves an irreducible element of speculation because the future is intrinsically uncertain. What one can do is try to ascertain the trends of the recent past, the possible continuing trajectories, and the loci of possible social choice. Inevitably, this means arguing how the social sciences have been historically constructed, what are the current challenges to these constructs, and what are the consequent plausible alternatives of the coming decades and century.
There is a second difficulty about discussing the future of the social sciences. The social sciences are not a bounded, autonomous arena of social action. They are a segment of a larger reality, the structures of knowledge of the modern world. Furthermore, they have been largely albeit not entirely located within a major institutional framework of the modern world, the world university system. It is hard to discuss the historical construction of the social sciences, the current challenges, or the existing plausible alternatives without placing the social sciences within the evolution of the structures of knowledge as a whole and within the evolving institutional framework of the university system.
I shall therefore address these issues in three time frames - the historical construction; the present challenges; and the plausible future alternatives. I shall deal with the first two time frames in broad brushstrokes, simply to provide the background for the discussion of the future. Within each time framework, I shall treat three things - the structures of knowledge as a whole; the evolution of the university system; and the particular character of the social sciences.
The structures of knowledge of the modern world are quite different from those known in any previous world-system in one fundamental way. In all other historical systems, whatever their value-systems and in whichever group within them was placed the primary responsibility for the production and reproduction of knowledge, all knowledge was considered to be epistemologically unified. Of course, there may have developed many different schools of thought within any given historical system, and there may have been many struggles over the content of "truth," but it was never considered that there were two radically different kinds of truth. The unique feature of the modern world-system is that it developed a structure of knowledge within which there are "two cultures," to use the now famous phrase of C. P. Snow.
The historical construction of the social sciences occurred within the tense framework that was created by the existence of "two cultures." But the two cultures first had to be created themselves. The absence of boundaries was double. There was little sense that scholars had to confine their activities to one field of knowledge. And there was certainly almost no sense that philosophy and science were distinct arenas of knowledge. This situation was to change radically sometime between 1750-1850, resulting in the so-called "divorce" between science and philosophy. We have ever since been operating within a structure of knowledge in which "philosophy" and "science" have been considered distinctive, indeed virtually antagonistic, forms of knowledge.
The emergence of this new structure of knowledge, the epistemological divide between science and philosophy, was reflected in the university system in two important ways. The first was the reorganization of the faculties. The medieval European university had had four faculties: theology (the most important), medicine, law, and philosophy. Beginning in 1500, theology became less important, and tended to disappear entirely by the nineteenth century. Medicine and law became more narrowly technical. It is the evolution of the faculty of philosophy, however. that was the crucial story. Two things happened to the faculty of philosophy. In the eighteenth century, new institutions of higher learning emerged inside and outside it that were "specialized."
The university system was able to survive essentially by creating within the faculty of philosophy the series of specializations we today call disciplines, and by assembling these disciplines no longer within a single faculty of philosophy but usually within two separate ones, a faculty of arts (or humanities or philosophy) and a faculty of sciences. What is significant about this organic restructuring is not only the institutionalization of a division between philosophy and science but the steady rise of the cultural prestige of science at the expense of the humanities/philosophy. In the beginning, the sciences had to fight for their preeminence and initially found the university system somewhat hostile, but soon the balance was reversed.
Where then did social science fit in this picture? Social science was institutionalized only in the late nineteenth century, and in the shadow of the cultural dominance of Newtonian science. Faced with the claims of the "two cultures," the social sciences internalized their struggle as a Methodenstreit. There were those who leaned toward the humanities and utilized what was called an idiographic epistemology. They emphasized the particularity of all social phenomena. the limited utility of all generalizations, and the need for empathetic understanding. And there were those who leaned towards the natural sciences and utilized what was called a nomothetic epistemology. They emphasized the logical parallel between human processes and all other material processes. They sought therefore to join physics in the search for universal, simple laws that held true across time and space. Social science was like someone tied to two horses galloping in opposite directions. Having developed no epistemological stance of its own, social science was torn apart by the struggle between the two colossi that were the natural sciences and the humanities, neither of which tolerated a neutral stance.
I shall not review here the internal methodological struggles of the social sciences, as they sought to carve a space for themselves amidst the two-culture split between science and the humanities. Suffice it to remember that, in this Methodenstreit, the three principal disciplines that were created to deal with the modern world - economics, political science, and sociology - all opted to be nomothetic, by which they meant replicating to the extent possible the methods and epistemological worldview of Newtonian mechanics. The other social sciences thought of themselves as more humanistic and narrative but were nonetheless attempting in their own partial manner to be "scientific." The humanistic scholars embraced the scientific emphasis on empirical data but cavilled at the idea of universal "generalizations."
