A world-system perspective on the social sciences.

This article explores a world-system perspective on the social sciences. It is in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth that the organizational structures of the sciences of man became fixed. In 1800, the categories or disciplines, which currently are standard--history, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science--did not for the most part exist as concepts, and certainly were not the bias of differentiated groups of teachers and researchers. The process by which certain combinations of concerns and concepts took particular forms resulted in major methodological debates. Among the debates, one of the most influential was that between so-called nomothetic and idiographic knowledge, between the possibility and impossibility of generalization about human behavior, between the universalizers and the particularizers. The universalizers spoke of themselves as scientists. They tended to argue that human behavior was a natural phenomenon. The particularists, in contrast, often termed themselves humanists. The key difference between a developmentalist and a world-system perspective is in the point of departure, the unit of analysis. A developmentalists perspective assumes that the unit within which social action principally occurs is a politico-cultural unit--the state, or nation, or people--and seeks to explain differences between these units, including why their economies are different.