Summary History and Social Sciences (CH1106)
Lecture 1: History and the Social Sciences
History and the social sciences: general observations:
General observations:
Scientific knowledge vs. common knowledge
Subdivision of the sciences:
- Natural sciences, applied sciences, social sciences, humanities, …
History versus the social sciences: differences
Approach:
o Holistic (history) vs. Reductionist (social sciences)
Holistic: the idea of historians trying to take into account as many aspects of a phenomenon as
possible to be as complete as possible.
Reductionist: historians take individuals and look at their personal relationship (between those two
individuals) and they try to gain understanding how that shapes policy making. the only way you
can understand a topic is by decomposing it and looking at all the specific sub elements specifically in
order to come to a better understanding research of very specific topics.
o Induction (history) vs. Deduction (social sciences)
Induction: historians start from observations first, and then come to conclusions based on that
Deduction: work deductively: start from a theory that is already given and then try to deduce, come to
new theoretical premises based on that.
Were various historians actually start with the empirical material (data first then build a theory), for
social scientists it’s the other way around (start with theory that is already given and then based on
that, they try to come up with something new).
Method:
o (archival) source-based research (history) vs. Qualitative/quantitative research
(social sciences)
(Archival) source-based research: historians use these sources to gain insight into past events
enter the archives, did an elaborate study and came to conclusions.
Qualitative/quantitative research: quantitative: social scientists tend to gather large amounts of data
that they then quantify, so transform in an excel sheet f.e., and then use that to actually draw
conclusions from. Qualitative: when reading documents, they will use a coding scheme (highlight
certain words, give it a code/number and can then count again and form clusters and numbers).
o Explanation through narration (history) vs. Hypothesis-driven research (social
sciences)
Narratives: historians will usually compose a story line
Hypothesis: when social scientists start a research, they ask a question and will also already think
about a possible answer to that question they will come up with a hypothesis which they will then
test through their study to see whether or not they were correct about their assumptions.
Notions of time:
o Contingency (history) vs. Social laws (social sciences)
Contingency: paying very close attention to the specific sequence of events and how that has a
broader impact.
Social laws: social scientists pay much less attention to this contingency and mostly depart from some
sort of law-like observations social life adheres to certain laws. when A happens, B is tended to
happen as well
o Path-dependency (history) vs. Evolutionism (social sciences)
Path-dependency: certain choices that have been made in the past will fundamentally shape the
possible outcomes that you can have at a later point in time. If you look at the long-term consequences
of that, the choices that you made so many years ago, will have an inevitable impact on what the
outcome is later on.
,Evolutionism: to some extent stating that the initial conditions that you find yourself in, don’t always
have to be so determining as historians would put because ultimately, human societies will always
evolve towards a certain direction. Hence, they will have a certain evolution towards a new situation.
Rapprochement:
History and social sciences: critical perspectives
Annales-school in history (1929-…): have an interest in exploring new theories
Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) thinking about how historians can contribute to social sciences and
how social sciences can come closer to historians to help eachother to strengthen each other’s work.
Text: ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée”
How can the human sciences work together?
“endless bickering” in academia, different fields stand next to one another and sometimes being
very reluctant to cooperate.
history’s place?
- Often misunderstood/ill-known by social scientists
- Historians have become very good at identifying different time speeds. According to the
specific development that you are looking at, another time scale might be relevant.
o Histoire événementielle (events), Moyenne durée (cycles), long durée (long term
developments)
Main take-aways Braudel:
The main ‘ideological’ differences between history and social sciences lies in approach to
time social sciences are ‘timeless’ (general laws, short-term investigations extrapolated)
while historians’ main task is to explore the unfolding of time related to specific subjects.
Time = motion events do not shape the course of history by definition, while interplay
between social, cultural, economic, and geographical factors (evolving with different paces,
see ‘plurality of temporalities”) does events are reflections or outcomes of these structures
The best way to uncover these structures, continuities and changes focus on longue durée:
evolution of underlying, continuously present factors (NB: not every durée is equally long!)
one of the historians’ tasks is to figure out the “appropriate” durée for a certain topic.
Lecture 2: The Nineteenth-Century Founding Fathers of the Social Sciences
What is modernity?
One of the man questions of social sciences. Around 1750, the idea of society started, and people
wanted to study it and the thought that humans can change society started.
Modernization is the process of transforming from a traditional society with order to modern society
with chaos. Between this traditional society (order) and the modern society (chaos) is the
modernization process which brought:
- Nation states, state for one nation. Did more than just waging war
- Market economy, people swith from producing for themselves to producing for the market
- Secularlization, the idea that God isn’t longer needed to shape society
- Urbanization
- Industrialization
Theories of modernization
Karl Marx (1818-1883):
Modernization: commodification, estrangement (alienation)
Commodification: value of activities is increasingly being measured in terms of profit education is
for example very much understood as something that needs to generate a profit all sorts of aspects
of human life, social life, are increasingly being commodified (commodity = artikel)
,Estrangement/alienation: human labor: labor is central as to who we are as human beings Marx
argues that (in the 19th century), human beings as laboring beings are increasingly being estranged
from the activities that they are used to perform in a factory: one could argue that the labor that you
perform there is alienating because of the specific process that you have to follow (you make one
specific part but, in the end, have no idea what the product will look like and lose the connection with
the activity that you’re supposed to perform).
