The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (55 page)

universe, could know everything.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, one could say that ``science'' ± as a world view, as a set of claims on truth-value, as a series of institutions ± had effectively displaced natural philosophy and was becoming acknowledged as the

pinnacle of the hierarchy of knowledge, and the principal mode of validation of

intellectual activity. Thè`scientization'' of authoritative knowledge was no

doubt deplored by scholars who feared the social implications of this model.

In the wake of the French Revolution, their reaction became organized in the

form of anti-Enlightenment thought and romanticism, and was institutionalized

in universities as thè`humanities''; that is, eventually as multiple and autonomous departments of philosophy, of languages and literature, of art history and

musicology. History was usually also classified as one of the humanities. While

the sciences were concerned with the regularities and certainties they attributed to the natural world, the humanities took as their purview the uniqueness and

unpredictability they argued was characteristic of the human world. This divi-

sion of perspective and tasks is what has come to be known as thè`two

cultures.''

Despite a continuing strong opposition by the humanities throughout the

nineteenth century, the sciences maintained their lead and marched to domin-

ance in the structures of knowledge. This represented the triumph of universal-

ism, with its corollary, the irrelevance of time and space. The superiority of

science, furthermore, received massive social confirmation in the twentieth

century at the level of popular belief as a result of its very real accomplishments Structures of Knowledge

229

in terms of inventions and techniques, and, consequently, at the level of state

support as well, because of its promise of economic development and military

security through ``big science.''

Never did the sciences seem to be held in higher esteem than in the period

1945±70, and thereby the hierarchical organization of the disciplines of know-

ledge production they anchored. Nevertheless, beginning in the 1960s, the

validity of the structures of knowledge came under renewed serious challenge

from many quarters. Many of these recent challengers, however, did not merely

reassert humanistic concerns. Some now began to express a skepticism concern-

ing the very logic of the long-term division of knowledge into two cultures (see Wallerstein, 1991; Gulbenkian Commission, 1996). Given the fact that the

structures of knowledge are both constituted by and constitutive of the modern

world, the pertinent question this raises for social analysts is whether the contemporary sharp debate about the structures of knowledge may not itself be

considered to be one of the signals of a structural crisis of historical capitalism.

The Social Sciences: Contradiction and Restructuring

Restructuring

The contradictions driving the historical development of the two cultures took

form in the early nineteenth century in political projects, the three modern

`ìdeologies'' of conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism/socialism. They claimed legitimacy in part on the basis of their interpretations of work in the humanities tradition, but also in part on the claimed scientific quality of their arguments.

They did this, of course, while asserting antagonistic, mutually exclusive, value orientations. The social sciences ± that is, the study of social reality as it was remolded, invented, and most of all institutionalized in the late nineteenth

century and early twentieth century ± represent a reorganization of the structures of knowledge in large part in response to this political debate.

During the nineteenth century, the intellectual as social critic began to play a central role in policy-oriented interpretations of a world in which change had

come to be seen as normal and requiring management. The extension of the

Enlightenment ideal of rationality to all individuals had the corollary that such social subjects consequently could, and for some should, exercise their rationality not only to confirm, but also to question, or even transform, time-honored social relationships or systems of rule. Values justifying change were the rallying cry of the radicals in particular ± the eternally valid values of the Rights of Man and of Democracy, values which, however, were yet to be achieved or at least to

be fully implemented.

This strand of social criticism was explicitly political in nature and was, of

course, anathema to conservatives. Although romanticism embraced the Enlight-

enment ideal of individuality through creativity and difference, the romantics

preferred to stress not only the artist's but even the common people's access tò`truth'' through imagination, personal experience, and the values of the community, as opposed to the scientific rationality of the philosophes. Responding in kind to the thrust of the radical critique, conservatives put forth notions of

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authenticity, tradition, and the organic community, in this case the defense of a vision of values coded as ``culture'' and extolled as `òrder'' in opposition not only to revolution but also to democracy and laissez-faire liberalism, disparaged as `ànarchy.''

The scientization of social knowledge represented the medium-term resolution

to the contradiction involved in the separation of knowledge into general state-

ments that were value-neutral but confined to the world of nature, and multiple, particular assertions that were value-laden and limited exclusively to segments of human reality, and thus not amenable to external resolution and thereby general

consensus. This was the dilemma posed to knowledge producers in their efforts,

allied with those of policy-makers, to come to terms with the evolving material

and political structures of the nineteenth century.

It was in this context that positivism as a methodology began to encroach

steadily on the domain of social inquiry. John Stuart Mill argued for the application of the methods of the physical sciences to the moral sciences, and Auguste

Comte attempted to establish positivism as the methodological basis for the

analysis of human relations. As a result, the divorce of systematic knowledge

from human values deepened. Both Mill and Comte were politically aware and

understood the implications of a positivist methodology. Of course, not all

students of the social world agreed. Against those who, following Mill and

Comte, wished to apply so-called scientific methods to the study of the social

world, there were those who continued to insist on a hermeneutic approach,

emphasizing qualitative differences and particularistic patterns. This came to be known as the difference between a nomothetic and an idiographic epistemology.

