Thehistory of the social sciences has its origins in the common stock ofWestern philosophy and shares various precursors, but began most intentionally in the early 18th century with thepositivistphilosophy of science. Since the mid-20th century, the term "social science" has come to refer more generally, not just tosociology but to all those disciplines which analyze society and culture, fromanthropology topsychology tomedia studies.
The idea that society may be studied in a standardized and objective manner, with scholarly rules and methodology, is comparatively recent. Philosophers such asConfucius had long since theorised on topics such associal roles, the scientific analysis of human society is peculiar to the intellectual break away from theAge of Enlightenment and toward the discourses ofModernity. Social sciences came forth from themoral philosophy of the time and was influenced by theAge of Revolutions, such as theIndustrial Revolution and theFrench Revolution.[1] The beginnings of the social sciences in the 18th century are reflected in the grand encyclopedia ofDiderot, with articles fromRousseau and other pioneers.
Around the start of the 20th century, Enlightenment philosophy was challenged in various quarters. After the use of classical theories since the end of the scientific revolution, various fields substituted mathematics studies for experimental studies and examining equations to build a theoretical structure. The development of social science subfields became very quantitative in methodology. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it made many of the natural sciences interested in some aspects of social science methodology.[2] Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine,biocultural anthropology,neuropsychology, and thehistory andsociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences. In the first half of the 20th century, statistics became a free-standing discipline of applied mathematics. Statistical methods were used confidently.
In the contemporary period, there continues to be little movement toward consensus on what methodology might have the power and refinement to connect a proposed "grand theory" with the various midrange theories which, with considerable success, continue to provide usable frameworks for massive, growing data banks. Seeconsilience.
Plato'sRepublic is an influential treatise onpolitical philosophy and the just life.
Aristotle published several works on social organization, such as hisPolitics, andConstitution of the Athenians.
Significant contributions to the social sciences were made in MedievalIslamic civilization.Al-Biruni (973–1048) wrote detailed comparative studies on theanthropology of peoples, religions and cultures in the Middle East,Mediterranean and South Asia.[3] Biruni has also been praised by several scholars for hisIslamic anthropology.[4]
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) worked in areas ofdemography,[5]historiography,[6] thephilosophy of history,[7] sociology,[5][7] and economics. He is best known for hisMuqaddimah.
Near theRenaissance, which began around the 14th century,Jean Buridan andNicole Oresme wrote on money. In the 15th century St. Atonine of Florence wrote of a comprehensive economic process. In the 16th centuryLeonard de Leys (Lessius),Juan de Lugo, and particularlyLuis Molina wrote on economic topics. These writers focused on explaining property as something for "public good".[8]
Representative figures of the 17th century includeDavid Hartley, Hugo Grotius,Thomas Hobbes,John Locke, andSamuel von Putendorf. Thomas Hobbes argued thatdeductive reasoning fromaxioms created a scientific framework, and hence hisLeviathan was a scientific description of a politicalcommonwealth. In the 18th century, social science was called moral philosophy, as contrasted from natural philosophy and mathematics, and included the study of natural theology, natural ethics, natural jurisprudence, and policy ("police"), which included economics and finance ("revenue"). Pure philosophy, logic, literature, and history were outside these two categories.Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy, and he was taught byFrancis Hutcheson. Figures of the time includedFrançois Quesnay,Jean-Jacques Rousseau,Giambattista Vico,William Godwin,Gabriel Bonnet de Mably, andAndre Morellet. TheEncyclopédie of the time contained various works on the social sciences.[8]
This unity of science as descriptive remains, for example, in the time ofThomas Hobbes who argued that deductive reasoning from axioms created a scientific framework, and hence hisLeviathan was a scientific description of a political commonwealth. What would happen within decades of his work was a revolution in what constituted "science", particularly the work ofIsaac Newton in physics. Newton, by revolutionizing what was then called "natural philosophy", changed the basic framework by which individuals understood what was "scientific".
