Concerned about the worldwide state of the social sciences--the
relations among the disciplines, and their relationship with both the
humanities and the natural sciences--the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation,
based in Lisbon, established in 1993 the Gulbenkian Commission on the
Restructuring of the Social Sciences. It comprised a distinguished
international group of scholars--six from the social sciences, two from
the natural sciences, and two from the humanities.
The report first explores how social science was historically
constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was divided into a
specific set of relatively standard disciplines in a process that went
on between the late eighteenth century and 1945. It then reveals the
ways in which world developments since 1945 have raised questions about
this intellectual division of labor and have therefore reopened the
issues of organizational structuring that had been put into place in the
previous period. The report goes on to elucidate a series of basic
intellectual questions about which there has been much recent debate.
Finally, it discusses in what ways the social sciences can be
intelligently restructured in the light of this history and the recent
debates.