20 January 2022, NIICE Commentary 7605
Dr. Ajay Kumar Mishra & Dr. Shraddha Rishi
“Open the Social Sciences: The Report of the Gulbenkian Commission the Restructuring of the Social Sciences” by Immanuel Wallerstein et al. offers an insight to make universities as an agent of change in the changing time and space. The analysis of the report advocates for organisational restructuring and epistemological reorientation of the university system to make it more representative to the society. The euro-centric restructuring of the universities in the rest of the world is rather exclusionary, discriminatory and parochial. The universities in South Asia are to refrain from bandwagon the euro-centrism and claim diversity, equity and inclusion. The university cannot remain aloof in a world in which, since certainty is excluded, the role of intellectual is necessarily changing and the idea of the neutral scientist is under severe challenge. After 1945, with the rise of area studies and the consequent expansion of the empirical domain of history and the three nomothetic social sciences into the non-Western world, these non-Western areas too became subject to state-centric analyses. The classical and neo-classical thinkers could not reject the role of the state, absolutely. Neo-liberalism, even, had advocated the positive role of the state. The greater market orientation of nomothetic social sciences narrowed down and even delegitimised the role of the state. But even then, it could not delegitimise the concept of the state.
In South Asia, the state is not refrain from security psychosis in relation to each other; leaving university education to have leverage to talk on tolerance to its maximum liberty forget about accommodation and assimilation of differences. The self-evident nature of the states as conceptual containers-the analytic derivative in the social sciences of both idiographic history and the more universalistic social sciences-became open to serious challenge and to debate. This article attempts to explore the possibility of specific nomothetic social sciences taking a unique idiographic source of reference to restructure the universities and society in South Asia based on equity, inclusiveness and diversity that is influenced by temporal and spatial factors.
Epistemology of Subjectivity and Objectivity
State and its fear psychosis have shaped the epistemology in South Asia. Max Weber summarised the trajectory of modern thought as the “disenchantment of the world.” It represented the search for an objective knowledge unconstrained by revealed and/or accepted wisdom or ideology. In the social sciences, it was a demand that we not rewrite history in the name of existing power structures. This demand was an essential step in freeing intellectual activity from disabling external pressures and from mythology. It frees up scholars to act and to think without feeling motivated by any vested interests. Contrarily, the re-enchantment of the world is meant to liberate human thought still further. In the attempt to liberate the human spirit, the concept of the neutral scientist offered an impossible solution to the laudable objective of freeing scholarship from arbitrary orthodoxy. No scientist can ever be extracted from his/her physical and social context. Every measurement changes reality in the attempt to record it. The thought of re-enchantment of the world gives an edge to intellectuals as they come from the same idiographic historical trajectory that may provide common nomothetic social science solutions to the common problems that the South Asia shares. Thus, the intellectual trajectory of both “disenchantment of the world” and the re-enchantment of the world” favours intraregional communication and cooperation in South Asia.
The Epistemology of Social Sciences in Constrained Conditions
The epistemological underpinnings of the analyses have tended to distinguish the epistemological challenge from political challenge. Political and social inclusion and assimilation will resolve epistemological challenge. State-centrism in devising epistemology narrows down the spatial dimension to assimilate the concerns of marginalised society. In South Asia, the restructuring and the reshaping the education and the society with inclusion and assimilation of marginalised society can transform the power relations within society and lessen the social and political unrest within and across the nation-state. It opens a subject matter for research between dominance of subaltern politics and nature of the nation-state. Furthermore, the conception of social construction of time and space erodes the distinction of idiographic and nomothetic epistemologies. The consideration of time and space as determining factors specify the generalities of monotheism. Specific idiographic history begins to beacon the nomothetic social sciences that seeks to find general laws. The nomothetic epistemology moves closer to that of idiographic with the validity of time and space in the analysis. It recognises that the major issues facing a university that is functioning in a complex society cannot be solved by idiographic and nomothetic categorisation but rather by attempting to treat these problems, treat humans and nature, in their complexity and interrelations.
Epistemology of the Temporal and Spatial Dimensions
The focus on progress and the politics of organising social change gave importance to temporal dimension and left the spatial dimension in limbo. If processes were universal and deterministic, space was theoretically irrelevant. Space was seen as merely a platform upon which events unfolded or processes operated-essentially inert, just there and no more. In it, development, a term is defined as the process by which a country is advanced along the universal path of modernisation. Westernisation and euro-centrism in which state predominate are termed as modernisation. University has little space to become inclusive and diverse. State-led policy mechanism universalise the epistemology. In international sphere it tries to advance particularism as universalism and transform its methodology as deterministic universalism. On the other hand, if processes verged on being unique and unrepeatable, space became merely one element (and a minor one) of specificity. Space becomes a context influencing events (in idiographic history, in realist international relations, in “neighbourhood effects,” even in Marshallian externalities). These contextual effects were seen as mere influences-residuals that had to be taken into account to get better empirical results. It rejects any universal definition of progress and believes in the diversity of epistemology. It negates Newtonian model of certainty and eternal present.
Nonetheless, social science in practice based itself on a particular view of spatiality. The set of spatial structures which is influenced by specific and contextualised social construct through which social scientists assumed lives were organised were the sovereign territories that collectively defined world political map. South Asia fits well here. If the emergence of nation-states in South Asia is termed as the result of social construct that characterises the complexity of the South Asian society, then we can say that any homogenisation prescription of nomothetic social sciences is destined to be inconsistent with the social realities of the region. The complex structure of the South Asian society makes it the subject matter of context-specific study. Its unique, diversified and similar idiographic source of reference combined with contextual nomothetic social sciences is the better suited to explore the epistemology in the region.
Dr. Ajay Kumar Mishra teaches Economics at Samastipur College, India & Dr. Shraddha Rishi teaches Political Science at Magadh University, India.
