The History And Prospects Of The Social Sciences

The book covers the main developments in the social sciences after World War Two. Chapters on economics, human geography, political science, psychology, social anthropology, and sociology will interest anyone wanting short, accessible histories of those disciplines; they will also make it easy for readers to compare disciplines. A final chapter offers a blueprint for writing the history of the social sciences as a whole, drawing attention to the role of interdisciplinary work and to the importance of factors from the Second World War to the sixties and the fall of communism.

Society has always existed, but social science is remarkably new. How and why did the social sciences originate? How are they related to older philosophical, theological, and moral questions? What is the unique perspective or "way of knowing" of each social science? And what are the challenges to--and alternatives to--the social sciences as we know them today? Take a journey through the history, theories, and schools of economics, political science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, and history and learn how non-Western, feminist, and indigenous ways of knowing are compelling us to rethink and unthink the conventional social sciences.

One of the very first books to explore the role of the social sciences in historical, sociological, and global perspectives, it does so by analyzing the practical making and discursive aspects of social scientific disciplines, including sociology, economics, psychology, business and administration studies, social gerontology, gender studies, educational science, geography, and political science. It looks at them not only in their academic setting but also in extra-academic contexts and in a broader global setting. The volume includes 15 chapters written by an international and multidisciplinary group of scholars. The overall aim of the book is to encourage a contextual and reflexive understanding of the complex and dynamic relationship between the social sciences and society of the past and in today's globalized world. It is concerned with the bonds between the social sciences and society at large, including themes such as gender and power, science and politics, academic boundaries and global power relations, and postcolonial perspectives.

American Progressive History is the first book to relate the story of Progressive history through all its transformations from its emergence in the early 1900s to its demise in the 1940s. Focusing his account on the work of the movement's most important representatives—including Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and Carl Becker—Ernst Breisach demonstrates that Progressive history is distinguished by its unique combination of beliefs in the objective reality of historical facts and its faith in the inevitability of the progress of the human race. And though he discusses at length Frederick Jackson Turner's contributions to the creation of a modern American historiography, Breisach sets him apart from the scholars who shaped Progressive history. While Progressive history is usually treated in isolation from simultanieous movements in European historiography, Breisach shows how it was formulated in the face of the same cultural pressures confronting European historians. Indeed, it becomes clear that until the 1930s the Progressive historians' confidence in the validity of historical investigation and the progress of civilization shielded American historians from the skepticism and cultural pessimism which characterized many of their European contempories. Breisach's exceptionally broad and subtle analysis reveals American Progressive history to be an important and innovative experiment in the international quest for a New History, as well as a coherent school of thought in its own right.

Though the publication of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions seemed to herald the advent of a unified study of the history and philosophy of science, it is a hard fact that history of science and philosophy of science have increasingly grown apart. Recently, however, there has been a series of workshops on both sides of the Atlantic (called '&HPS') intended to bring historians and philosophers of science together to discuss new integrative approaches. This is therefore an especially appropriate time to explore the problems with and prospects for integrating history and philosophy of science. The original essays in this volume, all from specialists in the history of science or philosophy of science, offer such an exploration from a wide variety of perspectives. The volume combines general reflections on the current state of history and philosophy of science with studies of the relation between the two disciplines in specific historical and scientific cases.

Containing over 25,000 entries, this unique volume will be absolutely indispensable for all those with an interest in Britain in the twentieth century. Accessibly arranged by theme, with helpful introductions to each chapter, a huge range of topics is covered. There is a comprehensiveindex.