A PROPOS David Kaiser's current post.......
One of the problems which advanced societies, and their citizens who are forced to specialize, face, is that few if any of us specialists can get a perspicuous view of other important and relevant fields, as they evolve and transform;
fields which, in a sort of blind hurly burly, profoundly direct the zig zag course of events in advanced societies.
One of the watershed developments, it seems to me, was the breaking off of politics and economics, into separate disciplines in the nineteenth century.
Similarly, various social science disciplines, including notably sociology and psychology, developed in a similarly disjointing fashion.
Business administration, and things such as journalism, developed out of practical life, but were pulled, ultimately, into the specializing and fragmentizing university system in the 20th century nonetheless.
The sociological social scientists seem to have been the first to have looked at the problem.
Wuthnow, in Communities of Discourse, which amid other projects I am still trying to finish, has a good discussion of some problems along these lines.
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