The rise of social sciences in the post-16th century western Europe has widely been attributed to the enormas political, economic and cultural contradictions - and struggles - generated by the twin crises of feudalism and "faith", the working out of reformation and renaissance, the rise of capitalism and, later, of the structure of democracy. This large-scale and drawn out dislocation and crisis could find resolution only with a radical reorganisation of life and society. This reorganisation involved the creation, among others, of an expanded European and global market for wage labour, commodities and reinvestment of profits; the class and state systems; relatively centralised production regimes which usurped the role of the household as a centre of production; spacially and socially disattached and "free", often migrant and urbanised labour; a culture of "faithless" reason, doubt, empiricism, "scientific temperament" and of human and socially generated, rather than supernaturally delivered and preordained progress; and norms of citizenship. It also involved the democratic and liberating influences of the American and French revolutions, the industrial revolution, the Soviet and other socialist revolutions as well as the much more drawn out processes of decolonisation, state formation and democratisation as well as nationalism, modernisation and developmentalism within the newly independent regions and countries.
