Since the eighteenth century, economic science has been punctuated by debates on the relation between state and market. Its history has been marked by a succession of doctrines and political constellations, more or less interrelated. They have usually been understood historically in relation to dominant ideas and institutional practices: mercantilism, planism, liberalism, the welfare state, Keynesianism, and neoliberalism. Whatever their dominant orientations, the various states gradually constructed systems of statistical observation. Yet the development of these statistical systems has generally been presented as a sort of inevitable and univocal progress, having little relation to the evolution of the variegated doctrines and practices of state direction and guidance of the economy. The historiography of economic thought, or more precisely, historical works dealing with the reciprocal interactions between the state and economic knowledge, has placed little emphasis upon the modes of statistical description specific to various historical configurations of state and market. In a word, these two histories, that of political economy and that of statistics, are rarely presented, much less problematized, together.

The reason for this gap in economic historiography is simple. Statistics has historically been perceived as an instrument, a subordinate methodology, a technical tool providing empirical validation for economic research and its political extensions. According to this “Whig” conception of the progress of science and its applications, statistics (understood as the production both of information and of the mathematical tools used to analyze that information) progresses autonomously relative to economic doctrine and practice. It is for this reason that the historical specificity of statistics is neglected in the historiography of economic science, and left unproblematized.

History occupies a singular position among the modern social sciences. It was the first to assume a durable professional shape. The basic canons for modern academic historiography were introduced in Germany early in the nineteenth century. By that century’s end, the model of Barthold-Georg Niebuhr and Leopold von Ranke had been widely imitated across western Europe and the United States, establishing the permanent institutional mold of the discipline. The special place of history among the social sciences involves more than mere precedence, however. For historiography was accompanied in its passage toward science by an enabling philosophy of history – or a set of such philosophies – that claimed a unique privilege for historical explanation and understanding, with consequences for the entire range of the social sciences.

It was only early in the twentieth century that these philosophies or ideologies of history were first gathered together, retrospectively, under a single rubric, that of “historicism.” Although the term was a century old, its release into wider circulation really began with Ernst Troeltsch, who used it, in the years following the First World War, to describe what he saw as the dominant outlook of the preceding century, which had emphasized the decisive place of change and development in the human realm. Contrasting it with Naturalismus, the outlook of the natural sciences, Troeltsch declared Historismus to be in “crisis,” having issued into antiscientific skepticism and relativism. A decade later, Friedrich Meinecke gave the term a slightly different inflection. Tracing its origins to Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Meinecke saw their stress on the concrete, the unique, and the individual as the core of historicism.

Economics has always had two related faces in its Western tradition. In Adam Smith’s eighteenth century, as in John Stuart Mill’s nineteenth, these might be described as the science of political economy and the art of economic governance. The former aimed to describe the workings of the economy and to reveal its governing laws, while the latter was concerned with using that knowledge to fashion economic policy. In the twentieth century, these two aspects were more often contrasted as positive and normative economics. The continuity of these dual interests masked differences in the way economics was both constituted and practiced during the twentieth century, when these two aspects of economics became integrated in a particular way. These two wings of economics, originally a verbally expressed body of scientific lawlike doctrines and associated policy arts, in the twentieth century became more firmly joined together by the use of a set of technologies routinely and widely used within the practice of economics in both its scientific and policy domains.

In the twentieth-century history of economics, tool development and changes in economic theory need to be set alongside demands for advice generated by overwhelming events in the economic history of the times and strong economic ideologies in the political arena. These processes interacted to generate a Western technocratic economics very different in style and content from the economics of previous centuries, one we might characterize as an engineering science.

To understand twentieth-century economics as a science in the mold of engineering is to see that the economics profession came to rely on a certain precision of representation of the economic world, along with techniques of quantitative investigation and exact analysis that were alien to the experience of nineteenth-century economics, when the extent of such technologies of representation, analysis, and intervention were extremely limited.

The idea that politics is, or can be, the subject of science is an ancient one that reaches back to Aristotle. Early modern expressions of the idea can be found in Machiavelli and Hobbes, as well as in Enlightenment thinkers from Hume to the American Founders. “Science” was understood as the systematic knowledge of first principles, whether prudential or philosophical, and “politics” as the public life of a city-state, kingdom, or republic. This old science of politics became remote in time and worldview during the nineteenth century with the flourishing of the democratic state and the empirical natural sciences. In 1835, Tocqueville foresaw the consequences in Democracy in America.:“A new political science is needed for a world itself quite new.”

