Moral sciences, Geisteswissenschaften (1795-1900): Parcours transnationaux d'étiquetages savants

For some time now, historians of humanities and social science have taken some of their most famous categories of analysis as subjects of their own research: “ethnicity”, “race”, and “class”, for instance. This did not occur with the meta-categories which structure knowledge, and indeed they are often considered to be self-evident. This article weaves between France, Great Britain and German-speaking lands to reconstruct the shifting appropriations and meanings, and also rejections, of the categories “sciences morales et politiques”, “moral sciences”, and “Geisteswissenschaften”. In so doing, it exposes the scientific, academic, political and nationalist forces at work. It thus also, reflexively, comments on its own research field and how it has been carved out.