While he was merely the archetype of an accelerating trend, the important distinction is that for Newton, the mathematical flowed from a presumed reality independent of the observer, and working by its own rules. For philosophers of the same period, mathematical expression of philosophical ideals was taken to be symbolic of natural human relationships as well: the same laws moved physical and spiritual reality. For examples seeBlaise Pascal,Gottfried Leibniz andJohannes Kepler, each of whom took mathematical examples as models for human behavior directly. In Pascal's case, the famous wager; for Leibniz, the invention of binary computation; and for Kepler, the intervention of angels to guide the planets[citation needed].
In the realm of other disciplines, this created a pressure to express ideas in the form of mathematical relationships. Such relationships, called "Laws" after the usage of the time (seephilosophy of science) became the model which other disciplines would emulate.
The term "social science" was coined in French byMirabeau in 1767, before becoming a distinct conceptual field in the nineteenth century.[9]Auguste Comte (1797–1857) argued that ideas pass through three rising stages,theological, philosophical andscientific. He defined the difference as the first being rooted in assumption, the second incritical thinking, and the third in positive observation. This framework, still rejected by many, encapsulates the thinking which was to push economic study from being a descriptive to a mathematically based discipline.Karl Marx was one of the first writers to claim that his methods of research represented a scientific view of history in this model. With the late 19th century, attempts to apply equations to statements abouthuman behavior became increasingly common. Among the first were the "Laws" ofphilology, which attempted to map the change over time of sounds in a language.
Sociology was established by Comte in 1838.[10] He had earlier used the term "social physics", but that had subsequently been appropriated by others, most notably the Belgian statisticianAdolphe Quetelet. Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through the scientific understanding of the social realm. Writing shortly after the malaise of theFrench Revolution, he proposed that social ills could be remedied through sociologicalpositivism, an epistemological approach outlined inThe Course in Positive Philosophy [1830–1842] andA General View of Positivism (1844). Comte believed apositivist stage would mark the final era, after conjecturaltheological andmetaphysical phases, in the progression of human understanding.[11]
It was with the work ofCharles Darwin that the descriptive version ofsocial theory received another shock.Biology had, seemingly, resisted mathematical study, and yet thetheory of natural selection and the implied idea ofgenetic inheritance—later found to have been enunciated byGregor Mendel, seemed to point in the direction of a scientific biology based, likephysics,chemistry,astronomy, andEarth science on mathematical relationships. The first thinkers to attempt to combine inquiry of the type they saw in Darwin with exploration of human relationships, which, evolutionary theory implied, would be based on selective forces, wereFreud in Austria andWilliam James in the United States. Freud's theory of the functioning of the mind, and James' work on experimental psychology would have enormous impact on those that followed. Freud, in particular, created a framework which would appeal not only to those studying psychology, but artists and writers as well.
Though Comte is generally regarded as the "Father of Sociology",[11] the discipline was formally established by another French thinker,Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who developed positivism in greater detail. Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology at theUniversity of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing hisRules of the Sociological Method. In 1896, he established the journalL'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph,Suicide (1897), a case study of suicide rates amongCatholic andProtestant populations, distinguished sociological analysis frompsychology or philosophy. It also marked a major contribution to the concept ofstructural functionalism.[12]
Today, Durkheim, Marx andMax Weber are typically cited as the three principal architects of social science in thescience of society sense of the term.[13] "Social science", however, has since become an umbrella term to describe all those disciplines, outside of physical science and art, which analyse human societies.
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In the first half of the 20th century, statistics became a free-standing discipline ofapplied mathematics. Statistical methods were used confidently, for example in an increasingly statistical view of biology.
The first thinkers to attempt to combine inquiry of the type they saw in Darwin with exploration of human relationships, which,evolutionary theory implied, would be based on selective forces, wereFreud in Austria andWilliam James in the United States. Freud's theory of the functioning of themind, and James' work on experimentalpsychology would have enormous impact on those that followed. Freud, in particular, created a framework which would appeal not only to those studying psychology, but artists and writers as well.
