Contrary to the classical Kuhnian notion of knowledge accumulation as "normal science" and of paradigmal shifts as sporadic "scientific revolutions", the project will provide proofs that in contemporary social sciences the qualitative epistemological change is perpetual, concerning the subject-matter studied, the cognitive patterns used and the entire field of disciplinary knowledge. Its main focus will be on American sociology as a representative case of rapid disciplinary transformation but seen in a comparative perspective (and in intellectual interactions) with economics, political science, anthropology, philosophy and history. Second, the study should prove that the principle of social science transformation itself changes fundamentally. Yet it is not so much the official institutions that are decisive for the course of change, but the informal groups and specific social networks (for example of Jewish intellectuals in the 50's and the 60's) that exert an insurmountable pressure for a change of academic priorities and practices in the social sciences. It is particularly important that studies on parallel development in the social sciences make it possible, through comparison of separate disciplinary cases to control the degree of validity of generalizations from the cases studied in a single discipline (sociology).
The study will concentrate on two key stages in the development of 20th century American sociology (and their transdisciplinary inspirations and repercussions): 1) the interplay of cognitive and socio-cultural contexts of the rise and decline of systematic theoretical sociology (1940-1970) and 2) the specific socio-cultural premises for the rise of a broad and powerful tide of feminist social science during the end quarter of the 20th century (1970-2000). The methodological approach is a synthesis of historical sociology, agreeing with its designation as "enthusiastically interdisciplinary" (Adams, Clemens, Orloff 2005) and R. Friedrichs's dialectical version of sociology of sociology (Friedrichs: 1970). The project will use secondary analysis of literary sources, giving special attention to biographical and autobiographical literature on key figures of the American sociological tradition in order to capture the specific subjective meanings of the past processes, the value attitudes and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, through which science is done and the ways of doing science are changed.