The hybridization of social science knowledge - Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

A whole army of famous American economists has given priority to the study of political phenomena, even if they have kept one foot in economics. Some eclectic economists denounce the reductionism advocated by other economists, particularly with reference to research on development: development is reduced to economic development; this is reduced to growth; which in turn is reduced to investment - in other words, to accumulation. It has taken several decades to dethrone per capita gross national product as a composite indicator of development. Gunnar Myrdal, the great economist, railed against economists who were in favor of unidisciplinary models.

In many countries, large numbers of economists have locked themselves up in an ivory tower and, as a result, whole areas have escaped their scrutiny. Their contribution to the problem of the development of the Third World, for instance, is rather modest when compared with the work of political scientists and sociologists. This is particularly true in the United States, Latin America, and India.

If a discipline has a tendency to turn in upon itself, if it does not open up enough, if its specialties do not hybridize, the neighboring territories do not remain barren. Many economists have had a somewhat condescending attitude toward political science. This has resulted in the development, side by side and in competition with economics, of a new corporate body, with an extremely active and large membership hi the United States, the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia: political economy, protected by only one of its parents and renamed through the revival of an old name from the French nomenclature of the sciences. Political economy is currently one of the main provinces of American political science with a prolific output and renowned journals. It is one of the most popular sectors among doctoral students in political science. Political science is the greatest beneficiary of the monodisciplinary self-confinement of economics.

Thirty years ago, F.A. Hayek (1956) wrote that "nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist - and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger" (p. 463). It may now be too late for economics to recoup the territories conquered by political science, sociology, economic history, and particularly by political economy. Some economists are still hoping. "It is necessary to reduce the use of the clause ceteris paribus, to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, that is to say to open economics to multidimensionality" (Bartoli, 1991, p. 490). Abandonment of reasoning by assumptions and by theorems would not be enough because the reality has changed: "Economic issues become politicized and political systems become increasingly preoccupied with economic affairs" (Frieden & Lake, 1991, p.5).

CONCLUSION

In the beginning, there were seven academic disciplines: logic, mathematics, geometry, grammar, rhetoric, music, and astrology. These disciplines remained separately sacred until the seventeenth century when a few heretics challenged them. Some time later, the philosopher Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, had built a hierarchy of sciences, with mathematics at the summit and biology at the bottom, followed by a second classification with sociology as the youngest and the most complex discipline. But soon this naive scaffolding was demolished. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the history of science is, first of all, a description of the multiplication of subdisciplines and of new branches of knowledge.