History in the Humanities and Social Sciences

This is a collaborative research project dedicated to exploring the role of historical inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. In recent decades, a range of disciplines have dispensed with applying historical perspectives to their objects of research. Our aim is to show how this tendency can be fruitfully reversed by setting out the intellectual benefits to be drawn from a return to history.
The network will focus on the uses of history in eight subject areas: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law and literature. Its key participants have been selected for their expertise within their designated fields along with their active preoccupation with the character of historical knowledge. This combination will enable the key participants to examine three essential questions: (i) What is the function of historical research within their own disciplines? (ii) What are the connections linking these diverse modes of historical inquiry? (iii) What, therefore, is the purpose of historical study as such?
Historicism as an approach to understanding the world emerged in various areas of humanistic study in the sixteenth century, and continued to conquer a range of disciplines over the next few hundred years: philology, jurisprudence, political science, economics, belle lettres, and moral philosophy. By the end of the nineteenth century in Germany, historicism had come to be seen as a precondition for any form of knowledge whatsoever. However, the success of the research methods associated with the natural sciences in the twentieth century, combined with the spread of positivism and the progress of specialisation, have led to a fragmentation of purpose within the humanities and social sciences, and various forms of polarisation between theoretical and historical understanding. The overriding objective of this project is to undo these polarities, ascertain the limits of historical reasoning, and reconnect the historical profession with the fundamental questions that animate adjacent disciplines.
The expected gains of historical research are multifarious, and are both substantive and methodological in nature. Each payoff deserves separate and detailed treatment, yet even a list of the primary benefits gives an outline sense of the advantages proposed. For instance, history helps to show us how behaviour has been conditioned, how choices are constrained by the limited options available, and how far outcomes are not the product of deliberately intended goals. Equally it demonstrates how cultural processes are mutually interdependent, and how meanings and values are determined by their contexts. Historical study also offers a paradigmatic illustration of how causal analysis can be conducted in the domain of the human sciences; how anachronism and prolepsis thwart context-sensitive analysis; how the value of impartiality serves the objective of rigour; how the study of human values differs from the treatment of natural objects; how critical procedures should be employed in the evaluation of evidence; and how competing pieces of evidence should be judiciously weighed.
Our goal in pursuing this collaboration is to show how these insights have made and continue to make positive contributions across the humanities and social sciences. Cumulatively, our joint effort is designed to show how the forms of historical practice just outlined constitute vital assets across the human sciences. This network therefore amounts to an experiment in thinking historically about diverse domains of inquiry. We hope to encourage a paradigm shift in how we approach many of the problems faced in our sample disciplines. Our objective is to make plain the dividends that can be expected to flow from such an undertaking. In short, we propose to set out the intellectual advantages that can be expected from a new historical turn in the human sciences.

"History in the Humanities and Social Sciences" will impact on a diverse array of research interests in academia, as well as on society at large. The overarching purpose of the network is to explore the purpose of historical study in a cross-disciplinary context, and to develop as a consequence a fuller sense of the influence of historical understanding on society at large. The potential beneficiaries of the collaboration are extensive, since the network is deliberately designed to bring together a range of academic stakeholders, spanning the eight subject areas represented inside the network: economics, political science, political theory, international relations, sociology, philosophy, law and literature. In this way, the academic significance of the work is intended in the first instance to impact on each of these individual disciplines as well as on research within the human sciences generally.

But while the academic community is intended as a major beneficiary of the network, our goal is to achieve a wider impact on a range of potential "research users", extending to the general public. This wider audience will benefit from the results of our collaboration by being prompted to reflect upon the role of historical understanding in society. We will stimulate this process of reflection by various means, including by organising collaborative events (with the Mile End Institute and the Institute of Public Policy Research) that will publicise our research questions and trigger debate about the implications of our arguments. We also expect this process to impact in turn on our own approach.

In addition to targeted events, we are proposing to engage a wider audience of interlocutors through electronic, print and other media, using these resources in a flexible yet purposeful way. This will inform discussion among a still wider circle of stakeholders, including journalists, policy analysts and figures in public life with a vested interest in the role of history in political and cultural understanding. It is reasonable to expect that generating debate in these sectors will lead to engagement with a multifarious public.

The activities and conclusions of the network have the potential to influence debate about the uses of history in diverse domains of human inquiry from economics to politics and beyond. Our pathways to impact are designed to publicise our work and diffuse its insights into areas of society that already have an investment in the way in which historical narratives shape public understanding of social values and practical possibilities. Ultimately, all members of the public must to some degree share this investment. Our aim is to extend and deepen general engagement with the issue by cumulatively demonstrating how a series of questions arising out of territorial disputes among university faculties are in fact fundamental to our orientation as citizens and voters.

The principal benefits of this network therefore lie in promoting the exchange of ideas around pivotal topics relevant to citizens in general, and in advancing understanding both in universities and outside them of how historical consciousness is molded, and how it forms the world around it.