Historical Social Science (Historische Sozialwissenschaft)

Definition

Historische Sozialwissenschaft — "historical social science" — is the West German historiographical current that established itself in the 1960s and 1970s under the leadership of the so-called Bielefeld school (Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka, and others), turning to U.S.-influenced social-science history as the means to modernize German historical studies. In the source volume it is the principal adversary of Alltagsgeschichte. Its creed is "the primacy of structural analysis, or 'big structures, large processes, huge comparisons'" (Eley, p. vii), and it takes as the central historical processes of recent centuries "the expansion of market relations, the implementation of wage labor and the increased division of labor, bureaucratization and 'modern' forms of the central state" (Lüdtke, p. 6). Its key weaknesses, per Medick: it defines the mediation of subjective and objective dimensions as "a problem of combining methodological approaches," remains "caught up in the categorical dichotomy of the subjective and objective," and treats culture only as "a social subsystem that is relatively static and closed off upon itself" (Medick, pp. 43–44).

Key Thinkers

• Hans-Ulrich Wehler — the movement's leading figure and alltagsgeschichte's most dismissive critic ("bland, conventional oatmeal"; the "microhistorical broom cupboard").
• Jürgen Kocka — the more nuanced critic; the charge of a "new irrationalism," and the demand for "large-scale contours, big patterns."
• Alf Lüdtke — the volume's sustained answer to the school.
• Hans Medick — the critique of its "technocratic interposition" of method for self-enlightenment.
• Jürgen Habermas — the adjacent "colonization of the life world" thesis, which Lüdtke finds subtler but still insufficient.
• Pierre Bourdieu — cited by Lüdtke as a corrective to crude determination/autonomy binaries.

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — its dissentient opponent.
• Lebensweise — the structural category it privileges, against Alltag.
• Historical Anthropology — the turn away from its structuralism.
• History from Below — the alternative orientation.
• Modernization (no page yet) — the teleology alltagsgeschichte questions.
• Organized Complexity — a differently framed alternative to "big structures."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Eley's foreword (pp. vii–xi); Lüdtke's Introduction, especially "The History of Everyday Life: A New 'Irrationalism'?" (pp. 9–12) and "Uneven Changes and Patchwork Composites" (pp. 15–17); Medick's "Terminus a Quo: Shortcomings in Social History in the 1960s and 1970s" (pp. 43–46); the volume's repeated rebuttals of Wehler and Kocka.

Open Questions

• Was the critique of historical social science a genuine methodological revolution, or a generational-political conflict within a single discipline?
• Can alltagsgeschichte actually answer the school's demand to explain large-scale formations (states, classes, capitalism), or does it only supplement them?