How were the human sciences constructed?

The concept of the modern individual is dependent on the process that Weber (1948) calls 'disenchantment'. Disenchantment was the process whereby responsibility for the fate of the world is accepted as a human rather than divine endeavour and its order seen as a social rather than natural or supernatural one. Before the birth of the human sciences (replacing religion as the dominant ideology) men and women had projected responsibility for these relations onto nature and God, spirits or magic, by imagining themselves to obey or enforce God's will or the laws of nature. So it was God that was imagined to be the author of one's identity and the meaning behind one's actions.

With the birth of the human sciences and the manifestation of discourses on sexuality relating to the 'truth' of the human being, the 'private' individual was born. As Foucault explains; 'For a long time, the individual was vouched for by the reference to others and the demonstration of his ties to the family, allegiance; then he was authenticated by the discourse of truth he was obliged to pronounce concerning himself.⁵ The 'truth' systems of science, economics, psychiatry and medicine have produced the concept of the individual and self.