Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Tle place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences I I
dimension of history, by applying dialectics to the process of social change.
It is hardly necessary to recall how Marx developed this trend, but by advanc-
ing from the concept to the facts and by generalizing the application of the
historical dialectic to economic structures and to the sociological analysis of
ideologies.
One of the decisive factors in the establishment of the human sciences along
genetic lines was the discovery, or rediscovery, by Darwin of the evolution of
organized species. For it follows logically that if man is no longer regarded as an
immutable creation with an absolute beginning, all the problems connected with
his activities must be reframed in completely new terms. No longer able to refer
back to an initial condition including, in planned or predetermined form, all
the compulsive factors which determine human nature, enquirers found them-
selves confronted with questions of causal explanation, which obliged them to
consider through what actual factors the human species, as distinct from the
animal, had come to construct languages, societies and a mental life, to create
techniques and an economic organization, in short to father those innumerable
structures of which only the existence and most obvious functions had hitherto
been known. From then on the problem was to understand how they had come
about. Even if the origins of this historical process are lost in the mists of
human paleontology, every question of transformation, both past and present,
takes on a new meaning in the evolutionary context, since it calls for an explan-
atory analysis. Comte’s positivist doctrine, which failed to take account of the
evolutionary teachings of Lamarck and was propounded before Darwin, could
reduce the scientific ideal to the mere function of forecasting on the basis of
laws. The problem now, in the light of evolutionary theory, is to reach a much
deeper understanding of the ‘mode of production’ of phenomena, condemned
by Comte but indefatigably pursued by the nomothetic sciences of man and the
natural sciences.
While Darwin’s evolutionary theory undoubtedly influenced sociology, and
in particular Spencer, its effect on scientific psychology was even more direct,
since mental activity and behaviour are more closeIy linked to organic states.
Darwin himself is one of the founders of comparative psychology through his
studies on the expression of the emotions. In human psychology, while we know
very little about the intellectual and emotional functions of prehistoric man, be-
ing familiar only with his techniques, the concept of evolution gave rise to that
kind of ‘mental embryology’ which is child psychology, not forgetting its close
relations with psychopathology, which is the study of the disintegrations
matching the integrations that accompany development. This is the reason why,
in the USA at the end of the 19th century, the study of the formation of mental
structures in children was known as ‘genetic psychology’.
UI. A third determining influence in the development of the sciences of man was
the model offered by the natural sciences, Two different types of factors must
here be distinguished. The first is the influence exerted by positivist philosophy
and the various forms of metaphysical scientism current in the 19th century,
when the climate might have seemed favourable to the general extension of the