This chapter is a selective overview of the development of sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics as defined in several Latin American countries. After reviewing the liberal heritage and the influence of positivism and social evolutionism at the turn of the century, the chapter discusses the emergence of sociology and cultural anthropology in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, with public education as a central theme. A recently established discipline in Europe and North America, sociology was adopted by learned groups for its promise of a scientific synthesis. Anthropology carried the legitimacy of its links with natural science, although it was the discovery of culture that lent it utility. From the 1940s through the 1970s, as development became the panacea, economics was in the ascendancy in Latin America. Modernization was to follow economic growth, although the relationship was understood to be far from necessary. The economic dependency argument, a dominant framework during the 1970s, was the outgrowth of a theoretical movement that relied on a Marxist third world perspective in rejecting the left-of-center reformist policies then in vogue. From the 1980s until the end of the century, the social sciences became associated with the expansion of higher education. The renewal of political science (grounded in a fresh look at state and society issues), the concern about cultural identity in anthropology and among students of communication, and the hegemony of the neoclassical economic framework were outstanding features of this period of theoretical and thematic diversity. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the Latin American social sciences in a globalized world.

During the nineteenth century, utopian socialism was most often interpreted as an essentially political phenomenon. Few commentators took seriously its ambition to create a new science of man and society. Yet the invention of such a science was one of the fundamental claims of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and their disciples who saw a scientific understanding of society as a prerequisite for its reconstruction.

At the turn of the century, Émile Durkheim was among the first to stress the role of utopian socialism in the emergence of the social sciences. He considered Saint-Simon, the mentor of Auguste Comte, to be the true founder of sociology. Since the time of Durkheim, the importance of utopian socialism in the birth of the social sciences has been widely recognized. This role is, however, difficult to assess accurately. Utopian socialism was, after all, the inheritor of eighteenth-century reflections regarding man and society. These reflections were in turn indebted to a long tradition of utopian writings dealing with social organization, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516. To what extent did Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen break with the Enlightenment and its utopian component to mark a new era in social thought?

Another justification for a more thorough inquiry lies in the definition of the social sciences given by the utopian socialists. Although meant to be a departure from the philosophical tradition, their idea of science was still imbued with philosophical and even metaphysical conceptions. Extending far beyond the limits of our contemporary social sciences, Saint-Simon’s, Fourier’s, and Owen’s doctrines appear in retrospect as a disconcerting combination of brilliant intuition and oversimplification, of original thought and prejudice.

The idea of developing social knowledge for the purpose of social betterment assumed its modern form during the Enlightenment. In many respects, the American and French Revolutions were a culmination of that development and the first large-scale “application” of modern social and political theory. At the same time, the revolutions were often interpreted as having brought about a situation in which good social knowledge would permit the steady amelioration of social life. The ways of thinking of the social sciences were also created in that context.

The new, postrevolutionary situation altered the epistemic position of the social sciences, even though this was acknowledged only gradually. Any attempt to understand the social and political world now had to deal with the basic condition of liberty; but an emphasis on liberty alone – as in the tradition of early modern political theorizing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – was insufficient to understand the social order. Thus, in the words of Edmund Burke, if “the effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please [, we] ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risque congratulations.” The use orientation of the early social sciences consisted in offering a variety of ways of dealing with this situation. Aiming at finding out what it pleased individuals to do, the emerging social sciences embarked on developing empirical research strategies to provide useful knowledge. On the other hand, the concern for the practical order of the world in those social sciences translated into attempts to identify some theoretical order inherent in the nature of human beings and their ways of socializing, namely, the predictability and stability of human inclinations and their results.

The disciplines recognized in the twentieth century as the social sciences emerged from older branches of knowledge by a process of separation and negotiation between related and overlapping areas of interest. As Theodore Porter points out, some of these lines of inquiry had been relatively continuous genres of writing for centuries, but they were often strands in broader traditions of knowledge and practice — chiefly philosophy, history, and affairs of state — and they were part of the intellectual equipment of liberally educated people, rather than occupations for specialists. Beginning in some cases earlier, but more conspicuously in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they formed into fields to which specialists devoted their principal efforts and sites for research, reflection, and training. This modern idea of disciplines itself emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, a product of increasing specialization in science, scholarship, and technical expertise; the research ideal pioneered in German universities; and the reconstruction of higher educational systems and administrative institutions in Europe and the United States. University training and credentialing was especially important in solidifying the existence of continuing communities of specialized scholars.

