I did a degree in Politics and then an MSc in International Relations, which are not subjects where there are definitive "canons".
To put it another way, you can go very far down the tech tree of one set of ideas without necessarily having to have the prerequisites from other courses, although you do build up your own inner library of useful tools, touchstone texts and concepts that stick with you for the long run.
I may never have directly put many of those into use in my career, but they've certainly given me a useful framework to interpret other things I've come across.
These days, I read a lot of effective altruist/rationalist discourse where they're reinventing very old social science concepts from first principles, and I feel it's a weakness of the monoculture that they have so little connection to what came before.
To put it another way, you can go very far down the tech tree of one set of ideas without necessarily having to have the prerequisites from other courses, although you do build up your own inner library of useful tools, touchstone texts and concepts that stick with you for the long run.
I may never have directly put many of those into use in my career, but they've certainly given me a useful framework to interpret other things I've come across.
These days, I read a lot of effective altruist/rationalist discourse where they're reinventing very old social science concepts from first principles, and I feel it's a weakness of the monoculture that they have so little connection to what came before.