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The following address was originally posted to H-NEXA, and reposted on 
H-IDEAS. It is quite long, but extends our discussion of Roy's editorial 
in interesting directions. Apologies to those who have seen it elsewhere. 
 
Ross B. Emmett 
 
********************************************************************** 
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 17:12:58 -0400 (EDT) 
From: Immanuel Wallerstein <[log in to unmask]>  
"Open the Social Sciences" 
by Immanuel Wallerstein* 
 
(Originally appeared in Items, a journal of the Social Science 
Research Council, Volume 50, Number 1, March 1996) 
 
[The following is based on a presentation delivered by Mr. 
Wallerstein at the SSRC on October 24, 1995, to mark the 
publication of Open the Social Sciences (Stanford University Press, 
1996), a Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring 
of the Social Sciences.1] 
 
     How were the social sciences constructed? In preparing our 
report we had to consider this question in order to understand the 
dilemmas of the social sciences. We start the story in the late 
18th century by noting that the most important thing that happens 
is a kind of definitive divorce -- I hesitate to use the word 
"divorce" -- a break between science and philosophy. 
 
     Before that the terms were not quite totally interchangeable 
but very closely aligned. They both meant knowledge, and people did 
not make a strong distinction between philosophy and science. It is 
in the late 18th century that we see the birth of C.P. Snow's "two 
cultures." Science was defined as the empirical, the search for 
truth through research, as opposed to what philosophers did, which 
was to speculate or make deductions in some way. It was a 
continuation of the break between philosophy and theology; this was 
taking it one step further, toward a thoroughly secularized 
knowledge system. 
 
Knowledge and the university 
 
     At the same time as this intellectual break in people's minds 
between science and philosophy, there occurs the revival of the 
university. We talk of the university as a continuous institution 
but it really is not. The medieval university was an interesting 
institution but it more or less died out in the 16th century. And 
the universities were relatively unimportant in the 16th, 17th, and 
18th centuries. They did not have permanent staff; intellectual 
work didn't go on in the university but outside of it, in many 
other kinds of institutions: the College de France, the Royal 
Societies, etc. One of the interesting things that happened in the 
19th century is the recreation of the university as the locus of 
both the creation of knowledge and its reproduction. That involved 
something quite new, which was to take the faculty, primarily the 
faculty of philosophy, and break it up into something called disci- 
plines, with chairs, and with departments that would grant degrees. 
The structure of the university as we know it today was really 
created in the late 19th century. So it was very recently that 
universities and disciplines as we know them were invented. 
 
     Between about 1750 and 1850, in terms of the development of 
individual disciplines, we a see a situation where there were 
hundreds of names for research inquiry. What happens between 1850 
and 1914 is the reduction of these hundreds of names to a small 
group of names which become defined as the disciplines. It's a kind 
of coagulation of sets of interests, sets of problems. Our report 
argues that in point of fact we end up with six major names, plus 
a couple of minor ones. These six major names become departments, 
national associations, scholarly journals, and library categories 
(the Library of Congress in the last decade of the 19th century 
reproduces these names as its set of categories). All of this 
institutionalizes a series of choices. 
 
Lines of demarcation 
 
     We see the names chosen around three basic cleavages. The 
first cleavage is past-present, which was a cleavage between 
history, as it was reorganized in the 19th century, and the trio of 
sociology, political science, and economics. There were two rather 
different assumptions about how one achieved scientific truths. The 
historians followed Ranke's dictum that ". . .er will blos zeigen, 
wie es eigentlich gewesen" [it wants only to show what actually 
happened]. In other words, you could only trust as evidence 
documents that were written at the time for purposes other than 
informing historians three centuries later. The fundamental 
assumption was that if an ambassador writes a letter to his 
monarch, he is trying to inform the monarch of a situation in the 
country where he is posted, and he is trying to tell it as he 
understands it. If you read it three centuries later, at least you 
know that is what the ambassador in fact said, and it may well be 
that it is what the ambassador really believed. And this of course 
pushes you in the direction of archives. It also pushes you in the 
direction of political and diplomatic history, because these are 
the things most likely to survive in archival form. 
 
