Centres Can be Where You Find Them

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague during the week where he asked me which of the social sciences had the intellectual vitality of economics in the past twenty years and I replied social theory. He though this was ridiculous just as I was unhappy with embracing as science a discipline that thinks the objects of its theories are irrational if they do not fulfill its expectations. That conversation came to mind later when I was discussing our department with a friend, another academic, who was visiting from Canada. He is an enthusiast for intellectual history and a particular fan of Pocock and was wondering where we were on this. As anyone who knows the University of Sussex will know that is a complicated question, but it came up in a useful way as we had been discussing what had happened to the humanities after the collapse of academic Marxism as a dominant trend in the early eighties. Game theory, in its many forms has moved in to occupy much of the space that had been occupied by that body of thought and we agreed, though many others might not, that the move to cultural history as a response had not been a success because it offered so little to explain either long term trends or account for agency and contingency. So if you are interested in providing complex and rich accounts of change that do have agency and plurality built into them intellectual history offers a rigorous position from which to work.

It is not the only such position though and as we were talking I was thinking through the way that within our history department intellectual history is in debate with at least two alternative possibilities for a revivified humanities. The children of Thompson, or in Sussex's case more properly Briggs, have made social history a far more intellectually nimble discipline. They have absorbed the really important contribution made by cultural history that social identity and economic function are only loosely aligned, but turned that into a powerful interpretative position. The history of science, and its aligned programmes in the histories of technology and environment, are where the ideas derived from social theory are most relevant. That field points in two directions. It offers a bridge from nature to culture, working very hard to eliminate the difference between natural and human knowledge. It also can handle the most difficult questions of social epistemology, that is, it addresses how the very categories we organise the world and act through get generated. What makes the department an interesting place to think, is that these three strong programmes are well represented and beautifully practiced within it.

So a better answer to my colleague would have been to acknowledge that while no discipline has been as successful as economics in offering us powerful tools, but that right now the really interesting debates about what will next structure the humanities are happening right in front of us.