By Andrej Grubačić
When I shared the academy’s brief description with a friend who happens to be an academic economist, he responded that it was very poetic but didn’t seem realistic. I believe we should take his polite condescension as a compliment. We don’t aspire to affirm reality but to oppose it. Reality is, indeed, real in that it truly oppresses us, but it isn’t our fate. Beneath and in opposition to the terror of this modern-capitalist reality lies a displaced and democratic knowledge, an anachronistic and antagonistic temporality that could never be synchronized with the institutional reality of capitalist modernity and its foundational lie.
This lie, the deepest dogma of bourgeois society, is that ordinary people are incapable of solving their own problems, by themselves and for themselves. This belief leads to the conclusion that the management of common problems belongs to “competent people.” Both the authoritarian conceptions of politics and the disciplinarian organization of the social sciences originated in bourgeois modes of thought formed during the French Revolution. The revolution introduced three concepts: evolutionism, economism, and elitism. Evolutionism is a belief that history unfolds in linear fashion, with the modern nation state at the other side of the developmentalist arrow. The concept of evolutionism or stages of history was put forth in the mid-eighteenth century, in France and in Scotland, by Jacques Turgot and Adam Smith. Economism rests on the idea that what drives human beings is a desire to maximize their pleasures, comforts and material possessions, and that all significant human interactions can thus be analyzed in market terms. Lastly, elitism is the conviction that management of common affairs really belongs to the experts, to what Haskel called the “community of competent.” This peculiar and distinctly modern intellectual configuration has two principal manifestations: Jacobinism, as an authoritarian concept of politics, and positivism, as an intellectual expression of authoritarian modernity. These concepts joined others that are inherent in what Blaufarb called the “Great Demarcation,” a radical modern distinction between power and property. From this distinction flowed other critical separations: between the political and the social, the state and society, and sovereignty and ownership. This great demarcation not only destroyed the conceptual basis of the aristocratic ancien régime, but also laid the foundation for capitalist modernity.
The combination of these new cultural concepts had very radical consequences. There then emerged three versions of how to handle this new reality — right-wing conservatism, centrist liberalism, and left-wing radicalism. Each of these was a mode of responding politically to the newly constructed geoculture of historical capitalism. The world-revolution of 1848 marked a turning point in the relations of the three political programs, a moment of their critical confrontation. The confrontation ended with the dominance of centrist liberalism in the geoculture, with the three dominant ideas of economism, evolutionism and elitism imprinted on social reality. This dominance of centrist liberalism essentially lasted until the world-revolution of 1968, shaping and informing important parts of both the right and the left.
The modern names for the social sciences are a recent phenomenon. Between 1750 and 1850, hundreds of different names were used to describe what we now consider social scientific inquiry. For example, in 1879, the economist William Stanley Jevons noted the numerous names for economic research, such as “Plutology,” “Chrematistics,” and “Catallactics.” The more straightforward term “economics” ultimately prevailed.
This naming flux highlights that these fields did not emerge suddenly but developed against at least two significant historical backdrops.
The first major context was the centuries-long transformation of knowledge systems that C.P. Snow famously termed the “two cultures” in his 1959 Cambridge lectures.
Before the 19th century, a unified culture of knowledge existed, focused on the “true, the good, and the beautiful.” In medieval Europe, the Church was the primary source of epistemological authority, making all knowledge essentially theological. Philosophers began to supplant theologians between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. However, their work was often seen as too abstract to have immediate practical consequences.
Around 1750, early natural scientists — a term that didn’t yet exist — began to argue that the search for truth should be grounded in empirical observation. This process culminated in the separation of two distinct cultures: science, which pursued truth through research, and philosophy, which sought moral laws through speculation. This division created a clear conceptual split between what is factually true and what is morally just. As the Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso later put it, they had replaced “the dreams of the theologians and the phantasms of the metaphysicians” with a few “dry facts.”
The second complex context was the aftermath of the French Revolution, which also profoundly influenced the development of the social sciences. This period gave rise to a new ideology that required a new, systematic way of understanding and managing society.