The disciplinarization of the social sciences, as a domain of knowledge "in-between" the humanities and the natural sciences and profoundly split between the "two cultures," reached a point of clarity and simplicity by 1945. Initially, from 1750-1850, the situation had been very confused. There were many, many names being used as the appellations of proto-disciplines, and none or few of them seemed to command wide support. Then, in the period 1850-1945, this multiplicity of names was effectively reduced to a small standard group clearly distinguished the ones from the others. In our view, there were only six such names that were very widely accepted throughout the scholarly world, and they reflected three underlying cleavages that seemed plausible in the late nineteenth century:
the split between past (history) and present (economics, political science, and sociology); the split between the Western civilized world (the above four disciplines) and the rest of the world (anthropology for "primitive" peoples, and Oriental studies for non-Western "high civilizations"); and the split, valid only for the modern Western world, between the logic of the market (economics), the state (political science) and the civil society (sociology).
After 1945. this clear structure began to break down for several reasons. The rise of area studies led to the incursion of the "West"-oriented disciplines into the study of the rest of the world and undermined the function of anthropology and Oriental studies as the special disciplines for these areas. The worldwide expansion of the university system led to a considerable expansion of the number of social scientists. The consequent search for niches led to much "poaching" across previous disciplinary boundaries and hence to considerable de facto blurring of the disciplinary boundaries. Subsequently, in the 1970's, the demand for academic inclusion of previously ignored groups (women, "minorities," non-mainstream social groups) led to the creation of new interdisciplinary programs of studies in the universities. All of this meant that the number of legitimate names of fields of study has started to expand, and there is every sign that this number will continue to grow. Given the erosion of disciplinary boundaries and de facto overlap, and the expansion of fields, we are in a sense moving back in the direction of the situation of 1750-1850 in which there were a quite large number of categories which did not provide a useful taxonomy.
The social sciences have also been affected by the fact that the trimodal division of knowledge into the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences has come under attack. There have been two main new knowledge movements involved, and neither of them originated from within the social sciences. One is what has come to be called "complexity studies" (originating in the natural sciences) and the other "cultural studies" (originating in the humanities). In reality, starting from quite different standpoints, both of these movements have taken as their target of attack the same object, the dominant mode of natural science since the seventeenth century, that is, that form of science which is that based on Newtonian mechanics.
Since the late nineteenth century, but especially in the last twenty years, a large group of natural scientists has been challenging the premises of Newtonian science. They see the future as intrinsically indeterminate. They see equilibria as exceptional, and assert that material phenomena move constantly far from equilibria. They see entropy as leading to bifurcations which bring new (albeit unpredictable) orders out of chaos, and therefore the consequence of entropy is not death but creation. They see self-organization as the fundamental process of all matter. And they resume this in some basic slogans: not temporal symmetry but the arrow of time; not certainty but uncertainty as the epistemological assumption; not simplicity as the ultimate product of science, but rather the explanation of complexity.
Cultural studies attacked the same determinism and universalism under attack by the scientists of complexity. Cultural studies attacked universalism primarily on the grounds that the assertions about social reality that were made in its name were not in fact universal. Cultural studies represented an attack on the traditional mode of humanistic scholarship, which had asserted universal values in the realm of the good and the beautiful (the so-called canons), and analyzed texts internally as incarnating these universal appreciations. Cultural studies insisted that texts are social phenomena, created in a certain context, and read or appreciated in a certain context.
Classical physics had sought to eliminate certain "truths" on the grounds that these seeming anomalies merely reflected the fact that we were still ignorant of the underlying universal laws. Classical humanities had sought to eliminate certain appreciations of "the good and beautiful" on the grounds that these seeming divergences of appreciation merely reflected the fact that those who made them had not yet acquired good taste. In objecting to these traditional views in the natural sciences and the humanities, both movements C complexity studies and cultural studies C sought to "open" the field of knowledge to new possibilities that had been closed off by the nineteenth-century divorce between science and philosophy.
What the assault on Newtonian mechanics opened up in the collective psychology of social scientists is the possibility that its poor results in the public policy arena are due not to the failings of the social scientists as empirical researchers but to the methods and theoretical assumptions they had taken over from Newtonian mechanics. In short, social scientists were now able to consider seriously for the first time the commonsense proposition they had so rigorously rejected: that the social world is intrinsically an uncertain arena.
What the assault on canonic appreciations of texts has opened up for social scientists is the obligation to be self-reflexive about the nature of their descriptions, propositions, and evidence, and to seek to reconcile the inescapability of positional bias in their work with the possibility of making plausible statements about social reality.
