Interdisciplinary History

In the nineteen-seventies, when I was a graduate student, interdisciplinarity was a fashionable notion. The character of the enterprise that we young scholars engaged in was influenced, although perhaps largely at the levels of aspiration and rhetoric, by a shared conviction that there was special value in the interaction between different scholarly approaches. The official fruits of this widespread enthusiasm for interdisciplinarity were, however, often somewhat mixed even within a single university. In Edinburgh, the establishment of the Science Studies Unit, my cradle and that of Social Studies of Science, was an outstanding success, of course. But most of the University's other interdisciplinary ventures have gone, for one reason or another, the way of the tulip sleeve and the cheesecloth shirt

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