Abstract
This chapter compares the histories of the international political science and sociology associations, and shows how these histories change our understanding of the transnational development of political science and sociology from the 1950s onwards. It challenges three common ways of narrating the history of the social sciences. Rather than presenting the institutionalization of disciplines as a byproduct of their intellectual autonomization, the chapter shows that the emergence of associations largely preceded that of disciplines, and participated to the creation of the new social roles of “political scientist” and “sociologist”. Rather than describing the transnational development of political science and sociology by focusing on a single discipline, it argues that there is virtue in approaching these disciplines in a relational and comparative way, in order to highlight interactions, circulations, and struggles both within and between disciplines. Rather than analyzing the internationalization of the social sciences as a single mechanism driving them all in the same direction (e.g. that of an “Americanization”), it shows that internationalization is a plural process that takes different forms and shapes sciences in different ways depending on disciplinary, social, and political contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
Corrado Gini, a prominent member of the Italian section of IIS, was thus “perhaps unwittingly, a spokesman of fascism”, as he “propounded an evolutionary conception of biological, demographic, cultural and social change that openly lent support to the regime” (Losito and Segre 1992: 50).
- 2.
This graph takes into account membership figures only for congress years, as more precise data could not be gathered in the case of the ISA. In the case of IPSA, yearly data shows that the association experiences significant drops in its membership during non-congress years. As pointed out by Platt (1998), this is also the case for ISA and a number of other international social science associations.
- 3.
This fragility was made visible by the fact that both associations were left on the verge of bankruptcy by difficult congresses, organized respectively in Uppsala for ISA (in 1978) and in Moscow for IPSA (in 1979).
- 4.
This evolution could be described as an “autonomization ”, as younger generations claimed to produce a science more autonomous from politics and neutral than their predecessors. This would, however, obscure the fact that this conception of scientific rationality was itself a product of the specific political climate of the Cold War (Solovey 2012; Erickson et al. 2013).
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Boncourt, T. (2018). What “Internationalization” Means in the Social Sciences. A Comparison of the International Political Science and Sociology Associations. In: Heilbron, J., Sorá, G., Boncourt, T. (eds) The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73299-2_4
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