The social sciences are not a bounded, autonomous arena and are located largely, but not exclusively, within the university system. So, they must be considered in the context of the evolution of modern structures of knowledge and the institutional university framework.

When social sciences were institutionalised in the late nineteenth century, there were scholars who tended towards the humanities, and others who leaned towards the methodologies and techniques of natural sciences, emphasizing the parallel between human processes and universal laws. Economics, sociology, and political science were considered positioned in the scientific category, while the others were ready to embrace the scientific emphasis on empirical data but balked at the notion of universal generalizations.

The post Second World War period saw the rise of area studies and cultural studies, and the rapid expansion of the university system as also the number of social scientists. Social sciences became so diverse that it was felt by some that the term lacked any real meaning. Some even felt that it had too many meanings.

However, the new millennium began with intellectual and organizational challenges and considerable uncertainty about the validity of the disciplinary boundaries within social sciences – the consequent demarcations in academia of natural science, humanities, and social science. This happens to be a period of transition for the university as an educational institution. And the search for reconciling the true and the good, when the object of study was social reality, challenged the claim of natural science that it had a monopoly on the search for the truth.

Social scientists are accustomed to the problem of establishing normative frameworks, and natural sciences have been pushed by contemporary knowledge movements towards the intermediate terrain of social sciences. Admittedly, philosophical queries are scientific queries as well. Here lies the rub. There lies a widespread confusion between the terms “education” and “literacy”.

Literacy deals with skills and information, education with knowledge and wisdom. Skills and information are the domain of professional courses while knowledge and wisdom are the intent of social sciences. Unfortunately, skills with knowledge and information with wisdom are confused. While one cannot deny the importance of good mechanics, managers and financiers, the fact remains that social systems are neither created nor sustained by mechanics and managers but by philosophers, artists, and scientists as well.

Mechanics and managers merely comprise the service sector of the society. Vocational skills have the basis purpose of supporting existing societal power structures. Genuine education, on the other hand, can never be the handmaiden of power brokers. It is an agent of liberation, numinosity, hope. The basic function of education is to enhance the humanizing potential of homo sapiens. The other possible alternative is dehumanization. Between the two, only humanization can be the real vocation of humankind.

The study of social sciences stands as a bulwark against dehumanizing forces. The dehumanizing forces threatening humankind today are those let loose by aspects of technology and economy that have become independent of the human element. Hence the importance of the study of social sciences. One pernicious doctrine to hit the world of letters is of the ‘usefulness’ of education.

The obsession with the earning power of learning ignores the fact that education must be useful in more ways than one, and that the development of an individual goes far beyond the vocational role it is called upon to fulfil. The effect of such doctrine may be seen all around us. We have highly skilled lawyers, doctors and technocrats who are insensitive towards fundamental human values.

Often, the role of education is not to teach how to look but to save from schools that blind. It is the social sciences, far more than the scientific and professional courses, which fulfill this role. The purpose of social sciences is to develop a set of core capabilities that are essential for survival ~ the ability to analyze, introspect, contextualize, and sensitise.

History sensitized us, as we all admit, to the infinite patterns of life and rhythms of human existence and economics to human condition amid widespread poverty. All knowledge is socially rooted. So, the understanding, interpretation and engineering of society will require the deployment of sociology and other social sciences in the quest of the true and the good. Encouragingly, the later decades of the twentieth century could realize the need for interactions of social and physical sciences at a greater level and not just co-existence and cooperation, as they did previously, in most academic and research institutions.

The subjects like environmental economics, resource politics, medical sociology, socio physics, social forestry, gender psychology, water markets, poverty pollution, rural technology and tribal genetics have already been on the academic schedule for quite some time. However, it is not desirable that an interdisciplinary initiative encourage people from the same administrative unit to work together. It would rather be an effort to force intellectual pursuit into an ill-fitting administrative enclosure.

Unlike a discipline, which is much more than a stream of courses, an interdisciplinary project may not serve as a group within which one expert is able to judge another expert’s work. It is imperative that disciplinary experts make recurring management decisions to avoid any confusion arising thereof. Let administrative structures not stand in the way of interdisciplinary research and training.

(The writer, a former Associate Professor, Department of English, Gurudas College, Kolkata, is presently with Rabindra Bharati University)