Announcement: The Gulbenkian Commision October 1993 The Fernand Braudel Center announces the composition of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. The Commission is sponsored by the Fundao Calo- uste Gulbenkian, and the Fernand Braudel Center is serving as its Secretariat. The members of the Commission are listed below, with brief biographies of each. The Commis- sion is composed of six persons from the social sciences, two from the physical sci- ences, and two from the humanities. The ob- ject of the work of the Commission is resumed on the reverse side of this announcement. Immanuel WALLERSTEIN, chair of the Commis- sion, sociology, USA. Director of the Fern- and Braudel Center for the Study of Econo- mies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations and Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Binghamton University; author, The Modern World-System (3 vol.), Unthinking Social Science. Calestous JUMA, economics, Kenya. Executive Director, African Centre for Technology Stud- ies; 1991 Pew Scholars Award in Conservation and the Environment; co-author, An Evolution- ary Approach to Economic Growth. Evelyn Fox KELLER, physics, USA. Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Mac- Arthur Fellow, 1992-1997; author, Reflections on Gender and Science. Jrgen KOCKA, history, Germany. Professor of the History of the Industrial World, Freie Universitt, Berlin; permanent Fellow, Wis- senschaftskolleg zu Berlin; author, Gesch- ichte und Aufklrung; editor, Interdiszipli- nariat: Praxis Herausfrderung Ideologie. Dominique LECOURT, philosophy, France. Pro- fesseur de la Philosophie des Sciences, Uni- versit de Paris-VII; author, A quoi donc sert la philosophie? Des sciences de la na- ture aux sciences politiques. Valentin Y. MUDIMBE, Romance languages, Zaire. Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of Romance Languages and Professor of Comparative Liter- ature, Duke University; General Secretary, Society for African Philosophy in North Amer- ica; author, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge. Kinhide MUSHAKOJI, political science, Japan. Professor, Faculty of International Studies, Meiji Gakuin University; former President, International Political Science Association; former Vice-Rector for Programme, United Nations University; President, Japanese Coun- cil for International Affairs; author, Global Issues and Interparadigmatic Dialogue Es- says on Multipolar Politics. Ilya PRIGOGINE, chemistry, Belgium. Nobel Prize for Chemistry, 1977: Director, Insti- tuts Internationaux de Physique et de Chimie; co-author, La nouvelle alliance. Les mtamor- phoses de la science; Exploring Complexity. Peter J. TAYLOR, geography, UK. Professor of Political Geography, University of Newcastle- upon-Tyne; editor, Political Geography Quar- terly; author, Political Geography: World- Economy, Nation-State and Locality. Michel-Rolph TROUILLOT, anthropology, Haiti. Director of the Institute for Global Studies in Culture, Power & History and Professor of Anthropology, The Johns Hopkins University; Chair, Advisory Council, Wenner-Gren Founda- tion for Anthropological Research; author, Peasants and Capital. Dominica in the World Economy. Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences: Its Objectives The rationale for such a Commission is a certain appreciation of the historical devel- opment of the historical social sciences. The nineteenth century saw a double development vis--vis the social sciences. First there emerged the idea of the "three cultures" as Wolf Lepenies calls it: that is, that the arts and sciences (what in medieval universi- ties was called philosophy as opposed to theology, law, and medicine) were really divided into three separate domains: the natural sciences at one end, the humanities (or belles-lettres plus philosophy) at the other end, and the social sciences in the middle (for some history being part of the social sciences, for others it being part of the humanities). Secondly, the social scienc- es were in turn divided into distinct "disci- plines". The names that were finally and widely agreed upon were (besides history) economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. There was also Orientalism, which constituted a transfer of the study of certain societies to the domain of the human- ities. Neither of these two processes the dividing of knowledge into three cultures; the subdivision of the social sciences into a series of specific disciplines was uncon- tested. There were significant movements of intellectual resistance, but in the period that went from 1850 to 1960 approximately, the pattern described here won out. One of the reasons it won out is that it became institutionalized, in three forms: a) within the universities, as chairs, depart- ments, cursus of instruction, academic de- grees, and above all students; b) at the national and international level, as associa- tions of scholars in particular disciplines and as journals devoted to particular disci- plines; c) in the great libraries of the world, as categories of classification of scholarly works. This organizational institu- tionalization served to make more difficult any subsequent intellectual reorganization. In the years after 1960, this intellec- tual consensus began to break down. It broke down on both fronts. The various "discip- lines" of the social sciences began to over- lap incredibly to the point that the intel- lectual distinction between them seemed to have very little basis either in theory or in practice. And in addition, the sharp distinc- tion among the "three cultures" broke down. On the one side, the line between the humani- ties and the social sciences was being under- mined by the increasing "historicization" and hence "contextualization" of the humanities, matched by the increasing willingness of social scientists to acknowledge "humanistic" issues and methods. And on the other side, the line between the natural sciences and the social sciences was being undermined by the "new sciences" and their emphasis on irre- versibility (the arrow of time), the impossi- bility of precision, and the centrality of complexity, all of which made them seem clos- er to the reality of the social sciences, and the reciprocal growing interest by social scientists in multiple ways in the content, and not merely in the methodology, of the natural sciences. But these intellectual developments of the last 30 years have not been matched by comparable organizational developments, in part because it is not easy to budge strongly entrenched organizations, and in part because those who were unhappy intellectually about the old epistemological premises were not sure what they should advocate organization- ally. The consequence has been a sort of massive worldwide drifting, in which more and more scholars feel dismayed at the state of the social sciences, but very little is being done collectively to change the situation. The intent of the Commission is to fill this lacuna by surveying the present state of the social sciences, both in terms of the relation among the so-called separate disci- plines, and in terms of the relationship of the social sciences to the physical sciences and the humanities. The object of this Com- mission will be to write (by 1995) a book- length programmatic analysis of where we should be heading in the next 50 years. The members will be committed in advance only to one basic premise the fact that the present structure of the social sciences creates unreasonable blocks to intellectual devel- opment and the consequent need for some kind of restructuring. It is hoped that the report will serve as the basis for debate about possible forms of organizational restructur- ing, in the light of the evolution of our intellectual work worldwide. For more information contact the Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University, Bing- hamton, 13901 USA tel. 606 777 4924 fax 607 777 4315 email devoist@bingvaxa.cc.binghamton.edu