Description: A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences includes essays on the ways in which the histories of history, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science have been written since the Second World War. Bringing together chapters written by the leading historians of each discipline establishes significant parallels and contrasts and makes the case for a comparative interdisciplinary historiography. This comparative approach helps explain historiographical developments on the basis of factors specific to individual disciplines and the social, political, and intellectual developments that go beyond individual disciplines. All historians, including historians of the different social sciences, encounter literatures with which they are not familiar. This book will provide a broader understanding of the different ways in which the history of the social sciences, and by extension intellectual history, is written.
Brief description: Philippe Fontaine is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at École Normale Supérieure de Cachan. In 2003-4, he was Ludwig Lachmann Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the coeditor of The History of the Social Sciences since 1945 (Cambridge, 2010); The Unsocial Social Science?: Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945 (2010); and The Experiment in the History of Economics (2005). He has written for a number of journals, including the British Journal of Sociology, Economics and Philosophy, History of Political Economy, Isis, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, and Science in Context. He has been the associate editor of Revue de philosophie économique. In 2005, he received the Best Article Award from the Forum for History of Human Science. In 2008, he was the recipient of the prix d'excellence en sciences sociales from Foundation Mattei Dogan/CNRS.
Review Quotes: '... this volume could be better considered to be a reference work for the historiographies of the modern social disciplines, and, if so, one I do recommend.' Marcel Boumans, Journal of the History of Economic Thought