The twentieth century in the context of intellectual history may in a sense be characterized as the age of the social sciences. It may be so, primarily because during the age of the social sciences a new system of knowledge about man and society have ...
The twentieth century in the context of intellectual history may in a sense be characterized as the age of the social sciences. It may be so, primarily because during the age of the social sciences a new system of knowledge about man and society have outgrown or sometimes taken the place of the traditional field of humanities. But the question still remains, whether or not such a secular prosperity of the contemporary social sciences would also signify a success as a genuine system of knowledge about man and society. The question becomes more acute by the fact that there exists virtually no unified idea of social science although there do in many different, in some cases mutually exclusive social sciences, each claiming for an equal title as a social science. This is a monstrous scene in the history of science.
When our judgement fluctuates or falls into aporia in front of equally plansible but conflicting claims or arguments, the only one safe and legitimate way to get out of such a state is to go into the root of the case. And the root in the case of the contemporary social sciences is the history of social science, simply and essentially as the history of men's intellectual efforts to know themselves and the society to which they belong. In it must be comprised not only of the historical development of the modem social sciences but that of classical political philosophy and medieval theology.
The recognition of the inherent importance of the history of social science has not as yet been sufficiently appreciated. In the United States there is one scholarly journal by the name of 'History of the Human Sciences'. Since its birth in 1994 it has produced many articles that approached the history of the human sciences from the prospective Foucault's idea of 'achreology of knowledge' The proper study of the history of social science must go beyond the horizon. While taking advantages of Foucault's idea as well as the conventional history of ideas and the 'Begriffsgeschichte', it must aim at describing and explaining the historical dialectic between the knowledge about man and society in one era and its social reality.