Histories of Recent Social Science

Abstract

In the past thirty years or so, the history of the social sciences since 1945 has become a more diverse research area. In addition to social scientists who write the histories of individual disciplines, a number of historians are now interested in the recent past of the social sciences, whose efforts emphasize extradisciplinary concerns. The time is gone, however, when this distinction could be summarized by the different approaches of disciplinary histories on the one hand and intellectual history on the other. Disciplinary historians have gone beyond disciplinary concerns and intellectual historians have paid more attention to the latter. More generally, a variety of historians have pointed out the role of social scientific ideas in the transformations of Western societies after World War II and noted the impact of these transformations on social science disciplines themselves. Finally, in the past twenty years, histories of recent social science have experienced a transnational turn.