We should not overemphasize the rapidity or pervasiveness of this transformation. In Europe, disciplinary organization was never as firmly established nor as important to the production of social knowledge as it was in the United States; and even there, the course of development was uneven. Still, specialized disciplines became a basic feature of the human sciences in the twentieth century and, particularly after the Second World War, an international pattern of intellectual organization.

Statistics assumed its recognizably modern disciplinary form during the period from about 1890 to 1930. These dates are comparable to those for the formation of disciplines in the leading fields of social science. Statistics, however, changed during this period from an empirical science of society, as it had been during the nineteenth century, into a mathematical and methodological field. Although it disappeared as a social science per se, as an area of applied mathematics it became an important source of tools, concepts, and research strategies throughout the social sciences. It also provided legitimacy for, and contributed to a redefinition of what would count as, social knowledge.

In its nineteenth-century incarnation, as itself a social science, statistics was guided by a different set of ideals – not academic detachment, but active involvement in administration and social reform. The social science of statistics was practically indistinguishable from government collection of numbers about population, health, crime, commerce, poverty, and labor. Even its most self-consciously scientific advocates, such as the prominent Belgian astronomer and statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), often had administrative responsibility for the organization of official statistics. This alliance of scientific and bureaucratic statistics did not disappear abruptly. But it was gradually subordinated to a new order in which statisticians assumed consulting roles, offering their expertise to statistical agencies but also to many others. At the end of the nineteenth century, it still appeared possible that statistics might succeed in the universities as a quantitative social science. Instead, it was recreated as a mathematical field.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) absorbed and modified, but never rejected, a German intellectual tradition concerning knowledge and science. This tradition, of science as Wissenschaft, derives from idealist assumptions about language and truth that contrast with the empiricism of common English usage and of Anglo-American philosophies of science. Moreover, Marx’s concept of social science was explicitly political, as was his activity as a social scientist, in contrast to views that social science can be “above politics” or “balanced,” that the social scientist can be apolitical or at least neutral between competing political positions. Because of these differences, Marx and Marxism are frequently located as a “Marxist” section or alternative within the various disciplines that have come to constitute the social sciences since his time, although in specific national contexts the social sciences have sometimes been constituted largely within a Marxist frame of reference (e.g., in France) or against a notion of what is Marxist (e.g., in the United States). Yet it is also undeniable that Marxist social science, both substantively and methodologically, has had such a considerable influence on social science generally, and on philosophies of science overall, that the saying “we are all Marxists now” is almost a truism.

WISSENSCHAFT

In the German tradition, Wissenschaft refers to knowledge in the broadest sense, provided that it is conceptualized in a systematic way. Thus, the natural or physical sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the social or human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) do not necessarily form separate domains of knowledge derived through distinct methodologies, nor is philosophy strictly distinguished from science in terms of method or content.

The social sciences, in broadly their contemporary shapes, emerged after the American and French Revolutions. They offered a variety of ways of dealing with the new postrevolutionary political situation, which enabled, and indeed obliged, human beings to create their own rules for social action and political order. It has been a part of the intellectual tradition of the social sciences from their beginnings to contribute to making the social world predictable in the face of modern uncertainties, or, in the stronger version, to reshape it according to a master plan for improvement.

The general idea of providing and using social knowledge for government and policy purposes was certainly not new. The cameral and policy sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were designed for use by an absolute ruler; the very name “statistics” reflects the fact that it was considered science for governmental purposes. The postrevolutionary situation, however, was crucially different in two respects. On the one hand, a much more radical uncertainty had been created by the commitment, even if often a reluctant one, to self-determination of the people, which appeared to limit the possibility of predictive knowledge. On the other hand, this radical openness had been accompanied by a hope for the self-organization of society and its rational individuals, so that the search for laws governing society and human actions emerged beyond – and to some extent instead of – the desire for the increase of factual knowledge of the social world.

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.