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Changing Social Science to Change the World: A Discusssion Paper*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Lee Benson
Lee Benson*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

To begin on a low-key, disarming note, I emphasize that this paper’s title has two clauses. The second is more important than the first. The first clause reads, “Changing Social Science to Change the World.” The second reads, “A Discussion Paper.” The second clause is more important than the first because it indicates the paper’s primary function. It is primarily designed to serve as a springboard for general and more elevated discussion of a set of topics that I hope interests all or most members of the Social Science History Association, despite their professional membership in different academic disciplines and their engagement in widely diverse fields of research specialization.

Type
Comment and Debate
Information
Social Science History , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , Summer 1978 , pp. 427 - 441
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1978 

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Footnotes

*

This article was initially presented to the “President’s Session,” at the second annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, held at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 21 October 1977.

References

Notes

1 Given the nature of this paper, it seems best simply to resort to citation of the most rudimentary type: tokenism that fails to indicate adequately my debt to a large number of scholars who have treated particular topics I sketchily discuss.

2 This argument is made in Benson, Lee, “Marx’s General and Middle-Range Theories of Social Conflict,” in Merton, Robert K., Coleman, James S., Rossi, Peter, eds., Qualitative and Quantitive Social Research: Papers in Honor of Paul F. Lazarsfeld (New York, in press)Google Scholar.

3 Some of those studies are discussed in a vigorous, provocative review essay, Kuklick, Henrika, “The Organization of Social Science in the United States,” American Quarterly, 23 (Spring 1976), 124–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I have also benefitted from her generosity in making available to me some of her unpublished papers dealing with the topic.

4 For the citations to Bacon and Descartes and fuller statements of their positions, see the quotations I used as the epigraph for my book, Toward the Scientific Study of History (Philadelphia, 1972). Subsequently, I have come to see that we need to develop a genuinely scientific social science, not simply “a genuinely scientific historiography.”

5 Leiss, William, The Domination of Nature (New York, 1972), 21Google Scholar.

6 Baker, K. M., “The Early History of the Term ‘Social Science’,” Annals of Science, 20 (1964), 212–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baker, Keith Michal, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, 1975), viiiGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid.-, 86.

8 Ibid., passim, especially vii-xii, 197-263, 343-86. Baker’s book has been most illuminating to me. For a laudatory review that offers some incisive criticisms, see Kors, Alan C., Journal of Modern History, 48 (December 1976), 718–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 MacRae, Duncan Jr., The Social Function of Social Science (New Haven, 1976), xiGoogle Scholar. Need I say that the translation of good theory into good practice poses very hard problems?

10 Shils, Edward, “Legitimating the Social Sciences: Meeting the Challenges to Objectivity and Integrity,” in Frankel, Charles, ed., Controversies and Decisions: The Social Sciences and Public Policy (New York, 1976), 287Google Scholar. Compare also the remarkable change in disciplinary self-confidence expressed in two collections of papers published in 1967 and 1975: Lazarfeld, Paul, et al, eds., The Uses of Sociology (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Demerath, N. J. III, et al, eds., Social Policy and Sociology (New York, 1975)Google Scholar.

11 Ibid, 290.

12 Schaff, Adam, “Alienation as a Social and Philosophical Problem,” Social Praxis, 3 (1975), 7–26Google Scholar.

13 Nagel, Ernest, The Structure of Science (New York, 1961), 15Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 12-13.

15 Markovic, Mihailo, “Explanation and Understanding,” in Jones, Robert A., ed., Research in Sociology, Sciences and Art... Volume 1, 1978 (Greenwich, Conn., 1978), 1–28, and “Comment,” 29–61Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., 14.

17 Iggers, Georg C. and von Mottler, Konrad, eds., Leopold von Ranke, the Theory and Practice of History (Indianapolis, 1973), “Preface,” lxiiiGoogle Scholar.

18 Ibid., lxii.

19 It has long been recognized that German universities had great impact on the development of American social science. For a recent discussion, see Furner, Mary O., Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865-1905 (Lexington, Ky., 1975), 48–49, 52, 74, 279–80Google Scholar.

20 For an illuminating discussion of Boas’s impact on American anthropology, and the overall influence of German idealist historicism on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century social science, see Harris, Marvin, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York, 1968), 250–300Google Scholar.

21 Schaff, “Alienation as a Social and Philosophical Problem,” 10.

22 Ibid., 25.

23 Ibid.