     It was argued that scholars would probably have a bias about 
current events because of their involvement in their own societies. 
For this reason, the further they delved into the past the more 
neutral the scholars could be. Also, the objective reality of the 
archive would impose itself upon the scholars. Hence anything 
recent was suspect. In addition, states or other institutions 
tended not to make recent documents available to scholars. They 
still don't; state documents are secret for 20 years, 30 years, 50 
years, 100 years or whatever. Furthermore, in order to understand 
the archives, you had to be pretty well-informed about the general 
cultural context within which they fell. This led historians to do 
work in fields with which they were most familiar, so there was a 
great tendency to work on their own national histories. At the same 
time, they were very suspicious of generalizations precisely 
because they were "scientists." That is to say they saw 
generalizations as being old-fashioned speculative philosophy, and 
in order to be empiricist, you could not generalize. In any case 
working with archives pushes you in the direction of detail, and 
detail tends to be terribly idiographic. 
 
     On the other hand, the nomothetic trio turned the whole logic 
on its head. In order to be objective, they said, we have to have 
data that are not subject to the judgment of the scholar. Ergo, the 
more quantitative the data, the less subject they are to the 
judgment of the scholar, the more comparable they are in various 
situations. And that pushes you inevitably into the present 
Especially if you take the next step which is to say there are 
universal truths about human behavior that hold across all time and 
space. The minute you say that, it becomes no different whether you 
study Germany in the present or India in the 5th century B.C., 
because you are looking for universal truths. Since the data on 
Germany in the present is 5,000 times better -- harder is the word 
-- than the data on India in 5,000 B.C., we study Germany in the 
present to arrive at our generalizations. That was the general late 
19th-century, early 20th-century separation of history from the 
three "hard" social sciences. 
 
     We note something else: the sociology of knowledge. At least 
95 percent of all scholars and all scholarship from the period 1850 
to 1914, and probably even to 1945, originates in five countries: 
France, Great Britain, the Germanies, the Italies, and the United 
States. There is a smattering elsewhere, but basically not only 
does the scholarship come out of these five countries, but most of 
the scholarship by most scholars is about their own country. So 
most of the scholarship is about these five countries. This is 
partly pragmatic, partly social pressure, and partly ideological: 
these are the important countries, this is what matters, this is 
what we should study in order to learn how the world operates. 
 
     That leads to the second cleavage. The fact is that the five 
countries were not the entire world and there was some vague 
awareness in the scholarly community that there was a world beyond 
the five countries. What they did in our view was simply invent two 
other disciplines to study the rest of the world. The first and 
most obvious is anthropology, which was invented to study the 
primitive world. The primitive world was defined in a very simple 
way: in practice, as the colonies of the five countries, including 
the internal countries. In theory it was defined as the study of 
small groups which had a low level of technology, which did not 
have writing prior to contact with the Western world, which did not 
have religions that cut across groups, with each group having its 
own religious beliefs. These groups were presumed to be unchanging 
and timeless. 
 
     And so we get a whole ideology about how you study them. They 
are very strange people who speak very strange languages, from a 
European point of view. You have to do participant observation, you 
have to go out there, you spend a couple of years with "your 
tribe," you learn the language, you get some people to help you as 
interpreters. What do you study? You study everything: ethnography. 
Because you know nothing, you learn everything: how they marry, how 
they exchange goods, how they handle disputes among themselves, 
what the grammar of the language is, and you come back and you 
report all of this. It was very idiographic in tonality and was 
based on the presumption of ahistoricity. 
 
