ABSTRACT
The other social sciences which are mainly interested in development are sociology, anthropology and political science. The development hypotheses propounded by each, along with the subsidiary area of social psychology, are discussed in this chapter. The overlapping of these fields is evident in the frequency of texts which attempt to draw ideas from all four sources together into a common body of theory. And yet, the best ideas that can be gleaned from the social sciences as they stood prior to World War II, and the best that has emerged during the twenty year period following the war, a period of intense interest in development, is a mishmash of trivia. There has been an outpouring of conflicting concepts and superficial hypotheses; and there has been a rising tendency to substitute ‘research approaches’ for theory. Born of European economic and political philosophies and still leaning toward this same authority, social study seems to be devoted more to the perpetuation of pedantry than to finding a legitimate place in the universe of science. Social scientists have attempted to overwhelm their problem areas by sheer verbal assault. The endeavor to sum up the character of cultures in such broadly meaningless adjectives as ‘ideational,’ ‘idealistic’ and ‘sensate’ and to portray societies as historically drifting from one of these states to another, labored listings of the universal ‘wishes,’ ‘instincts,’ ‘needs,’ or ‘ethics’ supposed to motivate individual behaviour and to supply drive for the whole society have provided grist for the training of graduate students in the social sciences, but little else. No field invokes the names of its authorities more effusively than do the social sciences and in none are the impotencies of theory more securely masked behind a facade of ‘scientific complexity.’ Meantime, the everyday community, which supports the social sciences on a surprisingly generous scale, must proceed upon the same tattered old folk wisdoms because its social scientists have failed to bring forward a more substantive type of knowledge.
