Trans-, Inter-, and Monodisciplinarity: Some Historical Considerations

Transdisciplinarity is often regarded as, or implicitly presumed to be, the outcome of a three-stage process. It was the natural ʼnext step’ after the rise of interdisciplinarity, which itself came about as the logical response to monodisciplinarity. The story presents a neat narrative of an almost inevitable development, where each stage almost inevitably produced the next. It also projects a clear starting point in everything that transdisciplinarity is not: a primordial state of single disciplines, isolated from each other and aloof from the needs of society. This Monodisciplinary Ivory Tower was the building to be razed to the ground. In this chapter we take issue with this all too simple historical picture. We argue that the relations between disciplinary science and inter- and transdisciplinary approaches have been much closer than suggested (also in time), and much more entangled than the standard narrative allows. We also show that the primordial state of the Monodisciplinary Ivory Tower never existed as such. Rather, the landscape of approaches to understanding and changing the world has always been rough and unruly, like a physical map of the Earth’s surface. Disciplines and their inter- and trans-correlates, were structures superimposed on this landscape like the territories of states on a political map. And the ways in which this was done have been historically changing and deeply contingent.