Historians have often looked askance at histories of social science written by social scientists. In 1978 Laurence Veysey declared, “A sociologist writing the history of sociology remains, from the historian's point of view, an amateur, no different in principle from an untrained Mormon writing the history of Mormonism.”Footnote ¹ A decade later, Stefan Collini recounted the many flaws of “discipline history,” which he contrasted to “intellectual history” proper. Written by current practitioners of social science, discipline history willfully misconstrued the past in the service of current disciplinary trends. As such, it was guilty of “charges of anachronism, of false continuity, of teleology, of indifference to context, of insensitive classification, and so on.”Footnote ²

Collini offered an accurate critique of many of the discipline histories written by social scientists. Discipline history has often been so one-sided, teleological, and selective as to represent no genuine engagement with the past. When narratives flatten out the past by telling a discipline's story as the development of a single currently fashionable perspective, either to celebrate that approach or to condemn it, they are merely carrying out disciplinary struggle through the means of history. However, discipline histories need not be amateurish or tendentious. Nor is discipline history necessarily distorted by a presentist concern with the current state of social-scientific disciplines. Without any such concern, discipline histories would be of antiquarian interest at best. Like any other human community, social scientists look to the past to better understand the present. When written with a sense of context, nuance, and complexity, discipline history can help current social-scientific disciplines become more self-conscious and can be of considerable interest to intellectual historians.

There is an important distinction between discipline history, which focuses on the internal development of disciplines and is written to serve a contemporary purpose for social scientists, and intellectual history, which, when it treats disciplines, seeks to place them in wider historical contexts. Even so, we should not overdraw the distinction between the two. Though it is not their sole or primary goal, intellectual historians do seek to help social scientists gain a sense of their own past. Themselves members of a larger community of humanists and social scientists, intellectual historians of disciplines have important stakes in the direction that social-scientific disciplines take. Indeed, their preference for historicist modes of analysis in social science has often motivated intellectual historians' interpretations of its history.Footnote ³

Many social scientists have simply disregarded the histories of their disciplines altogether. In the immediate post-World War II period, many agreed with Robert Merton that “a science which hesitates to forget its founders would be lost.”Footnote ⁴ In the 1970s and 1980s social scientists displayed a stronger interest in the history of their disciplines as the confidence and relative consensus of the postwar years broke down. But many of the works of history they produced were polemical in nature. They inverted the celebratory narratives of progress implicitly accepted by an earlier generation, yet were equally as reductionist in seeing a narrow scientistic approach as being at the core of disciplinary social science. Even the more sophisticated historical work of this period tended to exaggerate the dominance of particular modes of analysis in the social sciences. As a result, they neglected alternative traditions. Many drew upon the ideas of Thomas Kuhn to argue that disciplinary change occurred through a succession of overarching paradigms. But if this suggested change over time, it denied the existence of a considerable diversity of approaches within given periods. Indeed, Kuhn himself conceived the idea of a “paradigm” in part by noting the difference between the natural sciences, where a basic consensus on fundamental axioms and programs of research existed, and the social sciences, where it did not. Kuhn was “struck by the number and extent of overt disagreements between social scientists about the nature of legitimate scientific problems and methods.”Footnote ⁵

In recent years, works of discipline history have achieved markedly higher quality. A number of social scientists have achieved prominence in their own disciplines in large part through their work on the history of their home disciplines: George Stocking, trained as a historian but housed in a department of anthropology, paved the way in the 1960s, but he has been joined by such figures as Andrew Abbott and Charles Camic in sociology and John Gunnell and James Farr in political science. Moreover, the history of the human sciences has become a thriving field of interdisciplinary exchange between intellectual historians and social scientists.Footnote ⁶ Social scientists have developed more sophisticated discipline histories, shedding the self-congratulatory or polemical tone that marked many earlier attempts. Many social scientists writing the histories of their disciplines today stress the diversity of traditions within social-scientific disciplines and take steps toward understanding them in a wider historical context. Two recent edited collections, Sociology in America and Modern Political Science, display this new approach.

