Abstract

The introduction presents and introduces the special issue of the journal that addresses the relationship between social sciences and political cultures. It adopts a historical perspective to examine and evaluate how social sciences actually contributed to the understanding of politics and the different representations of society; it also discusses various descriptions of the social and political process offered by social sciences. Nowadays, with democracies facing a crisis of representation and the prospect of increasing prosperity for all questioned and challenged, it is important to reconstruct and discuss the historical connection between these two dimensions - politics and social sciences - in order to understand how and to what extent social sciences have influenced politics, and for the implications for both politics and social sciences.