Humanity: The Always Already — Or Never to Be — Object of the Social Sciences?

Abstract

From one viewpoint, the social sciences have never been more successful, especially in terms of available research funding and student course demand. Moreover, certain social science methodologies, notably those related to game theory, rational choice theory, and actor-network theory have been used to model phenomena in the life sciences. This would suggest that the social sciences are extending their influence across disciplinary boundaries. However, at the same time, ’social science’ is losing its salience as a brand name or market attractor. In more academic terms, the social sciences are losing their distinctiveness as a body of knowledge distinguishable from, on the one hand, the humanities and, on the other, the natural sciences. That distinction was epitomised in the idea of a ‘universal humanity’ as both a scientific object and a political project that was explicitly developed by Christianity’s most faithful secular offspring — German Idealism, French Positivism, and the Socialist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each challenged, on the one hand, the humanities by declaring equal interest in all of humanity (not only the elite contributors to the ‘classics’) and, on the other, the natural sciences by declaring a specific interest in humans (in terms of whom other beings are treated as a secondary consideration, if not outright means to human ends). This chapter should be understood as an extension of Fuller (2006), a call to revive this robust sense of social science under the rubric of a ‘new sociological imagination’.