Economics, Sociology, History: Notes on Their Loss of Unity, Their Need for Re-Integration and the Current Relevance of the Controversy between Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller Dieter Bögenhold Free University of Bozen, Italy and University of Economics and Business Administration at Vienna, Austria e-mail: dboegenhold@unibz.it Paper for Presentation at the Annual Conference of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) Cambridge University August 17-19, 2004 I. Introduction We are experiencing a situation of increasing criticism on the state in which economics is being represented nowadays. One of the remarks is that economics has become too formalized and too abstract and that the state of the discipline has become increasingly unable to express many phenomena of “real life” in terms of concrete socioeconomic, cultural, regional and historic specifica. In this sense, criticism has found a way to get cumulated in terms of “heterodox economics”, “postautistic economics”, socioeconomics or institutionalism which are new platforms to describe alternative approaches. The claim for fostering interdisciplinary research which we also find in recent times reflects the same diagnosis that our islands of shared knowledge have become too fragmented. The development of academic thought during the twentieth century is marked by a rapid and continual process of accumulation of a vast quantity of scientific material. If we narrow down the field and consider merely economics and social sciences, a drastic accumulation of academic output is evident during the course of the twentieth century. The result is that economics and social sciences find themselves in a totally different position at the beginning of the twenty-first century than they occupied at the end of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth.