ABSTRACT
One may imagine a researcher facing three different strategies, conceived of as ideal types: pure specialization, utopian “interdisciplinarity,” and hybridization. However, innovative social scientists are increasingly turning away from the first two strategies: specialization is self-destructive, exposing its own weaknesses as it advances, while true interdisciplinarity is impossible today because of the extent of specialization. To deal with the multicausality, it is very common to suggest “interdisciplinary” strategies; in fact, everyone seems to approve of interdisciplinary research. Historians, in attempting to reconstruct an “event,” rather than an analytical issue, are especially prone to overbroad multicausality. For teaching purposes, for the transfer of knowledge to the next generation, unidisciplinarity seems inevitable because basic training is necessary before specialized expertise can be achieved. Once that level of expertise is reached, however, the scholars should widen their horizons in the direction of neighboring disciplines.