One of the most persuasive advocates for the view of scientific treatment of philosophy would beJohn Dewey (1859–1952). He began, as Marx did, in an attempt to weldHegelianidealism andlogic to experimental science, for example in hisPsychology of 1887. However, he abandoned Hegelian constructs. Influenced by bothCharles Sanders Peirce andWilliam James, he joined the movement in America calledpragmatism. He then formulated his basic doctrine, enunciated in essays such as "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy" (1910).
This idea, based on his theory of howorganisms respond, states that there are three phases to the process of inquiry:
With the rise of the idea of quantitative measurement in the physical sciences, for exampleLord Rutherford's famous maxim that any knowledge that one cannot measure numerically "is a poor sort of knowledge", the stage was set for the conception of the humanities as being precursors to "social science".
In 1924, prominent social scientists established thePi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences. Among its key objectives were to promote interdisciplinary cooperation and develop an integrated theory of human personality and organization. Toward these ends, a journal for interdisciplinary scholarship in the various social sciences and lectureship grants were established.
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Theodore Porter argued inThe Rise of Statistical Thinking that the effort to provide a synthetic social science is a matter of both administration and discovery combined, and that the rise of social science was, therefore, marked by both pragmatic needs as much as by theoretical purity. An example of this is the rise of the concept ofIntelligence Quotient, or IQ. It is unclear precisely what is being measured by IQ, but the measurement is useful in that it predicts success in various endeavors.[14]
The rise ofindustrialism had created a series of social science, economic, and political problems, particularly in managing supply and demand in their political economy, themanagement of resources for military and developmental use, the creation of masseducation systems to train individuals in symbolic reasoning and problems in managing the effects of industrialization itself. The perceived senselessness of the "Great War" as it was then called, of 1914–18, now calledWorld War I, based in what were perceived to be "emotional" and "irrational" decisions, provided an immediate impetus for a form of decision making that was more "scientific" and easier to manage. Simply put, to manage the new multi-national enterprises, private and governmental, required more data. More data required a means of reducing it to information upon which to make decisions. Numbers and charts could be interpreted more quickly and moved more efficiently than long texts. Conversely, the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary nature of scientific inquiry into human behavior and social and environmental factors affecting it have made many of the so-called hard sciences dependent on social science methodology. Examples of boundary blurring include emerging disciplines like social studies of medicine,neuropsychology,biocultural anthropology, and the history and sociology of science. Increasingly, quantitative and qualitative methods are being integrated in the study of human action and its implications and consequences.
In the 1930s this new model of managing decision making became cemented with theNew Deal in the US, and in Europe with the increasing need to manage industrial production and governmental affairs. Institutions such asThe New School for Social Research,International Institute of Social History, and departments of "social research" at prestigious universities were meant to fill the growing demand for individuals who could quantify human interactions and produce models for decision making on this basis.
Coupled with this pragmatic need was the belief that the clarity and simplicity of mathematical expression avoided systematic errors of holistic thinking and logic rooted in traditional argument. This trend, part of the larger movement known asmodernism provided the rhetorical edge for the expansion of social sciences.
There continues to be little movement toward consensus on what methodology might have the power and refinement to connect a proposed "grand theory" with the various midrange theories which, with considerable success, continue to provide usable frameworks for massive, growing data banks (seeconsilience).[15] Midrange theories can support the emergence of new disciplinary thinking and act as a "critical step" towards formulation of a more comprehensive theory.[16] PhilosopherNancy Cartwright notes that the space which midrange (or middle-range) theory occupies is the space betweenabstraction, where principles are derived from specific examples, andgeneralisation, and that developments in this space often relate to "things that come under the label 'mechanism'".[17] In a field such as nursing, she has suggested that middle-range theory is "the only game in town".[18]
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