Да преосмислим въпроса за националните традиции в социалните науки
Rethinking the Question of National Traditions in the Social Sciences

Summary/Abstract: The article argues that national conditions and rivalries between nations have, for a long period of time, been a structuring principle which must be taken into account in order to understand the production and circulation of the social sciences. This is done on the basis of a historical overview of important debates, such as the controversy on chemistry as a ‘French science’ or the discussion of Schumpeter’s thesis that science does not belong to any one country and has no homogeneous national features. It is shown that the international space of the social sciences is historically constituted on the basis of national structures, and that transnational exchange can reinforce national specifics as well as the denationalization of national practices. In rethinking in such a perspective the concept of ‘national tradition’, the author singles out three different meanings: at the level of a research area or specific discipline (e.g. the French sociological school of Durkheim), at the level of clusters or constellations of disciplines (the American ‘behavioral sciences’ or German ‘Geisteswissenschaften’), and at the level of general intellectual dispositions and categories, which are produced and reproduced by the school system and which are recognizable as national intellectual styles.

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