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.

As academic disciplines, the social sciences are quite young in China, having been banned in the People’s Republic from 1952 until the early 1980s. At the same time, they trace back to an extensive tradition, especially the sociological research in China that, along with North America and Western Europe, formed a third flourishing center during the 1930s. During the period of its abolition, Chinese social science became a forgotten chapter in the international history of science. Social scientific study of China fell into oblivion not only because it was neglected for so long in China itself and because of language barriers, but also because of the self-reference of American and European research.

This chapter deals mainly with institutionalized social science in China, which, in a strict sense, includes also studies that do not deal specifically with China. It is concerned especially with what I will call “the Chinese social sciences,” referring to those approaches that aim to sinicize or indigenize the social sciences, as well as with approaches seen as a distinct “Chinese school” of social science. I emphasize specific aspects of this definition, and describe some central junctures in the development of the social sciences in China. The chapter starts with the native domains of learning of the Chinese scholars during the Qing Dynasty; it aims to describe these domains as the intellectual space that served as the framework for the reception of Western sciences as a new body of knowledge. The second section shows how a social space for scientific development was created after the abolition of the imperial examination system during the 1920s, and how sociology, economics, and political science became academic disciplines.

Survey research has a relatively short history, since the systematic practice of aggregating preferences dates back only to the nineteenth century. Scholars, statesmen, and businessmen had an interest in the nature of public opinion long before the nineteenth century, of course, but technically sophisticated attempts to quantify popular sentiment trailed far behind theorizing and discussion of it. In the twentieth century, most Western democracies witnessed a tremendous surge in survey research with the emergence of large commercial firms devoted to counting individual opinions, preferences, and attitudes. This chapter will focus on three moments in the development of survey research: the proliferation of the straw poll in mid nineteenth-century America, the vital period between 1930 and 1950 across several national settings, and contemporary debates over the uses of opinion research in a democratic state.

The meaning of the term “public opinion” itself is tied to historical circumstances, as are methods for measuring it. These days, we have all become accustomed to the constant flow of polling data in our mass media, and to their underlying assumption – that public opinion can be defined as the aggregation of individual opinions. But public opinion has not always been conceptualized or measured in an aggregative fashion. For example, Jacques Necker (1732–1804), the finance minister of France, proposed that public opinion was equivalent to the “spirit of society.” Public opinion was a wise court, embedded in communication and conversation, which made societies stable, rising up slowly and rationally when necessary in response to important events. Necker viewed the salons of the period (elite drawing-room discussions of politics, art, and religion) as manifestations and indicators of public opinion – a far cry from the polls and surveys of today.

History plus the social sciences: This has been a common formula for more than a century. It has produced extensive discussions and an enormous literature, often quite repetitive, seeking to explain what the relationship between history and the social sciences should be, could be, and cannot be. Still, the terms of the debate have not stabilized. At once epistemological and methodological, the debate also involves power struggles among disciplines and the social representations that they nourish and reflect. For this reason, experiences differ from one country to another. This essay will concentrate on three principal experiences, those in Germany, France, and the United States.

THE PROBLEM POSED

Despite some distant precedents, the problem was not attacked directly until the period when the social sciences were recognized as autonomous disciplines and institutionalized in academia. This was the period from the 1870s to the 1880s – the American Gilded Age – For the sciences of politics and economics and to a lesser degree for sociology, and from 1880 to 1900 in France’s Third Republic, where university reforms opened the way for the scientific disciplines of geography, sociology, psychology, and economics. In both America and France, these new sciences embodied the demands for objectivity, method, and positive knowledge, and they expressed the dominant ideologies of progress. The German disciplines provided models for many other countries, but the German social sciences developed in the Humboldtian university within a cultural system built around philosophy, and their ascent appeared threatened at the end of the nineteenth century by the unity of the ideal of Bildung, or cultivation.

Since European explorers first began studying Africa, the continent has served as a testing ground for theories central to the development of science generally and of social theory in particular. Research conducted by sociocultural anthropologists, economists, and political scientists in Africa has generated concepts and theories of great importance to the disciplines. The impact of the social sciences on Africa has been equally far-reaching. Policy makers and development planners have tried to employ the social sciences as a means of bringing about social transformation since the colonial days. The development of the social science disciplines by Africans – the subject of this chapter – has been crucially shaped by all these efforts.

Writers on the social sciences in Africa can be divided into two polemical camps. The first is made up of Afrocentric scholars who are preoccupied with correcting unequal power relations in knowledge production. They try to show that there are other ways of knowing than those taught by conventional science. They also try to expose the exclusion of African knowledge systems from university curricula and the history of science, as well as the marginalization of African scholarship in the global academic community. The other side downplays the significance of these power relations and advocates a universal system of scientific knowledge production, one that includes an African role. Lacking a common language, the two camps effectively talk at cross purposes and are engaged in polemical nondialogue. Rather than taking a position in this debate, I will discuss features of the social sciences in Africa that both sides must take into account.

How do we write the history of social science? There are problems even with the name. In English alone, “sciences of man,” “moral sciences,” “moral and political sciences,” “behavioral sciences,” and “human sciences” have been among its many predecessors and competitors. Their proliferation reflects the unsettled nature of this broad subject matter. All are capable of giving offense, both by exclusion and by inclusion. Many have long and contradictory histories.

Consider the career of the “moral sciences.” The phrase “sciences morales et politiques” was introduced in France about 1770. In 1795 it was enshrined as the official label for the “second class” of the Institut de France (the former Académie des Sciences was the first class), until this nest of critics was reorganized out of existence by Napoleon in 1803. Restored in 1832, the official institution of the moral and political sciences was now suitably conservative, emphasizing philosophy and individual morality. John Stuart Mill, an admirer of Auguste Comte’s “sociology,” included in his enduringly influential 1843 treatise on logic a section aiming to “remedy” the “backward state of the moral sciences” by “applying to them the methods of physical science, duly extended and generalized.” A German translation of Mill’s work rendered “moral sciences” as Geisteswissenschaften – not the first use of that German term, but an influential one. It referred to the sciences of Geist, which could be translated back into English as “spirit” or “mind.” In German, this remained a standard label until well into the twentieth century. It was understood to indicate that such studies had a moral and spiritual character, quite unlike the sciences of nature.

During the late nineteenth century, geography was institutionalized as a discipline with ties to both nature and culture, but it was divided into several distinct national schools and competing currents of thought. The chronology of ruptures over the past century also differed by country: The notion of a “modern” geography took hold in the early 1900s, while the diffusion of what was called the “new geography” occurred during the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, and during the 1970s in continental Europe. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the expansion of geography had not altered the segmentation of the discipline. Nonetheless, several general tendencies – geographic, epistemological, and institutional – transformed the discipline during the second half of the twentieth century. Geographically, the center of gravity of the discipline shifted after the Second World War from the countries of “Old Europe,” where it had first flourished – in Germany, France, and Great Britain – toward the United States and the Anglophone world. Beginning during the same postwar period, geography was incorporated into the human sciences rather than the earth sciences, to which it had earlier been attached, inaugurating a greater variety of practices and interactions with the social sciences, especially economics, although after 1980 geography also began to explore its links with the humanities. Finally, the development of new markets after 1950 diversified this formerly professorial discipline, so that training in geography became oriented toward spatial planning, the environment, geopolitics, and social expertise.