Centrist Liberalism, the defining ideology of capitalist modernity, imposed itself in four crucial spheres. The first was the creation of the modern nation-state. The second was the exclusive concept of citizenship, which excluded women, the working classes, and ethnic/racial others. The third was the private property regime. The fourth was the emergence of the social sciences as an organized study of the social world, distinguished from “humanities” and “natural sciences.”
The social sciences were absolutely crucial to the liberal project. In their earliest form, they functioned as a social movement for liberal reforms. When thinkers like Mirabeau and Condorcet first used the term “social science,” they spoke of it as a “social art” — a rational guide for public policy and social reconstruction, developed in organizations known as “social science associations.” The earliest of these was the Manchester Statistical Association, followed by The Social Science Association and, later, the American Social Science Association. All early social science positivists (such as Comte, Mill, and Spencer) believed that “social science theory was meant, in the end, to lead to the regeneration of social order.” Knowledge, for them, had to be useful and practical, and in that sense, profoundly political.
Anthony Giddens made an important and revealing point when he noted that “the early sociology of Emile Durkheim was rooted in an attempt to defend the claims of political liberalism in the face of a twin challenge: from conservatism on the one hand, and from socialism on the other.” When Albion Small sought to convince authorities to allow him to found the American Journal of Sociology, he wrote that a journal was “needed both to restrain the utopians and to encourage well-advised attempts at social cooperation.”
Social sciences, influenced by these ideas, continued to develop in the late 19th century. Despite the manifest success of some reformers, there was a push to break away from the social science associations and create new professional-academic structures. This new locus for the social organization of science was the research university, which assumed a central role in the production, and not merely the reproduction, of knowledge.
This was a very different kind of institution from the medieval university. Scholars earned their salaries within it and worked full-time in academic departments based on distinctions between disciplines — defined as a vocabulary plus an organization, a journal, and a conference. Constructing such a structure took time; Oxford, for instance, adopted new statutes in 1800 and 1817.
More importantly, the rise of the research university was intimately linked to the rise of the modern nation-state. Newly minted professional historians were sent to mine archives to discover the “memory” of these modern states. In Eric Hobsbawm’s memorable phrase, “historians [were] to nationalism what poppy-growers [were] to heroin addicts: we suppl[ied] the essential raw material for the market.”
After the Paris Commune in 1871, history became absolutely central to integrating the state. Eric Hobsbawm argued that historians invented “the imagery, the symbolism, and the traditions of the Republic to control the working classes.” A main concern of positivist social sciences was precisely to establish a society based on the model of the French Republic instead of the Paris Commune. The Commune liberated itself from the Jacobin myth of the “community of the competent,” reminding the world that the secret of every revolution resides in the creative activity of the masses. This was the real threat — the threat of communal politics, property, knowledge, and luxury — that the social sciences were constructed to manage and dispel.
Thus, historians were tasked with securing the past. To secure the present, however, the state created sociologists, economists, and political scientists. Anthropologists and Orientalists were invented to study non-Western peoples who had not made the evolutionary leap into modernity. Eventually, the social sciences were organized around three axes:
– Past and Present: History and oriental studies for the past; sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science for the present.
– West and Non-West: Sociology, economics, political science, and history for the West; anthropology and oriental studies for the non-West.
– Liberal Organization of Society: The state (political science), the market (economics), and civil society (sociology).
By the turn of the twentieth century, the three-part organization of the university — humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences — was well-established and stable, though not immune to challenges.
Arguably the first challenge to the modern organization of knowledge appeared as an indirect result of the Second World War in the form of area studies. Cold War geo-politics required new regional knowledge; for example, during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, academics suddenly became experts on “inner Asia.” Oriental studies and anthropology, as traditionally conceived, began to lose their intellectual legitimacy.
But an even more important challenge to the modern structures of knowledge came from outside the university: the world-revolution of 1968 pushed the disciplines toward a fiercely self-reflective and critical direction, which undermined the stability of the disciplines and the project of social science as a whole.
The most serious challenge came from above. Beginning in the 1980s, agencies of neoliberal capitalism started pushing for the defunding, bureaucratization, and restructuring of the humanities and social sciences. This included the university system itself as the main locus of knowledge production. If the period after World War II had seen a great worldwide expansion of the university system, in recent years its very existence has been called into question.
