Open the Social Sciences: 30 Years

Concerned about the worldwide state of the social sciences—the relations among the disciplines, and their relationship with both the humanities and the natural sciences—the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, based in Lisbon, established in 1993 the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. It comprised a distinguished international group of scholars—six from the social sciences, two from the natural sciences, and two from the humanities. They were: Immanuel Wallerstein (chair), Calestous Juma, Evelyn Fox Keller, Jürgen Kocka, Dominique Lecourt, Valentin Y. Mudimbe, Kinhide Mushakoji, Ilya Prigogine, Peter J. Taylor, Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

The report first explores how social science was historically constructed as a form of knowledge and why it was divided into a specific set of relatively standard disciplines in a process that went on between the late eighteenth century and 1945. It then reveals the ways in which world developments since 1945 have raised questions about this intellectual division of labor and have therefore reopened the issues of organizational structuring that had been put into place in the previous period. The report goes on to elucidate a series of basic intellectual questions about which there has been much recent debate. Finally, it discusses in what ways the social sciences can be intelligently restructured in the light of this history and the recent debates.

2026 marks 30 years since the publication of the report by Stanford University Press in 1996. The Wallerstein Institute, in conjunction with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Paris, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, the Institut d’études avancées, and the Immanuel Wallerstein Chair in Córdoba, Argentina, is organizing a roundtable discussion on the last 30 years, and the continued importance of the report for the next.

Location Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris. Date TBA.