Thus, we shall enter the twenty-first century with considerable uncertainty about the validity of the disciplinary boundaries within social science, and a real questioning for the first time in two centuries about the legitimacy of the epistemological divide between the "two cultures," and hence the de facto threefold partitioning of knowledge into the three supercategories of the natural sciences, the humanities, and the "in-between" social sciences. This is occurring within a period of major transition for the university as an educational institution. It is this triple set of zones of decision, both intellectual and organizational, that we shall explore. I shall treat first the issue of the two cultures, then the issue of the possible restructuring of the social sciences, and finally, the relation of these changes to the university system as such.
That the epistemological issues are basic to all the current debates is clear by the amount of passion the "science wars" and the "culture wars" have aroused in recent years. Passions run highest usually when participants in the arena believe, correctly or not, that major transformations are being proposed and may actually occur. But of course passions are not necessarily the most useful way to uncover or develop resolutions of the underlying issues.
There had long been one major problem in this "divorce" between philosophy and science. Before the eighteenth century, theology and philosophy had both traditionally asserted that they could know not one but two things: that which was true and that which was good. Empirical science did not feel it had the tools to discern what was good; only what was true. The scientists handled this difficulty with some panache. They simply said they would try only to ascertain what was true and they would leave the search for the good in the hands of the philosophers (and the theologians). They did this knowingly and, to defend themselves, with some disdain. They asserted that it was more important to know what was true. Eventually some would even assert that it was impossible to know what was good, only what was true. This division between the true and the good is what constituted the underlying logic of the "two cultures." Philosophy (or more broadly, the humanities) were relegated to the search for the good (and the beautiful). Science insisted that it had the monopoly on the search for the true.
Most persons were however unwilling in practice to separate the search for the true and the good, however hard scholars worked to establish a strict segregation of the two activities. It ran against the psychological grain, especially when the object of study was social reality. In many ways, the central debates within social science throughout its institutional history have been around this issue, whether there was some way of reconciling the search for the true and the search for the good. This desire to reunify the two searches returned, often clandestinely, in the work of both scientists and philosophers, sometimes even while they were busy denying its desirability, or even its possibility. But because the search was clandestine, it impaired our collective ability to appraise it, to criticize it, and to improve it.
It is of course unsure how far we will go in the next 25-50 years in the project of "overcoming the two cultures." Not everyone by any means is committed to the project. Far from it. There are many sturdy supporters of the continuing legitimacy of the epistemological divide, both within the natural sciences and within the humanities, and consequently within the social sciences as well. What we can say is that in the last 30 years of the twentieth century, the knowledge movements that have been opposed to the existing divide have, for the first time in two centuries, become seri-ous movements with extensive support, a level of support that seems to be growing.
The major problem these two movements have at present, aside from the existence of stiff resistance to each within their own camp/faculty/superdiscipline is the fact that each movement has concentrated on pursuing the legitimacy of its critique against the prevailing, and previously little questioned, orthodoxy. Neither complexity studies nor cultural studies has spent much time on trying to see if and how it could come to terms with the other, and work out together a genuinely new epistemology, one that is neither nomothetic nor idiographic, neither universalist nor particularist, neither determinist nor relativist.
The relative lack of contact between the two movements is not only an organizational problem; it also reflects an intellectual difference. Complexity studies still wishes to be science. Cultural studies still wishes to be humanistic. Neither has yet totally abandoned the distinction between science and philosophy. There is a long way to go before the two convergent intellectual trends might actually meet and establish a common language. On the other hand, the social pressure - both that coming from with the world community of pursuers of knowledge, and that coming from social movements throughout the world - is strong, as very many scholars (not to speak of everyone else) are overwhelmed by a sense of confusion coming from the exhaustion of the geoculture that has prevailed for some two centuries.
It is here that social scientists may perhaps be called upon to play a special role. They are professionally concerned with and attuned to the problem of establishing normative frameworks, and they have been studying such processes throughout their institutional history. Furthermore, the convergent trajectories of the two knowledge movements has in fact been pushing both the natural sciences and the humanities onto the terrain of the social sciences, where social science expertise, such as it is, may be applicable.
It is far too early to see clearly the lines of any new epistemological consensus. It would clearly have to address a series of long-standing issues, in ways that are more satisfactory than attempts hitherto:
1) Assuming that the universe is both real and eternally changing, how is it possible to perceive any more general reality than someone's irreproducible photographic snapshot of some momentary part of it? And yet, if one cannot do this to some reasonable degree, what is the point of any kind of scholarly activity?