Today, we find ourselves working within knowledge structures that are confused, not as useful as they once were, and searching for a way to survive organizationally in a moment of world-systemic, which, of course, also means world-ecological crisis. Social sciences are constructed visions of a changing world, and it is inevitable that they will be reconstructed. The key question is how they will be reorganized and by whom. Will the change come from a social movement from the top down or from the bottom up?
Searching for a Social Science
The only viable alternative project is the undisciplining of the social sciences and the idea of a singular social science, what Abdullah Öcalan terms the Sociology of Freedom. His proposal builds on the experience of four protest movements within the world of social sciences from the early twentieth century.
The first movement to challenge the prevailing order in the positivist world of social sciences was associated with Staatswissenschaften, an intellectual lineage that can be traced back to Friedrich List and forward to Veblen, Schumpeter, and Polanyi. The second was anti-dogmatic, historically grounded Marxism from below, a political and intellectual project especially prominent around the English journal Past and Present, founded by members of the Historians Group in the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Then came the Annales School as the French manifestation, grouped around a journal of the same name, and the Fernand Braudel Center in Binghamton as the American part of this international intellectual constellation. All four of these schools advocated for the analysis of economies over a long historical period and across a large geographical space, emphasizing the totality of the socio-historical process and the transitory nature of theories.
These schools stand in deliberate opposition to the universalizing theories of the nineteenth-century, state-centered social sciences. Those theories were, in essence, an attempt to reify the existing global situation into eternal truths, asserting that “what exists is what it has to be.”
The first argument for a unitary historical social science was put forth by the sociologist François Simiand. In 1903, he published a fascinating text — a manifesto, really — titled Historical Method and Social Sciences. In it, he laid out a program that would place history at the very heart of the other social sciences, or, to use Simiand’s own expression, “of social science in the singular.”
In Simiand’s opinion, nothing fundamentally divides the social sciences, neither their objects (the study of social phenomena) nor their methods. His work critiques the notion of progress and the project of a single, positive social science, arguing that an isolated fact is meaningless. He proposed that history should reshape itself along the lines of other social sciences; more precisely, that it should become a social science in its entirety, changing its methods to produce objects of study comparable to those of sociologists, economists, and geographers, according to homologous rules.
Simiand assumed, without question, the existence of a unified model of reference. Curiously, his vision does not resemble interdisciplinarity as it is understood today. In his article, Simiand sought to overthrow the “three idols of the historian’s tribe:” the political, the individual, and the chronological. (1978:10) He wrote:
From this point of view, one sees immediately that an individual phenomenon, unique in its species, does not have a cause, since it cannot be explained by a constant relation with another phenomenon… History must turn its back on the unique phenomenon and grasp repetitive facts, i.e., put away what is accidental in order to attach itself to what is regular, eliminate what is individual in order to study what is social. (1978: 10)
This polemical text seems to constitute a crucial theoretical matrix. It defines the relationship between the historian and the other social sciences in terms that, a hundred years later, have barely changed, at least formally.
One could also argue that the entire Annales School is virtually contained within his definition: history as a problem, the search for models, the long term (la longue durée), the convergence of the social sciences, and even the encouragement of collective work and the research project.
Simiand’s idea of history, albeit with important corrections, was later made the philosophical foundation of the Annales School 26 years after his initial publication. In fact, if you look at the editorial policy of founders Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, its first distinguishing feature is the attention given to publications from different social sciences. No other historical journal had ever attached such importance to new developments outside the domain of history proper.
This, however, is only one aspect of Bloch and Febvre’s deliberate intention to destroy the traditional barriers isolating history from the social sciences. Another equally important aspect was their effort to organize collective research and to standardize information, making it possible to compare data across different periods and countries. This new model of historical practice launched by the Annales journal clearly attests to a new approach to history and social sciences.