Sociology in America, edited by Craig Calhoun, was written to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1905. That sociologists chose to commemorate this centennial with a historical work rather than a volume on the current state of the field suggests their greater attention to the history of their discipline. Sociology in America's contributors include many of today's leading sociologists; Calhoun himself holds a prominent position as president of the Social Science Research Council. It appears that sociologists are becoming less anxious about their discipline's status as the least well defined of the social sciences and more willing to embrace their heterogeneity as a possible source of creative strength. As a result, Sociology in America aims to capture the breadth of the discipline's past and present, rather than seeking to exclude or coopt different strands to suggest a more unitary or cohesive history. As Calhoun notes in his preface, “from its nineteenth-century origins to its twenty-first-century present, American sociology has derived vitality from its diversity but seldom attained clarity of definition” (x). Indeed, Sociology in America itself encompasses diverse and occasionally competing histories of sociology, suggesting that no single narrative can adequately capture the discipline's history. As with any collection, particularly one that contains twenty-one essays and runs to nearly 750 pages, the quality varies. A few contributions, particularly those that recount the discipline's more recent history, tend toward a mere chronicle of events. As a whole, though, the collection succeeds.

Early chapters stress the discipline's multiple origins, seeking to recover a history of sociologies and sociologists that had been excluded by earlier accounts seeking a tighter definition of the discipline. Hence Jane Addams and W. E. B. Du Bois are reappropriated as founders of the discipline alongside William Graham Sumner, Lester Frank Ward, Albion Small, and Franklin Giddings. Patricia Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge's essay, “Thrice Told: Narratives of Sociology's Relation to Social Work,” reflects on competing narratives about the separation of sociology from social work and their emergences as competing professions at the start of the twentieth century. The authors challenge earlier narratives that saw the break between sociology and social reform as essential for sociology to achieve scientific status, whether such narratives celebrated or bemoaned this development. Sociology and social work had their own internal logics, so this standard narrative goes, that required the former to focus on scholarly concerns and the latter to concentrate on practical issues. Questioning the assumption that the research university was the necessary institutional site for the production of social science, the authors explore one alternative to both professional sociology and social work in the settlement house movement, which “had a coherence of theory, method, practice, and purpose . . . [and] a major theorist in Addams” (98). Lengermann and Niebrugge build on over two decades of research that has recognized the importance of women, excluded or marginalized in universities and professional organizations, to the early history of American social science. They question whether sociology should always be primarily defined by its academic location. But they also point out that the social-reform tradition continues to be part of academic sociology even to this day, with much of the public, especially undergraduate students, perceiving a close link between sociology and social reform. As Stephen Turner notes in his contribution, an “underclass” of social reformers has always been an important part of the discipline (154).

Sociology in America also offers a new interpretation of the immediate post-World War II period in sociology, when an overarching paradigm is often said to have structured the disciplinary field. Disciplinary lore has it that sociology was utterly dominated by the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons, the middle-range theory of Robert Merton, and the quantitative methods of Paul Lazarsfeld. Many sociologists have accepted the polemics of C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner as accurate depictions of this period, rather than the partial if brilliant critiques that they were. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu likely relied upon such US informants when he claimed that elite American sociologists after World War II “succeeded in imposing a true intellectual orthodoxy by imposing a common corpus of issues, stakes of discussion, and criteria of evaluation” (as quoted on 370–71; Bourdieu's emphasis).