The democratization of politics and the scientization of knowledge are two forces of modernity that explain the formation and transformation of the social sciences in general. But these forces are particularly crucial for understanding a “new” political science, given their conscious problematization by those who have styled themselves “political scientists.” Political scientists were unique among the emergent social disciplines in using “science” in their chosen name, and they made the politics of a democratic age their principal inquiry and fundamental problem. Like Tocqueville, they displayed considerable ambivalence about democracy and what they should do about its shape and progress. Democracy needed to be explained and understood. But it also needed to be educated, because citizens wanted improvement, administrators needed training, and officials required statecraft. To satisfy democracy’s needs and their own competing goals, political scientists looked to natural science as a model — either to emulate or against which to pattern their own methodologies and cultural authority.

Psychologism is an elusive phenomenon in modern Western culture, located everywhere and nowhere, meaning everything and nothing at all. It refers to the discursive practice of using psychological explanations to make sense of individual and collective experience, and especially to link the two together. Because this explanatory resource is located in the slippery space between academic social science, clinical professionalism in psychology and medicine, and popular culture, psychologism is not fully at home in either the history of science or intellectual history. It has nevertheless often elicited sweeping cultural interpretations.

Psychologism was initially championed by psychological professionals and their enterprising partners in Progressive Era reform before World War I. During this early phase, it was linked to the administration of subjectivity by means of normalizing technologies – standardized tests given to individuals by schools or by the military, for instance. More than a handy toolbox for the managers of mass society, psychological discursive practices were imported into individual projects of self-fashioning. By 1945, they had migrated to popular audiences who began as objects but soon became avid consumers of disciplinary knowledges and practices, inspiring individuals to embrace the varieties of therapeutic experience as the surest path to mental well-being and happiness.

Among the many American figures who promoted a psychological world-view were the Progressives Henry Herbert Goddard and William Healy. At midcentury, professional experts Margaret Mead and Benjamin Spock achieved the status of cultural icons. At the end of the century, Oprah Winfrey was psychologism’s most visible proponent, and her massive and enthusiastic audience indicated how thoroughly the therapeutic sensibility had trickled down to the grass roots.

Over the last two centuries, race has carried contradictory meanings to members of different racial and ethnic groups and conveyed distinct and separate symbols even within such groups. Unlike the distinction between gender (social) and sex (biological), race connotes both categories. It conveys a cultural political entity that has certain, if not specific, relations to a group’s image of its own primordial characteristics. The mid nineteenth-century belief that “race is everything” was capacious and ill-defined, yet it provided an overarching concept that included meanings both natural and cultural, scientific and popular. Race has long played a powerful popular role in explaining social and cultural traits, often in ostensibly scientific terms. Furthermore, the confusion about race is heightened by the popular illusion, often shared even by scientists, that in premodern times racial distinctions were more orderly and clear, as communities and identities were coherent. This romantic view assumes a stable racial antiquity in contrast to the dynamic, hybrid racial anarchy of modern times. While the idea of race implies a permanent biological entity, an historical overview shows that the meaning of race is provisional and has changed according to political and social circumstances. A close relative of the concept of “race” is “racism,” and the two are often confused. Racism, in contrast to the specific and changing content of theories of race, is an ideology of hatred of the Other, and is used as a derogatory term. It was introduced into English from German in 1938, and replaced the word racialism, which had been used to denote a hierarchical view of races but which lacked the stigma of “racism.”

The period from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century forms a distinctive era in the history of scientific ethnographic writing. A double framework of technological and political change demarcates its beginnings. On the technological side, advances in mathematics and scientific instrument making facilitated accurate navigation over the thousands of miles of a world sea voyage. On the political side, the era opens with the British victory over the French in the Seven Years’ War (in its North American theater, the French and Indian War), which was ratified by the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763. This conclusion to one contest set off a new round of competition between the two great powers, who now played out their rivalry in the vast, hitherto imperfectly charted expanse of the Pacific.

