Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again? The structures of knowledge and the future of the social sciences

Abstract Fifty years ago it was clear what the social sciences were, what they did and where they were going. This consensus was the product of the long-term construction of the structures of knowledge that resulted in the institutionalization of a set of disciplines that would function to guarantee ordered change in the social sphere in the name of “progress” through scientific control, exercised by “experts” and based on “hard facts”. After 1945, the scholarly legitimacy of the premises underlying the partitions separating the disciplines and the practical usefulness of the distinctions declined and from 1968 were overtly contested. It is contended that the structures of knowledge, including the social sciences, have entered into secular crisis and thus a period characterized by the heightened transformative capacity of agency typical of transitions. Since no outcome may be predetermined for the organization of future knowledge forms, this paper ends by considering modes of scholarly participation in the transformation of the social sciences. “Don’t you think you’d be safer down on the ground?” Alice went on, not with any idea of making another riddle, but simply in her good-natured anxiety for the queer creature. “That wall is so very narrow!” Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There Fifty years ago a serious discussion focused on the future of the “social sciences” collectively might have sounded at best like self-reflexive narcissism or simply a waste of time. At worst it might have seemed merely absurd. That is not to say that there were not significant disagreements within and across the social science disciplines. There was, however, a widely held consensus on the intellectual and institutional organization of knowledge that recognized boundaries among the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences, and the singular disciplines of which they were composed. The exposition that follows will begin with a sketch of the historical construction of this relational structure, both constitutive of and constituted by material reality, which left open the possibility for theoretical and methodological innovation and substantive development but at the same time disciplined the trajectory of such developments. This sketch will be followed by an overview of how the upheavals of the 1960’s dramatically foregrounded the premises of disciplinary autonomy (indeed, that had never been totally devoid of controversy). As the foundational principles of theoretical approaches, methodological practices, and proprietary subject-matters underwent radical change and race, gender, and class constraints on the make-up of faculties and student-bodies were opened up through a combination of critical reflection and direct action, questions concerning the future intellectual and institutional centers for the production of legitimate and authoritative knowledge of human reality emerged dramatically. Finally, the crisis in the long-term evolution of the internal contradictions of the “two cultures” structure of knowledge and thus also of the social sciences suggests imminent structural transformation. No outcome is predetermined for the organization of future knowledge forms and their institutional organization, but elective agency will be a vital ingredient in their construction and in imagining the possible alternative social structures of which they will be an inseparable part. The last question to be addressed, then, concerns the modes of scholarly participation in this transition.