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At the very beginning of The Psychological Frontiers of Society, Abram Kardiner (1945) wrote:
There is today no discipline which can be called a science of society; there is only a group of social sciences, each of which has been isolated and self-contained as regards the subject matter [p. 1].
Today, more than forty years after Kardiner wrote these words, they still hold true. Despite various efforts to achieve a unified social science, or, as the French would prefer, a unified science of man, no such science has emerged. It may be true that there is even less unity in the sciences of man today than there was at the time Kardiner was writing. Indeed, the very notion of unity has been questioned. Postmodernist critics see unity as an artifice—an arbitrary, conventional narrative that is no longer compelling (Lyotard, 1979; Tyler, 1986). Kuhnian romantics would maintain that traditional notions of unity break down