In their essay “Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Hierarchy: ‘Mainstream’ Sociology and Its Challengers,” Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen take aim at this vision of a monolithic post-World War II disciplinary consensus. While acknowledging the disciplinary power then held by key leaders, they demonstrate that postwar sociology was not “unified, consensual, and singular” (373). There were key differences between the theoretical approaches of Parsons and Merton; in addition, Parsonian theory and Lazarsfeldian survey research looked very different in practice. More importantly, alternative sociological traditions continued to flourish in the postwar period, especially at the nonelite level, but also at top institutions such as the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley. Images of a strong consensus served the purpose of disciplinary leaders after World War II concerned with bolstering the scientific status of their discipline. Yet Calhoun and VanAntwerpen argue that the notion of a monolithic “mainstream sociology” was largely the product of disciplinary rebels beginning in the late 1960s. As the public prestige of the discipline waned and resources dried up in the 1970s, a younger generation of sociologists fighting for jobs and grants began to ask questions about the discipline's power structure. Groups with little use for Parsonian theory or Lazarsfeldian quantitative method railed against a mainstream that they portrayed as having a “nearly uncontested dominance in the field” (370). A shared opposition to “mainstream sociology” helped bind together such diverse groups as Marxists, ethnomethodologists, symbolic interactionists, heterodox Weberians, feminists, and ethnographic fieldworkers, allowing each to see themselves as part of a coherent movement. This new generation of sociologists exaggerated the dominance of a “mainstream sociology” and their own unity as an opposition. They also ignored earlier alternative sociological traditions upon which they might have built. Calhoun and VanAntwerpen suggest that the “failure to establish deeper roots in earlier dissident sociological traditions may have undermined the rebels of the 1960s and 1970s, obscuring the more complicated realities of their disciplinary situation” (404). The authors might also have noted that to the extent that dissident sociologists identified the “mainstream” of disciplinary sociology with the “mainstream” of American politics they misconstrued the nature of the American polity, for postwar disciplinary leaders in sociology were always to the left of center in the society at large.

The interpretation of the post-World War II period is one of the most sharply debated topics in Sociology in America. In contrast to Calhoun and VanAntwerpen, George Steinmetz defends the received view of postwar sociology as dominated by a tight consensus, which he argues centered around methodological positivism. Steinmetz offers a more sophisticated and nuanced argument for the dominance of positivism in the post-World War II period as compared with earlier accounts that perceived the hegemony of a unified paradigm. For Steinmetz, scientific domination does not work by paradigms or all-encompassing beliefs, but rather by a well-structured field with one view monopolizing prestige and resources. As Steinmetz acknowledges, many leading sociologists of this period, including Parsons and Merton, cannot be characterized as positivists. Even so, Steinmetz argues that all sociologists at the time perceived positivism as the dominant position in the field: “After 1945 . . . the methodological positivist definition of field-specific capital came to be almost universally recognized by all members of the field, regardless of whether they approved of it or adopted it themselves” (320; original emphasis). Yet Steinmetz still exaggerates the internal coherence of postwar sociology's mainstream and underplays the strength of alternative traditions. In addition, his use of the concept of “positivism” lumps together different viewpoints and overrates the significance of epistemological views for social-scientific practice. Calhoun and VanAntwerpen's interpretation of this period is not only more persuasive historically but it is also more consistent with the aim of Sociology in America to acknowledge the multiple traditions that have always existed within the discipline, even during the post-World War II period.

Sociology in America concerns itself with only one discipline. Yet social scientists in other disciplines are also seeking to recapture a sense of the past and present intellectual diversity of their disciplines, as with Modern Political Science, edited by Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir, and Shannon Stimson. Though containing a few selections by historians, political scientists conceived the book and make up the bulk of the contributors. Indeed, six of the thirteen chapters are written by at least one of the editors. As a result, Modern Political Science has fewer voices than Sociology in America, but also a sharper focus than one normally expects from an edited volume. Some essays in Modern Political Science focus solely on developments in either the US or the UK, while others compare the two.

Focusing partly on the place of historical approaches within their discipline, Modern Political Science seeks “to recall the plurality and range of approaches to the past” (5). Its aim is to tell more complex histories of the discipline that “bypass the narrative options of progress, pragmatism, or decline” (4). In their introduction, the editors persuasively articulate how better disciplinary histories can improve the practice of social science today. They claim that richer historical understanding of the discipline's development will lead to fewer straw-man arguments and more genuine intellectual engagements among holders of competing perspectives. Also, by recognizing themselves as belonging to an ongoing past tradition, political scientists may not find it so necessary to reinvent the wheel; they can recover past insights as well as learn from past mistakes. Greater appreciation for disciplinary history will also necessarily introduce a healthy skepticism about currently dominant perspectives, as an “emphasis on contingency undermines assumptions of the natural, progressive, or disinterested character of the development of political science and the institutions that it informs and by which it is informed.” (15)

