Interdisciplinarity is the deliberate crossing of disciplinary boundaries in research, teaching, or practice — working across two or more established fields to address problems that no single field can adequately handle alone. It emerged as a 20th-century institutional response to the second crisis of knowledge: the academic system had partitioned knowledge so thoroughly that important problems kept falling between the cracks.
Why It Became Necessary
By 1900, academic disciplines had hardened into self-contained territories. Physics, chemistry, biology, history, economics, and literature each had their own journals, professional associations, career ladders, and peer review cultures. Hiring committees evaluated candidates by their contribution to one field; journals accepted papers that addressed one field's questions. A researcher whose work genuinely spanned two disciplines could not find a publisher, could not survive a job market, and could not get funded.
The cost was real: problems that sat between disciplines — the chemistry of life processes, the economics of psychological behavior, the physics of climate — were systematically neglected or badly handled by single-discipline teams.
Institutional Forms
The 20th century invented several structures to work around disciplinary silos:
- Interdisciplinary research centers — institutions designed from the start to mix fields: the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (mathematics, physics, social science), the Santa Fe Institute (complexity science), the Salk Institute
- New hybrid disciplines — biochemistry, cognitive science, cybernetics, behavioural economics; each started as an interdisciplinary project and some eventually became disciplines in their own right
- Cross-disciplinary journals — Nature, Science, PNAS all publish across fields; later, journals like PLOS ONE made interdisciplinarity a publishing norm
- Norbert Wiener's cybernetics — the most ambitious mid-century attempt to build a single framework (feedback, information, control) that would unify biology, engineering, economics, and neuroscience
C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" lecture (1959) made the science-humanities divide visible and urgent. His argument — that scientists and literary intellectuals had stopped being able to talk to each other — prompted new institutional energy toward bridging.
The Limits
Interdisciplinarity fixed some things and struggled with others.
The career problem persists. A researcher who publishes across two fields still needs to be evaluated by one field's hiring committee. Interdisciplinary work is harder to judge, harder to fund through single-discipline grant bodies, and harder to place in high-status single-discipline journals. The structural incentives still pull toward depth.
Interdisciplinary centers solve the problem for a small, well-funded elite. They are not scalable enough to reshape the overall system.
New disciplines solve the problem by becoming disciplines — but once biochemistry has its own journals, departments, and career structure, it starts generating its own specialists and its own boundary-defense, recreating the problem at a finer grain.
Relation to the Polymath Tradition
Interdisciplinarity is the institutional version of what the individual polymath does personally. Burke treats it as the 20th century's partial reconstruction of the conditions — courts, salons, Republic of Letters — that once made polymathic breadth socially possible. The polymath solved the problem by holding multiple disciplines in one mind; interdisciplinary institutions try to solve it by assembling multiple specialists in one room.
Both strategies have failure modes. The polymath risks the Leonardo syndrome — too many projects, too little completion. The interdisciplinary team risks coordination overhead, shallow translation between specialists, and defaulting to the lowest common denominator across fields.