REFRAMING SOCIAL POLICY: The birth and growth of Modern Social Work as a local practice and its relationship to Social Policy as a more or less academic discipline – teaching and research – is another case in point. In the tracks of European Integration, a European Social Pol­icy discourse has been born and revitalized comparative research and teaching at the institutions of higher learning. Nowadays, there is an immense literature on this subject alone(for instance Kvist& Saari 2007). This brings me more generally to the social sciences. Social Science The social sciences saw the light of day at the dawn of the 19 th century as a true offspring of the Enlightenment when the Kingdom of God became a realm of blood sweat and tears, of women and men. The workshops of the world created a secular world, or at least a semi-secular. Out of the old faculties – theology, medicine, law and philosophy – originated new cultural and social sciences: history, geography, economics, political science, sociology, statistics, anthropology, etc., you name it. They strived to become professional disciplines of academia aimed at solutions to the complexity of social life and the human organization of society. However, with the exception of in particular history and its next-door neighbours, the liberal arts, social sciences tried to follow the example of the natural sciences. In order to gain legitimacy, they emphasized the instrumentality of science, in their case the exter­nal policy connection. Nevertheless, there was also a link to the reflexivity of phi­losophy and the humanities, the internal necessity of self-criticisms and self­reflection. In the end, in most countries the social sciences became part and parcel of a field much closer to the power field of politics, and trapped in between the universality of science –“truth” – and the domesticity of politics, the nation-state (“good”). This is still an issue on the public agenda(Burawoy 2007). The maturation of the social sciences is a more than century long history closely linked to the advancement of popular involvement in the social organization of human communities, in Europe and North America, later on also in parts of the “Third World”, India and parts of Latin America being“best practices”. Hopefully, this is still underway, and not in regress. Changes and transformations of this proc­ess are not always easy to decipher from the Periphery. To continue, we have to make a retrograde movement, go beyond 1957. From the end of the 19 th century, in particular French and German social thought provided the necessary input to the emergence of strong disciplines at North American universities. In the East, in Russia the“western” road to social science was abruptly halted in 1917, for in­stance, Potrim Sorokin left St. Petersburg for Harvard, and this pattern continued in the wider East after 1945 although there were local variations across Central and Eastern Europe(Poland, for instance). In the East, the thought of Holy Grand Fa­thers – Marx and Engels – was canonized and stupefied in church-hierarchical 20