     This helps you handle the problem of a good portion of the 
earth but not all of the earth outside the five countries, or 
outside of Europe, because there are obviously countries that 
cannot be described in the terms I just used for anthropological 
work: for example, China, India, the Arab-Islamic world, Persia. 
All share a series of characteristics. They have at the present or 
at some point in the past one or more large bureaucratic empires in 
their area. As a result, there was in fact writing, and surviving 
texts. Furthermore, they had -- to use a 19th century term -- world 
religions. What a world religion essentially meant was a religion 
that had spread over a large area of the world. Buddhism was a 
world religion, Islam was a world religion, Hinduism was a world 
religion, as opposed to African-animist-local religious beliefs. 
These non-European civilizations had world religions, and they had 
texts which tended largely to be religious texts. The only thing 
they did not have was modernity. 
 
     The study of these kinds of social systems was built into the 
last field which was not usually defined as a social science, which 
refused to define itself as a social science, but in fact was the 
major social science from 1850 to 1945 dealing with all these areas 
of the world: Oriental studies. The premise of Oriental studies was 
very simple: These are marvelous, complex, structures that we have 
to understand. The best way to understand them is to get into their 
civilization, which means reading and learning the texts -- philol- 
ogy becomes a very central technique -- and presenting these texts 
to the rest of the world, while also explaining why they could not 
become modern. They were seen as frozen civilizations, and 
therefore as ahistoric. So we have a second basic cleavage: history 
plus the nomothetic trio dealing with the Western world, and 
anthropology and Oriental studies dealing with the rest of the 
world. 
 
     The third cleavage has to do with the existence of three 
nomothetic social sciences (sociology, political science, and 
economics). Why not have one social science? I believe this has to 
do with 19th century ideology. Basically the dominant world view of 
liberalism was that the state, the market, and the civil society 
were different entities. They operated by different logics and 
therefore needed to be studied separately, and kept apart, in some 
sense, in the real world. In order to do that the scholars had to 
segregate their learning of these subjects. This is crudely what 
happened, and by about 1945, it was well established as the 
organizing principle in the social science divisions of most 
universities. In the meantime, in the emergence of the university 
system we get what we call the tripartite division, between the 
natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. 
Basically that means philosophy versus science, with the social 
sciences somehow uneasily in the middle, reproducing the tension 
inside the social sciences, of the "two-culture" split. This holds 
true up to 1945. Then everything is changed. 
 
The internationalization of the social sciences 
 
     We think everything changed as of 1945 primarily because the 
real world changed in several ways. We emerge at the end of the 
Second World War with a world in which the United States is the 
dominant force, economically, politically, and culturally. For at 
least 10 or 15 years it is literally the dominant force numerically 
in the social science world. I was very struck two or three years 
ago looking back at an early postwar UNESCO document that was 
produced by a committee of 16 people, of whom 15 were from the 
United States. That is absolutely extraordinary. I cannot imagine 
a UNESCO document today having more than one of the 16 from the 
United States. But there it was. Nobody thought it was surprising 
then that 15 of the 16 scholars were from the United States. What 
difference did that make? It made several differences; one is the 
emergence of area studies. The history is very clear, the 
motivation was heavily geopolitical. People were saying, "The U.S. 
has all these responsibilities in the world, it doesn't have any- 
body who knows what's going on in all these parts of the world, 
we're short of scholars, we've got to produce specialists of the 
non-Western world." Then area studies comes along as the 
organizational mode by which we are going to produce rapidly large 
numbers of scholars who know something about Africa and Asia and 
Latin America and Russia and China and whatnot. 
 
     Area studies is very interesting as an organizational 
structure. The basic idea was to say "We're not going to touch the 
disciplines. People are still going to get Ph.D.'s in all their 
disciplines. But we're going to try to induce graduate students to 
specialize in these areas and acquire knowledge by giving them a 
one-year program added on to their normal Ph.D., during which 
they'd learn a little bit about everything about the area." So if 
they were interested in India, they'd learn about the history of 
India, the sociology of India, the economics of India, the 
political science of India, etc. Plus maybe Urdu or Hindi or 
whatever. This was therefore -- to use the classic word -- 
multidisciplinary. The students would acquire this knowledge, then 
they would go on to their Ph.D. in some discipline and hopefully, 
they would continue to do their empirical work on India as 
economists, or as sociologists, or as historians. This was a highly 
successful program. Over the last 40-odd years it has spread beyond 
the United States. Many other countries adopted the same idea and 
we have produced thousands of very good scholars doing all kinds of 
work which was almost never done before 1945. 
 
