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The Civilised Surveyor: Thomas Mitchell and the Australian Aborigines, by D.W.A. Baker; pp. xv + 213. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997, $29.95, $16.99 paper. Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the [...]

Many a beginning student in the social sciences learns of Henry Sumner Maine (1822-1888) as an intellectual forebear. He stimulated research among his contemporaries and successors by conceptualizing the modernizing [...]

This paper reviews recent interpretive trends among historians of anthropology and sociology, examining both introductory texts and scholarly studies. It focuses on works published over the last ten years, and stresses that there has been no resolution of the long-standing conflict between “presentist” and “historicist” approaches to the history of the human sciences. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains why the editors of the periodical “Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present” decided to publish, in the volume three, 1983 edition, a special issue restricted to new work in the history of the social sciences. This collection exemplifies an emergent point of view. It also has a programmatic purpose: to foster communication among scholars working in professional isolation.

This article discusses prescriptive implications of historical self-consciousness in the school of social sciences. That history should be so used does not represent a novel insight. Historians writing at various times and places, describing societies both Western and non-Western, literate and pre-literate, have noted the role which history may assume; it becomes a weapon in the struggle of rival claimants to power, interpreted to suit the needs of each. It has long been customary for sociologists to legitimize their efforts by demonstrating their affinities to mythologized ancestors. The author is of the views that in order to recognize the tortured nature of the intellectual contortions thus performed, though, we may need to examine examples of this behavior remote from our own concerns and experience: for example, attempts by the late nineteenth-century British sociologists to demonstrate the continuity of their ideas with those of Adam Smith. But for sociology, as for other disciplines and whole peoples, the past is now always an issue; only under certain circumstances will it become controversial. In recent decades, as the degree of professional consensus within the sociological community has waxed and waned, the evidence of the past has seemed increasingly important to the present.