THE RISE of INTERDISIPLINARY APPROACHES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES DURING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Year 2017, Özel Sayı - ICEBSS 2017, 375 - 381, 10.11.2017

Fulya Özkan

Abstract

As a result of the rise of positivist approaches in the social sciences, different disciplines such as politics, sociology, history, anthropology, psychology and economics emerged during the 19th century. In order to attain objective knowledge, positivism divided reality into observable pieces such as the individual, the society, the state and the market each of which were examined by different social science disciplines like psychology, sociology, political science and economics respectively. Moreover, the rise of positivism was also accompanied by the rise of liberalism which emerged as one of the main ideologies of the 19th century in addition to nationalism and socialism. This also affected the study of social sciences by lessening the importance of interdisciplinary concepts such as the political economy which, until then, had argued for the interaction between politics and economy in the study of society. 

As thoroughly examined by Immanuel Wallerstein, this understanding brought about a specific institutionalization of the social science disciplines where we encounter six major departments in the major universities of the 19th century,. These were political science, sociology, history, economics, anthropology and Orientalism. Anthropology mainly dealt with the so-called primitive tribes of Africa and the Oceanic world whereas Orientalism examined the former high civilizations of the Islamic, East Asian and South Asian worlds which were regarded to have ceased their historical development as a result of the rise of the Western powers since the 16th century. On the other end of the spectrum, the other four major disciplines focused on the Western world. In this academic division of labor, historians analyzed the past of the Western civilization, political scientists its state structure, sociologists its social life, and economists its market relations.

However, during the course of the 20th century, interdisciplinarity, which advocated the interaction between different social science disciplines, gained more importance. Especially starting from the 1950s onwards, three developments contributed to this process: The first was the emergence of area studies as a separate research field and thus, the reflection of Cold War politics on the academia; the second was the new social movements such as the second-wave feminism which argued for the combination of the state and the society in social research and last but not least, cultural studies.

Keywords

Social, Twentieth Century, Interdisiplinary

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