     Now what does this mean? First of all it means that the 
cleavage, civilized world/rest of the world, is broken down 
completely in terms of the disciplines. Prior to 1945 you would 
have been considered strange if you were doing empirical work 
outside of the Western world and you were not in either anthropol- 
ogy or Oriental studies. All of a sudden you get historians, 
political scientists, sociologists, and even economists, floating 
around the rest of the world. If you think about that, it seems to 
undermine the theoretical logic of cultural anthropology and 
Oriental studies. The theoretical logic was that these disciplines 
had something special to do in these areas which nobody else could 
do and they had to do it in quite a different way. And they would 
do it ahistorically, whereas these people were coming in to study 
an ongoing, changing, transforming reality--that's why area studies 
was created. So it challenges the logic of the disciplines. 
Oriental studies gives up its name, the scholars join other 
divisions, they become historians or professors of religion. The 
cultural anthropologists tried various things. They decided that 
Europeans and North Americans have tribes too; they would study 
Swiss mountaineers and people in Chicago slums, and now they decide 
they'll study, "culture." They are in search of a raison d'etre. 
 
     The internal logic of those departments changed as well. It 
isn't only that anthropology and Oriental studies lost their 
bearing but that other disciplines have to struggle with their 
methodological and their theoretical rationales. On top of that, 
since 1945 you have the most extraordinary expansion of the world 
economy in the history of the modem world system. This means that 
there was a lot of money around, and one of the ways in which this 
money was expended is on the incredible expansion of the university 
system throughout the world. From 1945 on, there has been a 
geometric escalation in the number of universities, the number of 
university professors, of students, of Ph.D.'s.... 
 
     When we got our Ph.D.'s there was some mumbling about how it 
had to be original research. Original research means something that 
somebody hasn't already done. As the numbers increase this tends to 
be a bit of a problem. You have to find niches. So there is a 
natural process of poaching. Let's take my own field of sociology. 
One of the first sub-disciplines that emerges after World War II is 
something called political sociology. There was also economic 
sociology; a little bit later there was historical sociology. I am 
not even talking about the more esoteric sociologies: the sociology 
of tourism, for example, but those that directly impinge on the 
neighboring fields. I recall my own experience 40 years ago on my 
Ph.D. orals. One of my fields was political sociology, and some 
professor said, "What do you think is the difference between 
political sociology and political science?" a question which I must 
confess had not occurred to me before. I thought about it and I 
said, "Well, I can't see any." And I still can't see any. So we 
have a problem of overlap which escalates. 
 
     I go to quite a few different national social science meetings 
for one reason or another. One of the things that strikes me is, 
when you pick up the program of the meetings and you read the 
titles of the papers, it's very hard to know which congress you're 
at these days. The titles read the same whether it's sociology, 
anthropology, political science, or history. The overlap at that 
level grows daily. This was the situation from 1945 on. Area 
studies tremendously undermined the logic of the social science 
divisioning that was created up to then, and the mutual poaching 
also undermined it. 
 
     And then came 1968, symbolically. A couple of things happened 
as a result. First of all, one of the main themes of '68 was "the 
forgotten peoples." And the forgotten peoples got translated 
immediately into academic terms: women's studies, black studies, 
etc. There is a continuing creation of more names. These groups 
come along and say, We have a place, a legitimate place within the 
university structure, and we would like to translate that not 
merely into writing books, but into having programs, eventually 
majors, eventually Ph.D.'s -- although there was some hesitation 
about that. What you see with that process which is very strong, 
socially based, and not about to go away, is that we are in fact 
now moving in the other direction. If from 1750 to 1850 you had a 
lot of names which then got reduced (to about six as of 1945), the 
curve is now moving in the other direction. We are going from six 
to 20 names. When I read university catalogues I am struck with the 
fact that each catalogue has about 10 to 12 names. They all have 
the basic six or seven, but they all each add about three that vary 
from university to university. This will continue for some time to 
come. 
 
