Martha Nussbaum has a new book on the role of humanities, and a piece in the TLS to defend her point about the Socratic method and teaching in LACs. Several chapters of the UNESCO World Social Science Report, also published this year, echo her argument (Jon Elster, for instance, argues that social science is naturally cumulative, as the lessons of Aristotle and Tocqueville never leave us).
My argument about social science has always revolved around the following lines: first, that the goal of social science is to study violence, past and present, material and symbolic; second, that the aim of social science is to reduce the harm cause by such violence. This commentary of Philip Zimbardo‘s work on imprisonment by Martha Nussbaum illustrates the point quite well in my view.