ABSTRACT
The aberrant history of Unesco’s social science program, which we have put under a magnifying glass, does not lend itself to simple explication. It is, after all, not common for a distinct component of a world organization, a part of its mandate from the very beginning, to become so totally unhinged, nor has that happened in the other principal areas covered by Unesco. To dismiss the matter as of little significance on the grounds of its comparatively modest scale is unsatisfactory. Certainly, the entire endeavor is, from that point of view, at best comparable to a faculty in a medium-sized university which might congratulate itself on its success over forty years in turning out a few classes of decent graduates and in serving as a base for some respectable research in one subject, basta. But that would be to neglect the important legitimizing and symbolic functions of Unesco’s efforts, their wide geographical ramifications and the amount of first-class talent recruited over the years. No faculty can rival these, nor the countless weeks of debate to which the program gave rise, the number of overall or partial blueprints designed for it, its role as a forum and a testing board, its significance as an experiment in its own right. In asking what went wrong we are therefore not enquiring into the fate of some obscure undertaking which happened to have come unstuck. We are looking at a highly public process with thousands of participants, theoretically steered by an elaborate machinery designed at once to provide direction and ensure continuity. Its fate must tell us something about what is occurring in IGOs, the situation of the social sciences in the world and the interaction between the two.