2) How can we measure the impact of the perceiver on the perception, the measurer on the measurement? This is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle writ large. How can we get beyond both the false view that an observer can be neutral and the not very helpful observation that all observers bring their biases to their perceptions?
3) Given that all comparisons deal with similarities and differences, what plausible criteria can we establish for deciding on simi-larities and differences, given that similarities are based on definitions that exclude and differences are endless?
4) Given that we seem to be endlessly finding smaller entities and larger entities in the universe, and given the seamlessness of the universe as context for everything that occurs, what are the meaningful units of analysis that plausibly will aid our comprehension of the universe and all its parts?
As one can see, these are all philosophical questions, but they are all scientific questions as well. Can there possibly be two sets of answers to these questions, and two arenas of debate about them? We do not pretend that any of these questions will be resolved in the twenty-first century. But the structures of knowledge depend upon provisional consensuses about them. And it is not at all impossible that, as a result of the current attacks on the trimodal division of knowledge, a new provisional consensus might arise over the next 25-50 years. Furthermore, if it does, this will have profound implications for the organization of the university system (that is, the faculties) as well as, of course, the organization of scholarly research. And if this trimodal structure breaks down, then we have to ask where could what we now call the social sciences fit into any reorganized schema?
Whatever the weaknesses of the intellectual distinctions incarnated in the major social science disciplines as categories of knowledge, there is no doubt that they are organizationally quite strong. Indeed, they are quite possibly at an acme of their strength. Existing scholars, especially professors in universities and graduate students pursuing higher degrees, have a considerable personal investment in these organizational categories. They have, or are getting, degrees in specific disciplines. These disciplines control appointments to the university and curricula insofar as they are organized in departmental structures. There are major journals, nationally and internationally, associated with each discipline. (Indeed the name of the discipline is usually part of the title of such journals.) In almost every country, there are national associations of scholars in a particular discipline. And there are a series of international associations bearing the names of these disciplines.
Thus the disciplines as organizations largely control entry, award prestige, and govern career advancement in the scholarly hierarchy. They are able to enact and enforce "protectionist" legislation. They may doff their hats on public occasions to the virtues of "multidisciplinarity," but they are sure to emphasize at the same time the limits of the permissibility of the exercise.
In addition, the existing disciplines are "cultures," in the simple sense that they share biases and premises in the choice of research topics, the style of scholarly enquiry, and the required readings of the scholarly community. They have announced their respective cultural heroes (whom they installed as "traditions"), and they repeatedly conduct the rituals necessary to revalidate the cultures. There are few social scientists today who fail to identify themselves, some more closely some more loosely, with a particular discipline, and to assert, at least sotto voce, the superiority of their own discipline over its competing neighbors in the social sciences. One should not underestimate the extent and effectiveness of this cultural loyalty.
Nonetheless, there are two major forces at play that are undermining this capacity of the existing disciplines to reproduce themselves. The first is the actual practice of the most active scholars. The second is the needs of the controllers of financial resources - university administrators, national governments, interstate agencies, public and private foundations.
Active scholars constantly seek to create small, working communities of those who share interests. This practice has been enormously expanded first by the growth of speedy air travel and now even more by the creation of the internet. Small, working communities are of two sizes. There are groups of actual collaborators on specific research projects, who may be less than a dozen. And there are the somewhat larger communities of those working on similar research projects, who may number in the hundreds. Unless, however, we define commonality loosely, they are seldom larger than this. If now we begin to look at the emergence of such "research communities" or "networks" in the last 30 years (a piece of global empirical research which, to my knowledge, has not been done), I think we would discover two things: the number of such networks has been growing overall; and the members of such networks are drawn without respect to disciplinary boundaries, with the result that almost none of them are drawn exclusively from a single category; indeed, many of them show a significant dispersion in disciplinary labels. We can all provide instances of such groupings, from brain studies and cognitive studies to science studies and rational choice to international political economy and world history. There are no doubt dozens, perhaps hundreds, more of such groupings.
The key thing to observe about the intellectual stance of such groupings is that typically they find little utility to the classical divides that provided the historical underpinnings of the intellectual separation of the disciplines: present/past; civilized/barbarian; and even market, state, and civil society. Those who participate in the multiple networks maintain their organizational affiliations because, for the moment, there is no advantage (and perhaps some risk) in renouncing them, but their scholarly work is not reproducing the categories.
Whenever, furthermore, they find the disciplinary categories an obstacle to their research projects, especially when it threatens their access to funds, they actively seek to persuade the controllers of financial resources to give priority to their "cutting-edge" conceptual formulations over "traditional" concerns of the social science disciplines. They do this by establishing "institutes" or other specialized structures - within the universities, in the form of operating foundations, or in extra-university autonomous structures of prestige (academies and institutes of advanced study). Note that here too, as with the names of the disciplines, the historical trajectory has been curvilinear: from multiple names down to just a few and then to the growth again of multiple names; from multiple institutional structures to the concentration within the universities of scholarly activity, then returning to multiple structures.
