The Formation of the Social Sciences
The picture drawn by Wallerstein of the birth of the social sciences in the nineteenth century is a convincing demonstration of the inescapable relation between the crystallization of the definitions of the new objects that constitute each of these sciences, on the one hand, and the development of liberal capitalism in the nineteenth century, on the other.
The birth of social thought that proposes to meet criteria of scientific objectivity could only be, in its very definition, the product of modernity, founded on the recognition that people make their history.
In earlier times, the most advanced thinking possible gave itself the sole objective of reconciling faith and reason, while the modern scientific project relinquishes this metaphysical concern of searching for the absolute to theologians in order to concentrate solely on the discovery of relative and limited truths. However, the elements of rational social thought freed from religious dogma emerge before modern times, particularly in China and in the Muslim world (Ibn Khaldoun). Modernity, far from being formed ‘miraculously’ and belatedly in the London-Paris-Amsterdam triangle of the sixteenth century, had begun its birth five centuries earlier in China and subsequently in the Muslim Caliphate. It remains true, however, that it is only in the nineteenth century, as Wallerstein demonstrates, that Enlightenment thought succeeds in forcing philosophical reason to break apart into distinct disciplines.Political economy occupies a dominant place within the group of new social sciences, thereby reflecting the reversal of dominance in the hierarchy of instances (in the mode of production—tr.), which moves from the political in earlier tributary modes of production to the economic in capitalism. My insistence on the dimension of modern commodity alienation complements, in my opinion, Wallerstein’s contribution in the chapter here in question.
It allows us to read the history of the formation of modern social scientific thought as a development that leads to Marx. Subsequently, the exclusive concern of the new ‘economics’ (Wallerstein reminds us that the term economics is introduced for the first time by Alfred Marshall in 1881) will be to substitute for Marx’s historical materialist method a definition of the ‘economic’ that transforms it into an ahistori- cal anthropology. The new science is used in an attempt to demonstrate that in the imaginary ‘market economy’, invented as a response to Marx, the markets are selfregulating, tend to the production of equilibrium (that is optimal, moreover), and hence merit consideration as the expression of a trans-historical rationality. Walras in the nineteenth century and Sraffa in the twentieth, the major thinkers who set themselves the objective of demonstrating this, failed in this impossible endeavor.The world economy (of historical capitalism) moves from disequilibrium to disequilibrium through changes in the balance of power between classes and nations, without ever tending to any equilibrium definable in advance. ‘Economics’, however, which still forms the major axis of social thought under capitalism, fulfills a decisive ideological function without which the power of the established liberal center would lose its pretense of rationality, i.e., its legitimacy.
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