Unlike Sociology in America, a work commissioned by the ASA, the authors of Modern Political Science write from a self-consciously minoritarian strand within political science. The editors characterize their approach as “radical historicism,” which they contrast to “naturalizing” accounts of the discipline's history. “For radical historicists,” they write, “the history of political science might unpack the contingent origins of dominant traditions that get left out of other histories, or question the naturalizing histories by which practitioners of a discipline legitimate their own approaches” (3). The authors use the term “radical historicism” to distinguish their approach from the Whiggish developmental historicism that figured so prominently in the early history of political science. Yet, from the perspective of historians, for whom challenging naturalized narratives and unpacking contingency is a well-established professional creed, it is difficult to tell what exactly is “radical” about the editors' historicism. Most problematically, at times the editors advance “radical historicism” not just as an approach to discipline history but as a program for contemporary disciplinary work. Here they run the risk of slipping into the tendentiousness characteristic of bad discipline history by identifying their interpretation of the discipline's past with a single contemporary disciplinary approach. In any case, “radical historicism” is ill defined and a volume on disciplinary history is not the most propitious vehicle for advancing such a program.

For the most part, though, Modern Political Science does a commendable job of capturing the diversity and richness of the history of political science. The collection's essays on the early history of political science stress the closeness of the discipline to history. They also focus on the plurality of approaches within the field. In her essay “The Origins of a Historical Political Science in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Sandra M. Den Otter argues, “The term ‘discipline’ gives a false coherence to the conglomerate of studies denoted by ‘political science’ or ‘political studies’ at the end of the nineteenth century” (39). She identifies three prominent strands of political science: Whig constitutional history, legal history utilizing modern empirical methods, and an idealism offering philosophical theories of the state. James Farr similarly finds an “underlying plurality” for American political science during this period, and concludes that “disciplinary identity was consistent with—nay, it consisted in—diversity of opinion and debate” (72).

As in Sociology in America, the history of the post-World War II period remains a key touchstone. Indeed, this period remains the most significant one for those who stress the inherent multiplicity of social-scientific disciplines, for one could dismiss earlier signs of diversity as signs of immature disciplinary development. Historical accounts and disciplinary lore generally credit the postwar behavioral revolution in political science for turning the study of politics away from ideas and formal institutions and toward behavior and also with introducing survey research techniques into the field. Some political scientists consider the “behavioral revolution” so crucial that they divide the discipline's history into prebehavioral, behavioral, and postbehavioral periods. Yet as Robert Adcock argues, “any such framework—even, perhaps especially, one so prevalent as to constitute disciplinary common sense—is a selective perspective whose genealogy [we] might uncover and whose evolving and contestable content [we] might endeavor to reshape” (180).

In his essay “Interpreting Behaviorism,” Adcock challenges standard accounts of behavioralism in important ways. Key elements of behavioralism—such as a focus on political institutions not formally part of the government structure including political parties and interest groups—were already prominent in the 1920s and 1930s, as Adcock notes and John Gunnell argues in his contribution. Adcock also rejects common misperceptions of behavioralism, such as the notion that it was fundamentally ahistorical. While new techniques of collecting survey data made the study of the past difficult, since no such data existed for earlier periods, Adcock demonstrates that behavioralists in fact were interested in the study of past change and developed theories of history based around notions of key periods of “crisis.” Adcock also rejects the misconception of behavioralism as atheoretical, noting the importance behavioralists ascribed to theories that would “give systematic order to the findings of empirical work” (189). Because behavioralists' particular theories were quickly discredited by contemporaries, Adcock suggests, political scientists seem to have forgotten that behavioralists ever had any. In fact, Adcock argues that behavioralists' understanding of theory as providing generalized concepts that organize empirical data proved influential even on those political scientists who later claimed to reject behavioralism altogether.