It is at this point in the equation that the entry of the donors of financial resources has been affecting the picture. The period since 1945 has seen a sea change in world education. Primary education has now become a universal norm, and secondary education a requirement in all countries with a median or high GNP per capita. The same expansion has also occurred in tertiary education. As of 1945, university education had been reserved to a minuscule percentage of the age cohort. But it has expanded incredibly since then, reaching over 50% in the wealthiest countries, and growing significantly even in the poorest. As long as the world knew a period of economic expansion (essentially 1945-1970), this posed no problem. The necessary funds were easily available. But ever since, universities have been caught in the crunch of a constantly expanding student base (both because of population growth and of social expectations about the amount of education that an individual should have) on one side and tightening financial resources (imposed on them primarily by the states caught up in fiscal crises) on the other side.
The consequences of this scissors movement have been multiple. One is what might be called the "secondarization" of university education, the constant demand of government and other administrative authorities that professors teach more frequently and teach larger classes. The second is the creeping flight of scholars, especially the most prestigious ones, to positions outside the university system, who are likely thereby to find themselves in structures that ignore existing disciplinary boundaries.
The third, and possibly most significant, is the dilemma of university administrators (and ministries of education): reduced resources per capita at a time when the breakdown of the strictness of disciplinary boundaries leads to ever-increased demands to create new special structures, departments, institutes - demands that are inevitably costly. This must lead to efforts by these administrators to seek modes of resolving their financial dilemmas via structural reform within the university, and therefore to reconsideration of the validity of existing structures.
Where then are we heading? The first element in a reconsideration of the university as the virtually singular locus of the production and reproduction of knowledge. One might say that this had been the result of a movement that began in the beginning of the nineteenth century and reached a culminating point in the period 1945-1970, but then began to decline and should decline even further in the twenty-first century. There will of course continue to be universities, but they will have increasingly to share space (and social funds) with other kinds of institutions.
Secondly, we are beginning to have a major epistemological debate, reopening the question of the "two cultures," and promising to be at once noisy, worldwide, and somewhat politicized. The question remains open as to what will come out of this debate. It depends in part on developments in the larger social world beyond the world of knowledge. It is by no means certain that the thrust for a new consensus that overcomes the existing epistemological divides will succeed in developing a set of arguments that will impose itself. It is possible that the thrust is frustrated either endogenously because of the inability to resolve plausibly outstanding intellectual questions or exogenously because of the strength of forces resisting it. In this case, however, it is by no means sure that we can tranquilly revert to the existing system. We could easily see a breakdown in any widespread acceptance of common scholarly norms. Indeed, this is what some claim is already happening.
If, however, a new consensus is achieved, it will necessarily call into question the existing trimodal division of the university into the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences.
If that disappears, what will replace it? A unified faculty of knowledge? Or a recentering of activities in the "professional" schools - medicine (as health services), law (as public policy), business administration (as institutional management), and so forth?
And if we have an epistemologically reunified faculty of knowledge, what kind of role will the existing social sciences play within it? In one sense, a central role, since the reunification, as we have seen, involves the acceptance by both the natural sciences and the humanities of some of the long-standing premises of the social sciences, especially the social-rootedness of all knowledge. But there is still the question of what kinds of departments would be constructed within such a whole? There is no way at this time we can see this clearly. For while the principal nineteenth-century divides that were the basis of the multiple social science disciplines may have been undermined, there are other divides for which there continues to be much support, even though they too are being questioned today: macro-micro, the self (even the social self) and the societal (or group or collective identities). Nor have we yet seen the full impact that the concept of gender will have on how we formulate intellectual divisions within social science.
So much of the answers to these questions is tied to what happens in the world-system as social reality. Social science attempts to talk about what is going on. It constitutes an interpretation of social reality that at once reflects this social reality and affects it, that is at once a tool of the powerful and a tool of the oppressed. Social science is an arena of social struggle, but it is not the only one, and probably not the central one. Its form will be conditioned by the outcomes of future social struggles as its historic form was conditioned by previous social struggles.
What can be said about social science in the twenty-first century is that it will be an intellectually exciting arena, a socially important one, and undoubtedly a very contentious one. It is best we go into this situation armed with a combination of some humility about what we presently know, some sense of the social values we hope to see prevail, and some balance in our judgments about the role that we can actually play.
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