Why the Chicago School is different, and why that is good:
Social science is the attempt to develop systematic secular knowledge about social reality that is one way or another validated empirically.
Unlike many universities which have seen increased specialization and intellectual isolation in their social science departments, the University of Chicago believes that perspectives of analysis are more valuable distinctions that govern the worldviews of academics and seeks to deconstruct disciplinary boundaries.
The course argues that the Western social science tradition has produced nine distinct ways of analytically examining intellectual objects. These are: historical narrative, rational choice, Marxism, structural functionalism, modernization, psychoanalysis, linguistic structuralism, symbolic interactionism, and cultural hermeneutics.
Each has a distinctive genesis and intellectual model that usually rivals an exisiting one; central concepts and master arguments with different databases and sources to support it; methodological preferences in analyzing that data that are rooted in preexisting ways of viewing the world; each has been institutionalized inside and outside of academia and has provoked perennial criticism.
All and all, the disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences do not make much sense. The perspectives system provides the best orientation for examining the differences.
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