Bloch and Febvre spoke out against the disciplinary compartmentalization that separated historians from those who studied contemporary societies and economies. They assigned the journal the task of unifying the field of social sciences through empirical means, by “example and fact.” (1978:13) The journal’s very structure made this project clear. The first issue of Annales in 1929 opened with a statement “to our readers,” in which Bloch and Febvre complained of the “evils engendered by a divorce that has become traditional” — both the divorce between historians and those who study contemporary economies and societies, and the divorce within history itself among “cloistered” groups of specialists. “It is,” they said, “against these fearful schisms that we intend to stand. Not by means of methodological articles or theoretical disquisitions. But by example and by deed.” (1978: 13)
This commitment was reflected in their famous aphorism, “Histoire science du passé, science du présent” (History, a science of the past, a science of the present). This phrase stands in dialectical opposition to the dictum of the progenitor of positivist-empiricist history, Leopold von Ranke, that history must be written “as it really was” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). For Febvre, this historical social science was a “combat.” When Fernand Braudel took over the editorship in 1957, he stated that Annales would continue to stand for “history pushed to its outer limits, into the very heart of all the sciences that study man; and up to the contemporary instant, filled with the dangerous flames of the event,” (1978: 16) that very event whose episodic quality Annales had always warned against.
To summarize, the first manifesto for a unitary historical social science was the work of a sociologist, Francois Simiand, and for a long time, it was restricted to the fringes of the university and the social world. This presents a paradox: a program for the unification of the social sciences, based on a sociological model conceived by a relatively marginal figure at the beginning of the 20th century, was then taken up by a group of historians who were themselves initially on the periphery but became progressively less so. It is not without significance that these two foundational statements were pronounced from the edges of the institutions of knowledge.
From “Inter” to “Uni-”disciplinarity
In 1969, Fernand Braudel, now a leading figure of the Annales School, published an essay on history and the longue durée. Braudel opened by declaring a “general crisis of the human sciences.” He called for a “necessary convergence” of these fragmented pieces of knowledge. Braudel ended his famous essay with a programmatic statement proposing three key elements for this convergence: mathematization, narrowing in on a locality, and the longue durée. (1969 a:80) He believed these elements would help transcend the positivist division between particular (idiographic) and general (nomothetic) methods.
Few month later, in his article The Unity and Diversity of the Social Sciences, Braudel further developed his idea of a unified social science, urging scholars to “move forward to unity” and to “skip stages” if intellectually useful. He rejected the notion that history and sociology were separate disciplines, describing them instead as “a single adventure of the mind” and “the entire cloth itself, in all the complexity of its threads.”(1969 c:97)
In a provocative conclusion, Braudel called for a “reconciliation” and “new music” (1984: 20) among the social sciences. He advocated for a “generalized promiscuity” among disciplines, a distinctive approach he termed “interscience.” (1969b: 89) This was not an interdisciplinary collaboration but a profound mixing of all sciences, including philosophy and philology. For Braudel, interscience was a singular historical social science — a fully interwoven cloth, not a collaboration between distinct fields.
Braudel’s call for interscience was a direct challenge to the police logic of the academic disciplines, which he saw as outdated and restrictive. He sought a new politics of social science that rejected the rigid distribution of disciplinary competencies.
However, Braudel underestimated the opposition to his program. His proposal was considered outrageous and was largely dis- missed by polite academic society.
The reception of Braudel’s work in the United States was, contrary to popular belief, initially quite cold. The so-called “golden legend” of the Annales School’s success in America obscures a far more critical reality from the liberal academic establishment. Most of the Annales’ most significant works were not given serious consideration by influential American social scientists. For instance, when the second edition of The Mediterranean was published in 1966, historian Bernard Bailyn’s review revealed this hostility. He found the book “incomprehensible” and largely dismissed Braudel’s extensive sections on demography and geography as irrelevant. Instead, Bailyn focused on the final section concerning politics and diplomacy, which he considered the only relevant part. Other influential figures echoed this sentiment. In a review for the New York Review of Books, J.H. Elliott concluded that the first volume of Braudel’s work was a “failure” because it didn’t explain the Battle of Lepanto — a singular political event that Braudel’s work intentionally moved away from. Similarly, J.H. Plumb’s review in the New York Times Book Review launched an attack on what he called Braudel’s geographic, economic, or biological determinism. The rejection of Braudel’s work by the American academy likely wasn’t due to its language