In organizational terms, these approaches found their strong bases in different

disciplines. Looking at the social sciences as a super-domain in the structures of knowledge, in between the natural sciences and the humanities, one could say

they were torn apart by the two strongly contending currents and failed to

develop an autonomous ``third'' epistemology.

In the context of the English debates which posed order and anarchy as an

irresolvable antinomy articulated in the ideologies of conservatism and radical-

ism, T. H. Huxley invoked the objective, value-neutral, problem-solving spirit of science to realize (a liberal centrist version of) progress without moralism: ``men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with

scientific, questions'' (Huxley, 1881, pp. 158±9). Nonetheless, humanist critics like Matthew Arnold and socialists like William Morris would continue to

oppose the scientization of social inquiry, the individualism and reductionism

of which they rejected in favor of holism and organicism.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Germanies had institutionalized a

form of social science called Staatswissenschaften that rejected the transnational universalizing propositions put forth by the English and French positivists, and insisted on a holistic understanding of differently instituted social complexes, the Staat of Staatswissenschaft. The so-called Methodenstreit of the late nineteenth century began as an attempt to convert this major citadel of social science work, the Staatswissenschaften, to a positivist approach to social knowledge. Those

who resisted this attempt made a philosophical defense of a connection between

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231

meaning or values, Wert, and systematic knowledge, Wissen, which they said

positivism subverted. That this debate was especially strong in the Germanies

was probably no accident, beset as Germany was by an internal controversy

about whether the way to catch up with and contest Great Britain was by

imitation or by difference. By analogy, in the structures of knowledge, the

question was whether they should imitate a positivistic social science on the

model of Mill and Comte such as that advocated by Huxley or pursue an original

approach like that of Staatswissenschaften.

Wilhelm Dilthey (1883, p. 142) stated that ``we must meet the challenge to

establish human sciences through epistemology, to justify and support their

independent formation, and to do away definitively with subordinating their

principles and their methods to those of natural sciences.'' He considered it

philosophy's task to demonstrate that the Geisteswissenschaften were not less

fundamental, or comprehensive, or objective than the Naturwissenschaften, but

were nonetheless not positivist either. In 1883, the very year of the appearance of his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, the Methodenstreit erupted in economics. The neoclassical marginalists challenged the rejection by thè`historical school'' of the universality of deductive theory in favor of inductive history.

The advocates of the marginalist revolution succeeded in overcoming the

historicists' stronghold in the Germanies, and Germany would fall in line with

the Franco-British structures in the twentieth century. Economics would be

clearly demarcated as à`value-free'' discipline. The historicists' project was

also eventually frustrated by Max Weber, in part unintentionally, in his attempt to institutionalize sociology. Weber, like Descartes, labored in a milieu of ideologically driven conflict, this time concerning issues of nationalism rather than of religion, and therefore was similarly seeking a way of producing knowledge

freed from the imperatives of (patriotic) value imperatives. Although Weber

argued against both the positivists and their opponents and tried to hold on to

the axiological dimension, operationally he lifted his `ìdeal type'' out of time and context, thus de facto separating historians from the world of human relations

they sought to explain.

Overall, the outcomes of the order and anarchy debates and of the Metho-

denstreit determined the intellectual and institutional arrangements for the subsequent construction of knowledge in the social sphere. Although it did not go

unchallenged, the resulting organization of the disciplines was firmly in place

and largely taken for granted during the 1945±70 period. (Lee (1996) explores

the disciplinary organization of knowledge over the post-1945 period and the

differing types of challenges that were advanced on either side of the 1967/1973

turning point.) It had set universal science, empirical, positivistic, and the source of truth, in opposition to the humanities, particularistic, impressionistic, anarchic, and expressing human values. Occupying a tenuous space in between, the

social sciences remained very much torn between nomothetic and idiographic

forms of universalism. The appeals to universalism and the sectorializing effect separating market, state, and civil society into independent domains tended to

have the political effect of obscuring underlying organizational arrangements

and historical feedback mechanisms, and thereby made organization to effect

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social change much more difficult. In fact, already by the end of the nineteenth century, the social sciences had become the indispensable instrument of the

linear, predictable reformism that replaced the real, but defeated, political alternatives of the left and the right, as they were swallowed up in the new liberal

consensus and its promise of gradual progress.

Secular Crisis and Systemic

Systemic Transition

The term ``two cultures'' has been much discussed and repeatedly debunked, but

the phrase lives on in contemporary epistemological debates as a commonsense

classification. During the past three decades, however, there have been chal-

lenges to the very concept, and they have occurred simultaneously across the

entire gamut of the disciplines.

From its inception in the 1950s, cultural studies ± a politically motivated

intellectual movement that originated in the humanities and moved into the

intellectual and institutional space of the social sciences ± consciously challenged the validity of the separation of the disciplines of knowledge formation. It

dismissed the high±low culture divide, applied literary methods to the analysis

of social reality and insisted on the social bases of canons of taste, and re-

evaluated the intellectual history of the ideologies. Cultural studies reasserted the values of the culture of everyday life. This was a conception of a culture