Spheres of inquiry 
 
     Two other things happen in the 1970s and 1980s which are quite 
fundamental and which we talk about in the report. One is a major 
revolution in the natural sciences. The natural sciences were 
epistemologically very stable from about the 16th or 17th century 
to the 1970s, in the sense that Newtonian/Cartesian premises were 
fundamental to all scientific activity. Science was the search for 
the simplest laws. Science was objective. Science was neutral. 
Science dealt with equilibria. Science was cumulative. 
 
     What happens is that there has been a revolution brewing since 
the late l9th century, but it doesn't acquire organizational 
strength until the 1970s. It comes along and says science is not 
deterministic. All we can have is probabilistic statements about 
the future. Mathematical accuracy is impossible to obtain. Every 
time you measure you are going to measure something different. 
Processes are not linear but bifurcate. Science is the search for 
the complex, and not the search for the simple. And, most important 
for our purposes, scientific laws are not reversible. A founding 
assumption of the natural sciences is that time does not matter. 
But today many natural scientists proclaim that irreversibility is 
a fundamental premise of scientific activity. The slogan is "the 
arrow of time." Even atoms have time and are changed over time. Now 
this turns the relationship of the social sciences and the natural 
sciences upside down. 
 
     When I was a graduate student you learned that we social 
scientists were inferior physicists but one day we would learn how. 
We would someday figure out how to talk about social processes the 
way physicists talk about physical processes, that is, that they 
were linear, they had equilibrium, that they were irreversible, 
that there existed universal laws. All of a sudden we have a major 
portion of natural scientists saying no, no, no, it's an arrow of 
time--in effect bringing the natural sciences and the social 
sciences closer together, but not on the basis of mechanistic, 
Newtonian natural science, but on the basis of premises that are 
fundamental to the social sciences. The movement is toward the 
social sciences, in effect. The physicists are saying in a way that 
they are inferior sociologists rather than sociologists saying they 
are inferior scientists. In any case they recognize that the social 
processes are the most complex processes. 
 
     At the same time there is a movement in the humanities, which 
I think can be explained in part by changes in the political world, 
which has led to the rise of cultural studies. Cultural studies is 
an absolutely major movement today. Its seed is in the humanities, 
but there are many anthropologists and historians who are involved 
in cultural studies, and this is spreading throughout the social 
sciences. So there is a blurring. Although the cultural studies 
people emphasize the degree to which their work is a reaction to 
and a condemnation of scientism, it is of course Newtonian 
scientism that they are really denouncing, which, as I've pointed 
out above, is being undermined within the ranks of the natural 
scientists. But what is striking is the degree to which cultural 
studies is really a move of the humanities towards the social 
sciences. What cultural studies says is that social processes 
matter, that what the humanities have to talk about are these 
social processes. Not only are differences within the social 
sciences becoming blurred, but the tripartite division itself 
--humanities, social science, natural science -- is coming into 
question. 
 
A program of reform 
 
      What kind of social science shall we build? First of all, we 
suggest that the problem of the future is not merely a question of 
restructuring the social sciences. We are not suggesting that they 
be made one. We are saying that the rationale for the disciplines 
we now have does not make much sense. And we had better try to 
rethink new rationales, new ways of divisioning. I note that what 
we today call biology, was called zoology and botany not so very 
long ago, and that zoology and botany departments have virtually 
disappeared. Biology has many subdivisions, but botany and zoology 
are not the principle on which they are organized, so it is 
possible to redivide the pie in other ways. 
 
