Abstract
It is a huge honour to be joining the History of the Human Sciences editorial team. I have read the journal avidly since I started my career as a postgraduate in history and philosophy of science more than a decade ago. The journal has introduced me to ideas, scholars and whole fields of research that have shaped my work. It is therefore exciting to find myself on the other side of the fence and with the opportunity to help bring new, ground-breaking and thought-provoking scholarship to the History of the Human Sciences audience.
It is particularly thrilling to be joining the journal at a moment of change, with Felicity Callard, Rhodri Hayward and Angus Nicholls taking the editorial reins from James Good, who edited History of the Human Sciences with such care and attention, and to such great effect, for more than 15 years. The new editorial team has already outlined its vision for the journal’s future (Callard, Hayward and Nicholls, 2016). I can only endorse their messages about what they see as the historic mission of the field of history of the human sciences and its contribution to our understanding of the human. But two interrelated points stand out as particularly important in relation to my own work.
The first concerns the relationship between history of the human sciences and history of science. As I and others have argued, much of what falls under history of the human sciences, especially the history of the social and psychological sciences, is frequently absent from the general historiography of science (Renwick, 2012; Shapin, 2009). This oversight speaks of parallel developments and origins in different institutions and concerns but its consequences have been profound. We can and should do more to connect the two; for instance, by putting into historical context the analytic tools historians of science have appropriated from fields like sociology. The central point, however, is that history of the human sciences illuminates not only the human – the object that joins its diverse community of scholars together – but also the nature of scientific endeavour and knowledge in their broadest possible senses.
The second point concerns the study of history itself. Following in the late 20th-century footsteps of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, who called for historians to take an evolutionary turn, advocates of neuro-history are arguing that our understanding of the past could be transformed if we would only focus on the brain (Smail, 2008). What would this entail in terms of historical practice and our conception of our subjects? These questions do not have clear answers. As such, neuro-history, like its predecessors, highlights both the slipperiness of the term ‘history of the human sciences’ and the ways in which our sense of what constitutes historical practice is itself a historical product. Contributors to this journal are uniquely positioned to understand these debates, not least the claims some protagonists make for the liberating or reforming potential of their projects – a suggestion sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists seldom made. As my colleagues pointed out, we will need to engage with a wide range of seemingly non-human issues, including the environment, to make sense of the moment we find ourselves in. But doing so will allow us to continue History of the Human Sciences’ tradition of innovative critical enquiry.