Humanistic Social Science

In my view, humanistic social science is best understood and appreciated as the hand-maid of the humanities proper (i.e., the study of texts, broadly construed, as the proper study of humankind). The great founding figure of humanistic social science was Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 C.E.).

It would be centuries before any European intellectual would venture to theorize in a disciplined manner about human social organization and the effect of environment (natural and social) upon the construction of personal character. If I had to nominate a European for the honor of "founding figure" of humanistic social science in the so-called "West" (Ibn Khaldun, after all, was from Western North Africa), I would be tempted to name Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), although I would prefer to regard Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) as that figure.

While it is true that Montaigne wrote about himself, he did so, as Eric Auerbach rightly noted, in an effort to describe as accurately as he could the "human condition"--indeed, the latter phrase is Montaigne's. It is also true that few readers of Montaigne would ever accuse him of doing anything in a "disciplined manner," but that judgment is due, in part, to Montaigne's own self-effacing remarks about himself. The discipline one observes in Montaigne is his relentless self-scrutiny. Of course, one may object, this is not at all unprecedented--just read St. Augustine's Confessions! I am afraid I must disagree. St. Augustine engaged in self-scrutiny for the purpose of justifying his religious conversion--and to persuade his readers that they, too, were in need of salvation. Montaigne, on the other hand, was attempting to plumb the depths of the mystery of the self. He appears to have been innocent of any desire to justify himself or his way of life to his reader. What you see in the Essais is what you get--take it or leave it. The absence of a sense of sin and contrition in Montaigne infuriated Pascal; in Rousseau's eyes, his lack of self-justification must have appeared to be a missed opportunity--a "mistake" that Rousseau himself was determined not to make in his own Confession.



Among latter-day practitioners of this hybrid form of humanistic study, I am drawn to Max Weber, William James, C. Wright Mills, and Clifford Geertz. These four intellectuals appear to me to never lose sight of the fact that, by virtue of their practice as writers, their work contributed to the construction of a history of human subjectivities. In this respect, they are all worthy successors to Ibn Khaldun and Michel de Montaigne.