     We suggest that universities need to examine the tripartite 
division. It is built on a concept of the "two cultures" which grew 
up in the late 18th century and which we think should be overcome. 
We may be a bit chauvinistic in thinking that the social sciences 
might be central to that process. We even wonder whether the 
university will remain the primary locus of knowledge production 
and reproduction. Until recently it was. With the expansion of the 
universities and the numbers of people who go to universities, one 
of the things that has happened is what I call the high- 
schoolization of the university system, that is to say the enormous 
social pressure--you should teach more and it should be relevant 
and so forth--in order to get students with a B.A. into a position 
where they can get a job, etc. Scholarly professors have flown from 
college teaching to graduate school teaching; they are beginning to 
fly to institutes of advanced study. And we have to raise the 
question as we look ahead, 20, 50 years, whether we are not going 
to develop new kinds of institutions and, if so, on what financial 
base. How would you fund people doing research? Historically the 
university was the solution to the problem of how you fund 
scholars. You give them a job as a teacher, and that way you fund 
scholarship. If now there is a trend to push them out or they push 
themselves out, what will fund them as scholars? 
 
     One specific recommendation is that universities and other 
institutions encourage something that already exists on a small 
scale: the possibility of groups coming together around themes for 
a year's work. Second, instead of new programs being established 
every time somebody has an argument for x studies, we suggest that 
universities think instead of establishing a five-year time-limited 
research center on that subject. Then they will see what they can 
actually produce within this five-year program, without having to 
worry about fundraising during that period. (Funds should be 
obtained at the beginning so time is not spent writing grant 
proposals which, as we all know, is a very time-consuming process). 
Now those two suggestions cost a certain amount of money. We have 
two further suggestions which I think are even more important and 
will cost not a penny. 
 
     We suggest that professors be given joint appointments. 
Nowadays it is usually a favor to a relatively distinguished 
person, in his or her fifties or sixties. When you try to get that 
person to the university, you say, "You can be a professor of x and 
y simultaneously." It's a courtesy. The second appointment is 
usually meaningless and you're not really expected to do anything 
about it. It's just a nice title, it makes the professor feel good. 
We would like to turn it all around. We would like to say: 
mandatory double appointment. No professor at the university should 
be in one department. All professors should be in two. When you 
talk in terms of their primary department, it is the one in which 
they have their Ph.D. The second department could be any other one. 
And in order to prevent a department from being resistant to this, 
we would insist that all departments have at least 25 percent of 
their professors come from another so-called primary department. We 
think this would transform departments. It would create new mixes, 
and it doesn't cost a penny. As long as you make it mandatory, it 
will work. Every professor must be a professor in two departments, 
but in effect he/she can choose the second department. And the 
departments must accept this possibility; nobody can say, "Only our 
types here." 
 
     The same holds true at the graduate-student level. Make it 
mandatory to have a minor in another department. Now it's not only 
optional but most departments frown on it if you try to do it. You 
go to your department and you say, "I'd like to take x number of 
courses in some other department." And they say, "It's not good for 
your career, don't do it." We propose saying you can't get a Ph.D. 
in any discipline without taking a quarter of your courses in some 
other department as a minor. You can still earn a Ph.D. in that 
discipline but you must choose a second one. And departments must 
allow you to do it. 
 
     Those are the strongest recommendations. I think they would be 
revolutionary and as I say they would not cost a penny. Having made 
these recommendations, let me conclude by quoting from the last 
sentence of our report: "What is most important . . . is that the 
underlying issues be debated--clearly, openly, intelligently, and 
urgently." 
 
                              NOTES 
 
     *Immanuel Wallerstein is Director of the Fernand Braudel 
Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and 
Civilizations, and Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Binghamton 
University. 
 
     1The Gulbenkian Commission was chaired by Mr. Wallerstein. 
Other members included Calestous Juma, Executive Secretary, UN 
Convention on Biodiversity. 
 
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