Answer to Question #254581 in History for Mimi

Question

What are birth defects of modern social science and humanities (Conrad what is global history)p3-4

How has these birth defects shaped writing of world history?

Answer 1

The two birth defects of modern social science and humanities include;

1] The genesis of the social sciences and humanities was tied to the nation-state.

2]  The modern academic disciplines were deeply Eurocentric.

These birth defects have really shaped the writing of world history; They placed European developments in the foreground and saw Europe as the central driving force of world history.  In their themes and questions, and even in their societal function, fields like history, sociology, and philology remained tied to a country’s own society. Beyond that, the “methodological nationalism” of the academic disciplines meant that, theoretically, the nation-state was presupposed as the fundamental unit of investigation, a territorial entity that served as a “container” for a society. The commitment to territorially bounded containers was more pronounced in the field of history than in some of its neighboring disciplines. Knowledge of the world was thereby discursively and institutionally prestructured in such a way as to obscure the role of exchange relationships. History, in most quarters, was limited to national history.