Most importantly, Adcock argues that behavioralism never actually achieved the hegemony it is now accorded; it was always a minoritarian strand within the discipline, though an influential one. Adcock joins several contributors to Modern Political Science in stressing the enduring power of the “ideas-and-institutions” approach to political science throughout the discipline's history, even during the behavioral revolution. Moreover, the behavioral revolution was short-lived, lasting from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. By 1969, leading behavioralist David Easton acknowledged the limits of the approach and proclaimed the beginning of the “postbehavioral” period in the discipline. As Calhoun and VanAntwerpen do for sociology, Adcock suggests that the exaggeration of the movement's dominance served the purpose of the next generation of political scientists. Beginning in the late 1960s, opponents of behaviorism used anti-behavioralism as a “rallying cry of their own, depicting themselves as the noble and embattled resistance to a hegemonic wave of scientism” (181).

Reinterpreting behavioralism in this way reconfigures other elements of the discipline's history. For instance, the subfield of political theory is sometimes thought of as having disappeared during the behavioral revolution, only to experience a strong resurgence during the 1960s. Yet in “The Remaking of Political Theory,” Adcock and Bevir argue that political theory was alive and well during the 1950s. Thus they suggest that the work of political theorists such as Sheldon Wolin and Quentin Skinner who achieved prominence in the 1960s is “better characterized as responses to the intellectual ferment of the prior decade—responses informed by earlier traditions—than as a rebirth after a period of quiet or even death” (210).

More significantly, in their article “Historicizing the New Institutionalism(s),” Adcock, Bevir, and Stimson refute the claims of new institutionalism to be a disciplinary paradigm replacing behavioralism. In the mid-1980s, they argue, a group of political scientists adopted the label “new institutionalism” to bind together a wide variety of approaches and give them a sense of being part of a coherent movement opposed to rational-choice theory. Where rational-choice theories offered economistic explanations of political phenomena, stressing individual costs-and-benefits decisions, new institutionalists sought to return the field to the study of institutions, by, for example, “bringing-the-state-back-in” political analysis. But, as Adcock, Bevir, and Stimson argue, the sense of coherence that this label created relied upon misconceptions of behavioralism and of its earlier dominance. It provided “a straw man in contrast to which the diverse—even incompatible—character of various streams of recent scholarship is obscured” (273). The misperception of behavioralism as ahistorical and atheoretical also allowed the new institutionalists to exaggerate the novelty of their own approach. Hence the authors suggest that institutionalists “might be better advised to narrate themselves as inheriting a long-standing tradition, and thereby avoid the disciplinary forgetting and pseudonymal reinventions all too pervasive in political science” (288).

Both Sociology in America and Modern Political Science take steps toward correcting the pervasive tendency of discipline histories to focus on their disciplines as autonomous units. Recent disciplinary concern for the status of “public sociology” has given sociologists a particular impetus to consider their discipline in a wider context. Calhoun points out in his preface that he is editing a collection of essays on “sociology in America,” and not simply a history of the ASA. Some contributors similarly argue for understanding sociology in wider intellectual or social contexts, stressing the importance of extradisciplinary forces in shaping disciplinary development. For instance, Charles Camic argues that because policymakers conceived of the Great Depression as a political or economic problem (but not a “social” one), the New Deal benefited economists and political scientists, but not sociologists. As a result, sociologists redefined their work so as to stress its greater political relevance. Neil Gross's essay, “Pragmatism, Phenomenology, and Twentieth-Century Sociology,” argues that that sociology has been “shaped in deep and profound ways by movements of thought centered in philosophy” (188), pointing to the influence of pragmatism on the Chicago School and of phenomenology on ethnomethodologists. Gross concludes that “one cannot fully comprehend the sociological tradition unless one attends to developments in cognate fields from which sociologists have often taken their insights” (223).

