Johan Heilbron: "Towards a Historical Sociology of the Social and Human Sciences"

Research presentation by Johan Heilbron, Uppsala University and Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP-CNRS-EHESS).

Abstract:

The historical understanding of the social and human sciences (SHS) has, over the past decades, gone through a major shift from predominantly presentist to historicist accounts. Various programs for historicizing the SHS have shaped the formation of a subfield of ‘SHS studies,’ as it may be called, and contributed to significant changes in the (self)understanding of the disciplines involved. While the institutionalization of this subfield is relatively weak and its intellectual unity quite limited, a major challenge today is to go beyond the approaches that have defined the broadly ‘historicist’ turn (Cambridge contextualism, German Begriffsgeschichte, neo-institutionalism). In my talk I will argue that historical sociology represents a fruitful, general framework for ‘SSH studies’, and that the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in particular, provides some guiding principles. After presenting these, I will indicate some research areas that seem particularly significant for such a historical sociological program.