How the Social Sciences Think about the World's Social: Outline of a Critique (Beyond the Social Sciences)

At the beginning of the new millennium the social sciences discover an epochal turn making it necessary to revolutionize their theory-building: As a response to what they call the globalization of the social they find the need to globalize their theorizing as well. It is odd to discover after two centuries of colonialism and imperialism after two world wars and several economic world crises that there is a world beyond the national socials it is even more strange that the social sciences globalize their theorizing by comparing theories about nationally confined socials and by creating all sorts of preferably local theories just as if any national social was a secluded social biotope. Discussing how to globalize the social sciences they argue that globalizing social science theorizing means finding a way of theorizing that must above all be liberated from scientism in order to allow a provincialization of thinking. Not surprisingly the globalizing social sciences also rediscover mythological and moral thinking as a means for a true scientific universalism. Michael Kuhn's new book presents many thought-provoking arguments on the oddities of the globalizing social sciences and on how these oddities are not accidents but a consequence of the nature of how the social sciences theorize about the social.