The editors of Modern Political Science similarly warn of the “dangers of an excessive focus on the idea of a discipline” (4). In an attempt to put political science in a wider context, some essays indicate the close connections between disciplinary trends and the needs of policymakers. For instance, in “Institutionalism and the Third Way,” Bevir demonstrates how New Labour politics in Britain led to the appropriation of new institutionalist ideas by political scientists and politicians. Most significantly, by examining political science in both the US and the UK, Modern Political Science challenges the notion of looking at disciplines as self-contained national units. Some essays highlight the importance of exchanges across national boundaries, while others use a comparative focus to denaturalize the development of political science in each nation. In contrast, though Calhoun begins Sociology in America by noting that sociology flourished in the United States as it did in no other country, this comparative concern is largely dropped in the rest of the text. Why was it that sociology found such an early and extensive foothold in the US as contrasted with sociology in European nations which claimed more famous luminaries (e.g. Weber, Durkheim) but weaker institutional and cultural foundations? The history of social-scientific disciplines as a whole could benefit from more comparative and transnational studies. Though social-scientific disciplines vary from nation to nation, the phenomenon of social-scientific research as organized into academic disciplines would seem to be a widespread, if not universal, element of modern societies.Footnote ⁷

Despite their attempts to embed their disciplines in larger contexts, both Sociology in America and Modern Political Science ultimately offer histories in which disciplines take center stage. Most essays in both volumes still narrate developments internal to their disciplines. Even when put in a wider context, “sociology” or “political science” remains the primary focus of these works. As a result, the authors do not look to historical developments common to both disciplines, despite the obvious parallels that one could draw: for instance, the considerable influence that structural-functionalist sociologist Parsons had on behavioralist political scientist Easton or the similar ways in which sociologists and political scientists in the 1960s and 1970s rebelled against a perceived postwar consensus. Thus each volume helps to define and perpetuate an intellectual community based primarily around disciplinary organizations.

Discipline histories will inevitably focus on the discipline as the core unit of analysis, because they serve contemporary disciplinary ends and are written primarily with disciplinary audiences in mind. So long as intellectual life is structured by powerful disciplinary institutions there will be a need for such histories. As the works under review demonstrate, discipline history can produce genuine engagement with the past. Yet to what degree will these new narratives actually alter the narratives that social scientists tell about themselves and thus affect their current self-understandings? Those social scientists who seek to proliferate more complex and diverse histories of their disciplines will have to contend with the fact that, as Alan Sica notes in Sociology in America, current social scientists “are in general ignorant about their field's past and have not been persuaded to become otherwise during graduation education” (715).

Nevertheless, the present state of the disciplines augurs well for broader and more genuine engagements with their past by social scientists. Social scientists are increasingly aware that it is no longer fruitful to think of the history of sociology in terms of “post-structural functionalism” or of political science as “postbehavioralism,” now that these supposed “post” periods have lasted longer than the supposed periods of dominance. Many social scientists further recognize that no overarching paradigm can structure social-scientific disciplines and that this is no cause for remorse. As a result, social scientists are less driven to tell histories of their disciplinary past that either suggest an emerging consensus or polemically contest a past one. One can hope that this will produce not only better histories, but also self-conscious social-scientific disciplines that thrive by building on past traditions of inquiry and embracing a multiplicity of approaches.

Yet good discipline histories should remind social scientists not only of the diversity of past and present approaches but also of the shared questions that bind them together. The two books under review undertake this work only implicitly for their own disciplines and hardly at all for the social sciences as a whole. It appears that intellectual historians are better positioned to help social scientists gain a broader sense of their shared history. This is not because intellectual historians do not hold stakes in the contemporary direction of the social sciences (they do) or because they possess some specialized knowledge or technique exclusive to professional historians (they do not). Yet, precisely because they have no investment in the fate of disciplinary institutions in the social sciences as such, historians are better positioned to survey the social sciences as a whole. Thus they can correct the inherent flaws of discipline history not only through their greater knowledge of the larger historical trends of which social-scientific activity is a part, but also by providing a common language to describe major developments across the social sciences that are often described in specialist jargon. Rather than looking condescendingly upon histories of social science written by practitioners, intellectual historians might instead help social scientists recognize that while the social sciences may not have a single history, they do share a common one.