State-sponsored French and British voyages soon set out to scour the far side of the globe for layover stations on the journey to Asia. Louis Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811), a mathematical prodigy who had served Montcalm’s expedition during the disastrous concluding phase of the struggle for North American hegemony, led a world voyage from 1766 to 1769. On the British side, James Cook (1728–1779), who had distinguished himself as a surveyor-hydographer in Newfoundland, led three scientific voyages around the world from 1768 to 1771, from 1772 to 1775, and from 1776 until his death in Hawaii. These and other “scientific voyages” of the late eighteenth century served imperial aims by providing accurate charting of island locations and coastlines, one of the most remarkable achievements of the officers and scientists who risked their lives on wind-driven odysseys to the ends of the earth.

The persistence of poverty amid economic growth has provoked debate about the state’s responsibility for social welfare since the beginnings of industrialization. Claiming that empirical study was a sine qua non for effective reform, social investigators played a leading role in formulating policies toward the poor. Later, academic social scientists developed theoretical models, statistical data, and a language for defining social problems that were placed in the service of the state and of social and political movements. For better or worse, the ideas of modern social scientists have helped to write the history of twentieth century social welfare policy and affected the life fortunes of millions of people.

SYSTEMATIZING SOCIAL INQUIRY

The relationship between social inquiry and social welfare policy is as old as efforts to redress human misery. In both Europe and America, notions of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor surfaced in some of the earliest measures devised to lessen the scourge of indigence, such as the Elizabethan poor laws and early American strategies for “bidding out” and “warning out” the poor. Data collection, analysis, and the regulation of those who received assistance were mandated by the logic of policies that distinguished between those who truly needed help and malingerers, and by a desire always to minimize the burden of dependency on the state.

In 1979, Immanuel Wallerstein proclaimed the death of modernization theory. The concept of modernization, he argued, had finally been recognized as a “cul-de-sac,” an intellectual obstruction that had confined decades of social scientific inquiry. Drawing scholars away from questions about the essential nature, historical construction, and lasting power of a capitalist world system, it had only encouraged “comparative measurements of non-comparable and non-autonomous entities.” As social scientists invoked objectivity, employed structural-functional indices, and ordered nation-states in terms of relative “progress,” they ignored the power that structured global flows of resources. The concept had been, perhaps, a “worthy parable” for its time. By inventing “development” and the “Third World,” well-intentioned liberal social scientists had offered “new hope” that destitute peoples might emerge into twentieth-century light. If the “underdeveloped were clever enough to invent an indigenous version of Calvinism … or if transistors were placed in remote villages, or if farsighted elites mobilized benighted masses with the aid of altruistic outsiders,” then the “underdeveloped too would cross the river Jordan and come into a land flowing with milk and honey.” The time had come, however, to reject modernization, “to put away childish things, and look reality in its face.”

While perhaps the most striking, Wallerstein’s was not the only unflattering epitaph for modernization theory. Starting in the mid-1960s and continuing on through the 1970s, a broad range of scholars generated a massive literature criticizing the idea that all of the world’s nations followed the same essential trajectory of growth, a pattern most clearly identified in the history of Western accomplishment.

This chapter traces in outline the history of the modern social sciences in India from the late eighteenth century to the present. It begins with an account of the “discovery” of India by the European Enlightenment, which created the field of Indological studies. It then describes the practices of the modern disciplines of social knowledge in India in their relation to the institutions of governance created under British colonial rule and thereafter to the project of the Indian nationalist movement. The final section deals with the professionalization of the disciplines during the postcolonial period. The focus is on the disciplines of history, economics, sociology, social anthropology, and political science.

COLONIAL ORIGINS

The decisive event in the early institutional history of modern social knowledge in India was the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta in 1784 at the initiative of William Jones (1746–1794), an official of the East India Company and a major linguist of his time. For almost a century, the Asiatic Society was the chief institution in India for encouraging, organizing, and propagating knowledge about the country’s history, philosophy, religion, language, literature, art, architecture, law, trade, and manufacture. Most European scholars who worked in India were associated with the Society. They helped to establish Indological scholarship as a specialized field in the world of modern learning.

This chapter traces the history of Japanese social science in five successive “moments” or intellectual orientations that defined problems, structured analysis, and drove disciplinary development. Importantly, they also helped to set the terms of collective agency in public discourse: What was Japan? — a nation of imperial subjects? of classes? of “modern” individuals? a single Volk? The account is biased toward elite institutions and scholars, largely because social science in Japan, as in many “late developers,” grew out of state concerns and developed as an unequal contest between elite and nonelite scholarship; there was no “free market” of ideas. It is also formalist, in the sense that I see “social science” in terms of the self-consciously professional activity of practitioners themselves.

