The ArgumentThis essay attempts to show the decisive importance of the “scientific discipline” for any historical or sociological analysis of modern science. There are two reasons for this:1. A discontinuity can be observed at the beginning of modern science: the “discipline,” which up until that time had been a classificatorily generated unit of the ordering of knowledge for purposes of instruction in schools and universities, develops into a genuine and concrete social system of scientific communication. Scientific disciplines as concrete systems (...) (Realsysteme) arise as a result of (a) the communicative stabilization of “scientific communities” at the end of the eighteenth century and the formation of “appropriate” roles and organizational structures (in universities); (b) the structural differentiation of the new scientific disciplines from the established professions (law, theology, medicine) in Europe; (c) the formation of scientific communication in the standardized form of scientific publication; the distinction of the separate action-type “scientific research” and the differentiation of these two elementary acts of all future scientific endeavor in relation to each other.2. The scientific discipline as primary unit of the internal differentiation of science has, since its genesis, been stabilized by two conditions: (a) The fact of a science differentiated into a plurality of (competing, mutually stimulating) disciplinary perspectives becomes the chief causal factor underlying the developmental dynamism of modern science; (b) Similar to the way in which the discipline functions as a cognitive address within the system of science, science also links the discipline up as a structural unit (utilized in both systems) with curricular structures in the system of education — i.e., it is stabilized by the central system/environment relation of science. (shrink)

This article draws on results from a long-term research program carried out by the Science Centre Berlin for Social Research (WZB) and the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS) on the history and sociology of the social sciences. The transformations of the discourses on society is outlined in the three major periods of transformations that have occurred in the age of modernity in Europe since the late 18th century. These three transformations have all involved a fundamental (...) restructuring of the key political, economic and discursive institutions. The article outlines these institutional transformation and their mutual linkages and social embeddedness with special reference to problems of societal knowledge, technology and identity. (shrink)

Why did nineteenth‐century German historians and physicists habitually warn against vices that they believed philosophers in particular embodied: speculation, absence of common sense, and excessive systematizing? Drawing on a rich array of sources, this article interprets this vice‐charging as a rhetorical practice aimed at delineating empirical research from Naturphilosophie and Geschichtsphilosophie as practiced in the heyday of German Idealism. The strawman of “the philosopher” as invoked by historians and physicists served as a negative model for strongly empiricist scholars committed to (...) virtues like precision, thoroughness, and conscientiousness. In their historical narratives, historians and physicists consistently depicted philosophy either as a relic from the past or as a phase that they had virtuously left behind. This boundary work was central to the self‐positioning of both history and physics, which makes clear that the persona of the philosopher mattered not only to philosophers but also to scholars in adjacent disciplines. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis essay discusses Hans Aarsleff's long battle to demonstrate the importance of the French and British thinkers of the mid-eighteenth century to the development of modern linguistic thought. Contesting claims that German scholars were the first to develop historicised theories of language, Aarsleff, along with his Princeton colleagues Lionel Gossman and Anthony Grafton, helped pioneer longue durée studies of the history of philology and of historiography that cross national boundaries as well as the so-called Sattelzeit. Although the importance of his (...) work was, for a long time, little appreciated by modern intellectual historians, this essay argues that it is time that we fully learned Aarsleff's lessons. (shrink)