The Social Sciences and Their Histories

In the past decade or so, there have been a number of retrospective surveys of the histories of the social sciences. For instance, to mark the centenary of the American Political Science Association, the American Political Science Review, widely viewed as the premier scholarly research journal in that field, published a centennial issue of some twenty-five articles on the “evolution of political science” with special emphasis on the period since the Second World War. Likewise, to celebrate its hundredth anniversary, the American Sociological Association sponsored Sociology in America (Calhoun 2007), a 900-page volume that, as one reviewer (Geary 2008) put it, placed more emphasis on the history of the discipline than on its current state. These volumes attest to the depth of research being undertaken on the history of these disciplines; however, interest in the histories of other disciplines may be less. For example, the American Economic Association did not choose to mark its centenary two decades ago in a similar way, and it seems unlikely that its leading journal, the American Economic Review, will devote an issue to historical reflection on its first hundred years. Nonetheless, there is a significant amount of work being undertaken on the recent history of the discipline.

Historical work on what Ross (1993, p. 99) has called the “core social sciences in the U.S.” has been undertaken, despite the fact that history has increasingly been seen as irrelevant to the shaping of theory.