or occasional complexity. Rather, it was a fundamental challenge to the core assumptions of the liberal intelligentsia, particularly its commitment to elitist, disciplinary specialization and a Lockean, event-driven interpretation of history. Braudel’s work, which emphasized long-term structures and the interconnectedness of all social phenomena, was a direct threat to this positivist worldview. Regardless, Annales were very successful — perhaps even too successful. Indeed, some would say they became the Establishment; at the very least they were awarded the status of a decisive intellectual authority. But the intellectual victory had its price: interscience disappeared, and the Annales school was at times distorted from a totalistic perspective into a totalizing description of all that exists, as well as into an empiricist quantification remote from the original concerns of the school. Traian Stoianovitch, quite rightly in my opinion, criticized the new Annales for fragmentation, or splintering, that set forth a sort of “placid interdisciplinarity.” Possibly, the answer is that, from the 1950s on, theories about structural history, the primacy of the “longue durée,” and the equation of politics with events — and thus with superficiality — have in many circles been raised to a kind of dogma. As is perhaps well known, Immanuel Wallerstein had a slightly different explanation. He stated that resistance has its perils, and that the greatest peril of resistance is success. Within a capitalist world-economy, those who resist are either crushed or rewarded, rewarded in order to be crushed more subtly. And those who resist often lend themselves to the boa constrictor’s embrace. The school of the Annales — for school there is, despite Bloch, despite Febvre, despite Braudel — is more guilty of creeping cooptation than other schools of resistance. When the Fernand Braudel Center (FBC) was established in 1976, the Annales School was no longer an anti-establishment movement; they were co-opted into a scholarly mainstream. Recognizing this, Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins consciously developed a new intellectual program. They adopted the Annales’ infrastructure, including research groups, collective work, and a journal, the Review. The first issue of the Review made it clear that the journal would oppose the disciplinary universalization of truth and its division into specialized sectors. Wallerstein explicitly referenced Braudel’s concept of “interscience,” and advocated for a historical social science based on quantitative, qualitative, and longue durée approaches. The term “unidisciplinarity” was used at the FBC to describe this approach. Scholars saw themselves as “students of long-term, large-scale social change.” Historical social science was a rejection of the mainstream social sciences, which they viewed as pluralistic, individualistic, and nationalistic — assuming the existence of many distinct societies that could be compared. The world systems approach inverted this idea, positing that there is only one unit of analysis: the world-system itself. Everything else is a part of this singular unit. The innovation of scholars like Wallerstein and Hopkins was not simply in studying a longer time frame or a larger geographical unit. Instead, it was their proposal for a new historical social science that took the capitalist world-economy as a singular unit of analysis, representing a radical theoretical and methodological departure from traditional approaches. World-systems analysis developed its own “golden legend” of success, with journals, research centers, and a section within the American Sociological Association (ASA). However, as a world-systems scholar and the current editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research (JWSR), I find it difficult to ignore a troubling parallel to the later Annales School. The JWSR, now an official ASA journal, receives contributions almost exclusively from sociologists. During a recent presentation of my own synthesis of Hegelian Marxism, Braudelian history, and Kropotkinian Anthropology, I was met with blank stares and a quick return to discussions of “dependent variables and statistical tables.” This experience felt eerily familiar to the fragmentation and splintering that plagued the later Annales. Perhaps it is time to declare that the world-systems movement has been rewarded and subtly crushed by the very discipline of sociology it sought to oppose. The movement achieved a modicum of mainstream success, only to be absorbed and its radical ideas neutralized by the very structures it challenged.
The Promise of a Sociology of Freedom
Today we enter the new cycle of epistemic struggle. Several years ago, Abdullah Öcalan issued his call for a new kind of social science, which he terms a Sociology of Freedom. His words bear striking resemblance to Braudel’s and Wallerstein: “Overcoming the crisis in the social sciences is a priority.” Social sciences, Öcalan argues, are Eurocentric concepts, damaged concepts, and political concepts: How, asks Öcalan, can we separate the idea of scientific truth from that of a true society?
He continues:
“A social science that makes social nature as a whole in all places and at all times the topic of research has two tasks: On the one hand, it must provide a direction for physics, chemistry, biology, and cosmology, all of which are basically connected to society, and, on the other hand, it must orient the humanities, including philosophy, literature, and the arts. It would bring together the end of separation between truth and freedom. The family tree of science can only be drawn with the social sciences at its root.”
