24-05-2025
To navigate a new order, hire a historian not a social scientist
What if you became the most powerful man in the world, the president of the United States of America? What would you do? Obviously, create a new world order. That is what every American president has tried, from Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush to Donald Trump.
A new executive order sends everyone scrambling to understand it, sometimes everyone and their ex, like Christiane Amanpour and her former husband James Rubin, who have just started a podcast for that purpose. Their advantage is having lived through major global changes from different angles; while he was in the policymaking business, she was on the ground living the consequences. The stories they will tell are of lived experience deciphered with tools that include their backgrounds, upbringings, and educations, along with some common sense, instinct, and wit. It is more of an art than it is a science and does not have to be either precise or certain. It is a process that includes human interactions and emotions that no algorithm or artificial intelligence can emulate.
They are, in fact, acting like traditional historians, telling the story and interpreting the changing world. This will help them understand the present and speculate, with a healthy degree of uncertainty, on what is to come. The rise and fall of empires and nations was very much the domain of such historians, before modern social sciences emerged.
But what about the rest of us? Do we have the tools to understand the new world order? The rest of us may well be part of another story — that of the rise and fall of the social sciences. It is a fairly short history of disciplines born out of theological controversies in Europe in the second half of the 19th century and later in the US. The social sciences, which include disciplines like economics, politics, and sociology, dominated the ideas of the 20th century and accompanied the rise of nationalism. Economics, in particular, rationalized or scientifically justified the ever-growing role of the state, on which international affairs and international relations were built.
But doubts have been emerging for quite a while about the adequacy of the individual disciplines and whether they are enough to help us understand the changing world. In a recent piece in the Financial Times, the economist Gillian Tett described the rise of a new discipline, geoeconomics, with a recent conference near the White House and with universities and think tanks rushing to create programs in it. Tett also mentioned the idea that companies should hire a chief geopolitical or geoeconomics officer to help navigate the changing world order, especially after the disruptions brought about by President Trump.
Geopolitics, geoeconomics, and geostrategy are imprecise and sometimes meaningless words. In a nutshell, they mean that the cult-like social scientists are out of their depth and have no clue what they are talking about. They are a product of theological debates resulting from Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which attempted to explain the origin of species through science and scientific observation, as opposed to the religious belief of divine creation.
The contradictions between Darwin's theory of evolution and the biblical story of creation sparked huge controversy. This quickly expanded into a heated debate about science versus faith. Disciplines like eugenics were an offshoot of the scientific study of society. For that was the key question: can scientific methods be applied to the study of society?
To understand the intensity of such debates, we should bear in mind that it was not until 1871 that old universities like Oxford and Cambridge started offering degrees to people who were not members of the Anglican church. It was also expected that any fellows of a college would resign their position at the university if they so much as developed doubts about any of the 39 articles of the Anglican faith.
A future historian may evaluate the extent of the damage done by the 20th-century doctrine of social sciences.
Nadim Shehadi
An Oxford education generally consisted of studying the classics in their original Latin and Greek and developing philosophical ideas. It was considered that reading the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and other classical philosophers, along with historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, was enough to prepare a young man for any pursuit, be it in the natural sciences, mathematics, medicine, or a career in the church, the army or in the rule of India. Darwin himself had such an education before turning to medicine. The works of Adam Smith and other political economists were introduced as part of moral philosophy and the political economy component was meant to help understand history, which was only really introduced as a faculty in the 1850s.
The social sciences as we now know them were therefore a result of the trend toward using the scientific method to understand the world. To believe in its results and recommendations, it is therefore necessary to have faith in science.
Elite education — conferring the tools that were considered necessary and sufficient to equip decision-makers in the art of statecraft — evolved with that trend toward science. The basic degree in classics, or greats, became modern greats and evolved into the study of philosophy, politics and economics, the Oxford 'PPE' degree. These subjects replaced the classics as the necessary intellectual tools to understand the world.
In fact, the discipline of economics is still not a stand alone subject for an undergraduate degree in Oxford. It must be combined with something like history. At the more scientifically inclined Cambridge University, it became a subject in 1905.
Economics, which dominated the post-Second World War world, became established as a dominant discipline in the interwar period. It was akin to a religious cult using faith in science instead of faith in God. Its theories were based on quite rudimentary mathematics to advance its principles. The growth of the state's role, for example, was justified by arguments like increasing marginal returns to scale or the multiplier effect.
Simply put, this argues that the larger the scale, the larger the profit. And because state control would work on a larger scale, it would become more efficient and profitable. These were dangerous tools in the hands of power-hungry politicians.
A future historian may evaluate the extent of the damage done by the 20th-century doctrine of social sciences. A cult of economists, political scientists, and sociologists ran the world and provided the justification for politicians to expand their power and that of the state.
When such 'scientific' theories did not fit with reality, it was reality and people that needed to change, not the theories. This was in the name of science, which is synonymous with indisputable fact.
In fact, it is not Trump's chaotic disruptions that are the problem. In days when we are on the verge of surrendering our lives to mega-processors and AI, and in which we interact more with our screens than with each other, it is not too late to introduce a serious element of doubt into the disciplines we feed these machines. As a repentant economist, I put my trust in Amanpour and Rubin and would hire a historian over an economist anytime.