NEO-TRADITIONALISM AND THE HEGEMONY OF THE PARTICULAR

Japan was the first successful modernizer in Asia. Determined to resist Western domination, elites of the Meiji era (1868–1912) had undertaken a forced march to industrialization and military power through the relentless taxation of peasant production. Initially, this effort was supported by a somewhat free-wheeling Anglophilia. Social Darwinism, the theory of progress, and an ethic of individual and national advancement were the keynotes. Meiji’s state makers understood, however, that Japan could never be a pioneer in industrialization or empire building. They sought cultural self-preservation and national strength while avoiding the pitfalls that beset the pioneer: in short, effective followership.

Of prominent concepts that owe their credibility and popularity to social science, “cultural relativism” is unusual for having received so little clarification from social scientists. The concept is properly associated with a group of anthropologists who flourished in the United States during the second quarter of the twentieth century and who argued, first, that culture rather than biology explains the range of human behavior, and, second, that the sheer diversity of this behavior as seen throughout the world should inspire respect and tolerance rather than invidious judgments. But these anthropologists tried only episodically to fix the meaning of “cultural relativism,” and their successors have proved impatient with the terms on which it has been implicated in later debates over moral philosophy, human rights, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. A phrase that had become familiar as an affirmation of liberal values and cosmopolitan tolerance came to be associated instead with the defense of parochial cultures that sanction the abuse of women, and with the dismissal of the ideal of a common humanity. References to “cultural relativism” were more abundant during the 1980s and 1990s than ever before, but the meaning of the term and its relation to the anthropological movement said to be responsible for it were more elusive than ever. Hence “cultural relativism” is a topic without an agreed-upon referent. Indeed, the debate over just what cultural relativism is constitutes a vital part of its history.

The central idea in cultural relativism, said Melville J. Herskovits, is that “Judgments are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation”. This emphatic statement of 1955 may imply that questions of right and wrong, and of truth and falsity, demand different answers depending on one’s particular culture. But neither Herskovits nor the other anthropologists of his cohort were eager to put it so starkly. Indeed, crisp definitions of cultural relativism – that it means “truth and goodness are relative to your culture”, or “one culture is as good as another” – have been the staple of its critics, who have found themselves ridiculed, in turn, for failing to understand it.

Psychiatry, a branch of medicine, is a discipline that historically has taken severe mental illness as its object. In the course of the twentieth century, it dramatically expanded its purview, bringing the full range of human behaviors, both normal and pathological, within its domain. By the end of the century, psychiatry dealt with problems in everyday living as well as with schizophrenia and depression. It had become, as psychiatrists sometimes put it, “as broad as life.” In the process, it had also moved into the domain of the social and behavioral sciences. This essay will examine that expansion, focusing primarily on American psychiatry.

Unstably situated between genetics and biology on the one hand and the behavioral sciences – psychology, sociology, anthropology – on the other, psychiatry uniquely bridges medicine and the disciplines. Its practitioners take into account “everything from the molecular level to the most basic social issues.” They disagree, sometimes vehemently, on its goals, practices, and fundamental truths. Equally important to its instability, psychiatry has been thoroughly remade during the twentieth century. This remaking has fostered an eclecticism that is often interpreted as fragmentation, with psychiatrists advocating a broad range of conflicting models of behavior and disease. The remaking has also fostered a curious relationship between psychiatrists and their discipline’s history, with some taking pride in its ancient roots and others willing to jettison them and proclaim their discipline altogether new. “What is psychiatry?” has seemed to many a pressing question throughout the twentieth century.

If we assume, as many scholars do, that psychology is mainly European in origin and appeared as a special scientific discipline during the second half of the nineteenth century, we may ask how specific national contexts have affected the discipline’s development. Have the particular social and cultural contexts of Russia and central and eastern Europe, for instance, fostered any original developments in psychology? Can we say, as one historian has recently claimed, that there was a specific “Russian way” in the human sciences? What are the results for the human sciences of the “communist experiment” in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries? Did the Iron Curtain that separated the communist countries from the West for several decades create a “splendid isolation,” in which psychology proliferated unencumbered by controversies that surrounded the discipline elsewhere? Or did this situation produce a cultural and academic enclave that fostered parochial tendencies and hindered the discipline’s development?

