Economics and Sociology: From Complementary to Competing Perspectives

We historians know less than we should about internal differentiation among the social sciences. What is it that makes a political scientist a political scientist, an anthropologist an anthropologist, a psychologist a psychologist? Social sciences define themselves against one another just as they define their boundaries against amateur discourse and the natural sciences. Although it has been the rare social scientist who has commented explicitly on the relationship between his or her discipline and another, implicit understandings of those relationships have been significant not only for how social scientists thought of themselves but also for the kinds of work they did. Although there are some examples of the comparative history of disciplines (Calhoun 1992; Gross 2007), it remains an under-studied field. This relative gap in the history of the social sciences results from the fact that much history of the social sciences is written as histories of individual disciplines. Today, we have come a long way from the once-dominant “discipline history ” approach that offered self-serving narra-tives of the past to justify current disciplinary trends (Collini 1988). Never-theless, historians housed in the social sciences, for obvious professional reasons, tend to focus largely on developments in their home disciplines. Intellectual historians, on the other hand, tend to focus on the broader cultural significance of the social sciences. They identify common trends across the social sciences such as professionalization, analyze difference