Rethinking Current Social Sciences: The Case of Historical Discourses in the History of Modernity

Abstract

Since 1968, it has been apparent that the entire “system of branches of knowledge” regarding the social domain, which dated from 1870 to 1968, has entered into a total and irreversible crisis. Established in the last third of the nineteenth century, and having been deployed during the ?rst half of the twentieth century, this particular “episteme” regarding the social domain—which conceived the latter as a sum or aggregate of spaces, segmented, distinct and even autonomous among one another; spaces that in turn corresponded to the different and equally autonomous social sciences or disciplines—was progressively questioned. It ?nally began showing its general epistemological limits, permanently entering into an insurmountable crisis period as a result of the impacts of the 1968 cultural revolution.