Unambiguous answers to these questions are impossible to provide. On the one hand, in Russia after 1917 and in some eastern and central European countries after World War II, political pressures gave a particular twist to local psychological research. On the other hand, there were many conceptual developments in these countries that deserve close attention. There also were intense theoretical debates, of relevance for Western psychology, on questions of psychology’s relationship to philosophy and to physiology, the interaction between psychological theory and practice, and the remodeling of human nature.

Psychology occupies a peculiar place among the sciences, suspended between methodological orientations derived from the physical and biological sciences and a subject matter that extends into the social and human sciences. The struggle to create a science of both subjectivity and behavior, and the related effort to develop professional practices utilizing that science’s results, provide interesting examples of both the reach and the limits of such scientific ideals as objectivity, measurability, repeatability, and cumulative knowledge acquisition. In addition, psychologists’ struggles to live by such ideals while competing with others to fulfill multiple public demands for their services illuminate both the formative impact of science on modern life, and the effects of technocratic hopes on science.

The aim of this chapter is to sketch the results of a broad shift in the historiography of psychology over the past twenty years, from the achievements of important figures and the history of psychological systems and theories to the social and cultural relations of psychological thought and practice. In the process, I hope to bring out the interrelationships of psychological research and societal practices both with one another and with prevailing cultural values and institutions in different times and places, while at the same time attempting to bring out certain common threads in this varied narrative.

One of those common threads is that the history of psychology has been a continuous struggle by multiple participants to occupy and define a sharply contested, but never clearly bounded, discursive and practical field. The emergence and institutionalization of both the discipline and the profession called “psychology” are often portrayed as acts of liberation from philosophy or medicine, but these efforts to establish scientific and professional autonomy have never completely succeeded.

The social sciences developed from a philosophic tradition with a keen interest in education. Philosophers looked to education for evidence about human nature and viewed education as an arena for the shaping of individual character and the strengthening of social bonds. As a consequence, education was intertwined with the broad questions that social scientists inherited from philosophy: What is human nature? How is it formed? Can it be changed? How can we explain differences among humans? How and why are societies formed? What are the best forms of social relations? How can social ties be created and maintained?

Despite the centrality of education to the concerns of the social sciences, social scientists’ interest in education has waxed and waned. The first generations of social scientists viewed education as a laboratory in which to explore social and psychological theories, an outlet for the practical application of their new knowledge, and an instrument for social and political reform. This early enthusiasm faded, however, as the socialsciences became professionalized over the twentieth century. Since the 1920s, social scientists’ association with education has been haphazard. At times, education has been at the fore-front of the disciplines’ research agendas, but more often it has receded to the periphery.

This inconstant relation has been influenced by a number of factors, including social scientists’ integration into universities, their changing attitudes towards activism,the relation of universities to schools and the training of teachers, and the development of education as an independent field of research. Because these conditions vary from nation to nation, the relation between the social sciences and education has developed differently across countries.

The model of social science established in methodological writings of the 1830s and 1840s formed an ideal that has endured to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Subsequent authors have been obliged to excuse the social sciences for their failure to achieve this ideal model of science, to reinterpret the successes of social science in terms of it, or to construct alternative conceptions of social science in contrast to it. The ideal was worked out in two closely related texts, Auguste Comte’s (1798–1857) Cours de Philosophie Positive and John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) A System of Logic. The positive achievement of these texts was to clarify the application of the notion of “law” to the subject matter of social science. Their negative achievement was to eliminate, as much as possible, the role of teleological thinking (explanation appealing to purposes or “final causes”) from the study of the social realm.

The subject of this chapter will be the reformulation of the ideas of cause and teleology before and during the period of Mill and Comte, and its aftermath up to the early twentieth century in the thinking of several founding figures of disciplinary social science. The discussion to be examined here focused on the problem of the sufficiency of causal explanations, and particularly on the question of whether some particular fact could be explained without appeal to purpose. In response to such questions, the defenders of the new conception attempted to replace older terms with new ones, replacing “purpose” with “function,” for example.