The fundamental unit of analysis of such unified social science is “moral and political society, which I consider to be the very state of existence of social nature…The ultimate goal of social science is to develop the option of freedom.” Sociology of freedom would be a singular social science, one that defines freedom as awareness of life, and truth as the exploration of freedom. There is a substantial agreement between these intellectuals and their respective schools.
For Öcalan, just like for Braudel and Wallerstein before him, separation of two cultures had led to the search for good society being effectively eliminated from the world of knowledge and the search for the truth circumscribed into the world of microscopic positivism. To overcome the crisis of social sciences is to recognize that knowledge is a singular enterprise and that there are no fundamental contradictions of how we may know the natural and social world. They are both integral parts of the same universe, and the truth cannot be separated from fantasy, art, beauty, and justice, and other such things that positivists so neurotically reject. In this way, social science could be a crucial link connecting natural sciences and humanities.
We still inhabit the world of knowledge marked by the separation between truth and justice, the worshipful world of facts and fragments against which François Simiand wrote his manifesto for a unified historical social science in 1903. Once again, we must begin from the periphery, from the margins — like Simiand, like Febvre, like Wallerstein — and this is a good thing. The challenge is how to avoid being crushed or co-opted this time. I believe the mistake Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein made was to focus too much on the new forces within universities at the center of capitalist civilization. To reach our destination, we must instead build from the cracks — from knowledge-making institutions that exist within, against, and beyond the world of mainstream universities.
The Academy of Social Science proposes that we reject the liberal organization of knowledge and its state-centered science. Our task is to create intellectual structures that serve the struggle for a new democratic civilization. If the old social sciences functioned as a social movement for liberal reform, then the new social science must become a social movement for democratic civilization. Liberalism imposed an organization of knowledge around the triad of market, state, and society. By contrast, the revolution in Rojava and the Kurdish democratic tradition have offered us a very different trinity: women, life, and freedom. The new social science should be organized around the study of these three categories — defined as broadly as possible — as an integrated knowledge of women, freedom, and nature. I propose that we return to Braudel’s three éléments of preliminary convergence in the human sciences — quantitative studies and general laws, qualitative studies of particularity and difference, and long-term, large-scale research — as the basis for developing a more sophisticated restatement of a common epistemology. From this foundation, we can begin to imagine a world confederation of institutions of knowledge-making: a democratic network of research centers, academic programs, social movement universities, community schools and academies, and academic journals, working together to articulate a new vision of scientia — a vision that affirms freedom as awareness of life, and truth as the exploration of freedom. Such integral knowledge is desperately needed today, in a time when a morbid form of universal fascism permeates both the thought and practice of the ruling classes. But we will not be able to create this knowledge if we remain “realistic.” Or, to reverse the logic, if we are to be truly realistic then we must demand the “impossible.” To refuse reality is to confront a crisis deeper than politics, economy, or society, for even our language itself must be recovered and relearned — so that, as the Lebanese poet so beautifully put it, we may finally write the words that speak. To write those words, and to share them with ordinary people, is not only the idea but the mission of the Academy of Social Science. It is a call to arms for a new intellectual struggle: to dismantle the old structures of knowledge, to construct new ones, and to make of social science itself a movement for women, for life, and for freedom.
References
Braudel, Fernand (1969a). “Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée,” in Ecrits sur l’histoire. Paris: Flammarion, 41-83 [originally in Annales E.S.C., No. 4, oct.-déc. 1958, 725-53].
Braudel, Fernand (1969b). “Unité et diversité des sciences de l’homme,” in Ecrits sur l’histoire. Flammarion, 85-96
[originally in Revue de l’enseignement supérieur, No. 1, 1960, 17-22].
Braudel, Fernand (1969c). “Histoire et sociologie,” in Ecrits sur l’histoire. Paris: Flammarion, 97-[originally ch. IV of Traité de sociologie, publié sous la direction de Georges Gurvitch, Presses Universitaires de France, 2 vol., 1958–60].
Braudel, Fernand (1984).”Une vie pour l’histoire,” Magazine Littéraire, No. 212, nov., 18-24
Revel, Jacques 1978. “The Annales: Continuities and Discontinuities,” in Review (Fernand Braudel Center) , Vol. 1, No. 3/4, 1978, 9-18.