Starting point of Marx
Ontology: the sense of being from idealism to materialism.
Idealist ontology: understanding of ontology that the only thing that actually exists in the world are
ideas or self-consciousness of the mind. The only thing that is real is our perception, our self-
awareness and self-consciousness
shift to materialist ontology: he rejects the notion that ideas and self-consciousness are the only
thing that actually exists the material world is the only thing that exists. Everything else, also our
awareness is actually a product of that materiality.
His theory of society
Historical materialism: if you want to understand a society, look at:
1. Mode of production as base/infrastructure: if you want to understand society, you have to
look at how that society actually tries to organize its sustenance, how it tries to sustain itself
and produce goods in order to survive Marx: basis of society is how people produce goods
and economic element is central. How do societies produce:
a. Forces of production: revolves around the tools that people have at their disposal to
produce something.
b. Social relations of production: refers to the relations that you can discern between
different groups of people that area involved in the production process distribution
of different groups and a sense of inequality that arises from that.
2. Superstructure:
a. Social institutions: like state organization or church or religion, ideas and values
3. Class struggle: inequality becomes more aware certain groups will organize
themselves in order to overthrow the other group and mode of production that exists and
state system.
Class struggle is ultimately what determines the evolution of the different types of society, modes of
production that you have.
Capitalism and its crisis:
- Commodification of goods, labor and services
- Exploitation factory workers will perform a certain amount of labor and will get paid
for it but what the capitalists will do increasingly so is they will increasingly let factory
workers work more and more intensely while not compensating them for that.
- Concentration/impoverishment class consciousness – revolution. Concentration:
capitalists compete amongst themselves which will result in the fact that certain capitalists
will be pushed out of the market and means of production will be concentrated into the
hand of increasingly fewer capitalists. Impoverishment: the development where you see
that, because of exploitation, the members of the proletariat find themselves increasingly
in miserable conditions. combination of concentration and impoverishment people
become aware of the fact that the system is detrimental (schadelijk) and has to go (class
consciousness) which will lead to revolution.
Ultimately, one of the core inspirations for historians will be the sense of historical materialism.
Historians have very much used as a source of inspiration for the study of the past is indeed this notion
that societies are very much characterized by how people produce goods and try to sustain themselves
and the fact that certain institutions politics and so one, is a reflection of the specific way in which
goods are being produced.
, Money becomes more important because of the market economy. In a modern society there is a
price on almost everything like child care and school.
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)
Modernization: differentiation
Task-related differentiation: individual human beings are various. People increasingly start to perform
very specific subtasks became active in a certain field, have a certain task and people have to
complement each other.
Systemic differentiation is located on the structural systemic level. Certain activities become
increasingly organized by specific sub-systems. Care for the elderly is a task for retirement homes
we see the emergence of specific institutions that take care of this specific task within a certain
society.
De la division du travail social (1893)
When you look at the process of modernization, you see a transformation, a shift, between two types
of societies and going along with it, two types of solidarity.
- From “mechanical” solidarity:
Most people are the same social units very similar
Therefore, share the same core values and views collective awareness
Very specific type of social segmentation
- To “organic” solidarity:
People are very good in one specific task
Collective awareness partly starts to disintegrate so that individualism actually
becomes way more important
Is very reminiscent of a human body (doet denken aan). human beings
specialize in certain activities and you see this increased sense of
differentiation, you will see that people no longer fit in these homogenous
units like families, but that people become fundamentally independent from
another because they need one another to perform certain tasks. (like organs
in body)
Division of systems and tasks. In a modern society, every task is divided between all individuals.
You have all kinds of specialized stores and the division of labor in factories. In modern societies,
things are split up in segments and people are dependent on each other.
Max Weber (1864-1920)
Modernization: rationalization, ‘disenchantment’
Rationalization: in the 19th century, a process where people increasingly rely on reason to understand
the world.
Disenchantment: because of increased rationalization, religion increasingly loses its influence in
society.
Uses this as a starting point for other development that he sees and to provide characterizations of
social action, dimensions of social life and how they change throughout this period of modernization.
Social action; different ways in behaving in different social situations
Instrumental rational action: the type of social behavior where people identify a very specific
practical goal that they want to achieve and then they will actually tailor their social conduct
(the way in which they engage with people) accordingly in order to achieve that one particular
goal. networking events
Value-rational action: a type of action where people have identified a value for themselves
that they consider to be important and so the actions that they will perform will very much be
in line with these values which they hold form themselves patriotism
