Social science

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1767, a French nobleman named Mirabeau wrote down two words in his own language that did not yet describe a field anyone could study at a university. The words were "social science." At the time, there were no departments, no journals, no professors of the subject. There was only a hunch that human society could be examined with the same seriousness people were beginning to apply to the natural world. Why did that hunch take more than a century to harden into real disciplines? What changed in the way people thought, between Mirabeau's coinage and the lecture halls of the late nineteenth century? And how did a single phrase, born as a synonym for sociology, come to gather anthropology, economics, geography, history, law, linguistics, political science, and psychology under one roof? Those questions sit at the heart of a field that still argues with itself about whether human beings can be predicted at all.

• 2. Born Of Revolution

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  After 1651, during the Age of Enlightenment, a revolution within natural philosophy changed the basic framework by which people understood what counted as scientific. The social sciences grew out of the moral philosophy of that time. They were shaped by the Age of Revolutions, including the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, which forced new questions about how groups of interacting people might be improved. Diderot's grand encyclopedia carried articles from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other pioneers, and in its pages the beginnings of the field can be seen taking form. The concept did not become distinct until the nineteenth century, well after Mirabeau supplied its name. Positivism gave the young field its early temper. It focused on knowledge based on actual positive sense experience and avoided metaphysical speculation. Auguste Comte used the term science sociale, taking the idea from Charles Fourier, and he also called the field social physics. To Comte, this social physics resembled the natural sciences. From his influence, five paths of development sprang forth, each pulling the subject in its own direction.

• 3. Five Roads Diverge

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  Large statistical surveys undertaken across the United States and Europe marked the first of the five paths Comte set in motion: the rise of social research. Counting people and measuring their circumstances became a way to understand society at scale. Émile Durkheim opened the second road by studying what he called "social facts," while Vilfredo Pareto pursued metatheoretical ideas and individual theories. A third path arose from a methodological split, in which social phenomena were both identified with and understood from within, an approach championed by Max Weber. The fourth route grew out of economics, advancing economic knowledge as a hard science. Max Weber also drove the fifth and most philosophical path: the correlation of knowledge and social values. His antipositivism and his verstehen sociology firmly demanded a distinction between theory, meaning description, and prescription. The two were to remain non-overlapping formal discussions. This insistence that describing the world and instructing it must be kept apart would echo through every argument the field had with itself afterward.

• 4. Science Or Interpretation

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  Positivist social scientists use methods resembling those of the natural sciences, defining science in its stricter modern sense. Against them stand the speculative or interpretivist scientists, who may rely on social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than building empirically falsifiable theories, and so treat science in its broader sense. The split is not merely academic etiquette. It decides what a finding is allowed to be. In modern practice, researchers are often eclectic, combining quantitative and qualitative methods within a single study. To understand complex human behavior in digital environments, the disciplines have folded in interdisciplinary approaches, big data, and computational tools. Allan Bloom, writing in The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, drew the sharpest version of the divide, not within social science but between it and the humanities. "Social science and humanities have a mutual contempt for one another," he wrote, "the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine." The difference, Bloom argued, comes down to one belief: social science wants to be predictive, which means man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.

• 5. A Cluster Of Disciplines

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  Anthropology calls itself the "science of man," a science of the totality of human existence, and within the United States it splits into four sub-fields: archaeology, physical or biological anthropology, anthropological linguistics, and cultural anthropology. Eric Wolf described sociocultural anthropology as "the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the sciences." The word anthropos in Ancient Greek means "human being" or "person." Economics traces its name to the Ancient Greek oikos, meaning family or household, and nomos, meaning custom or law, so that the word once meant household management. In 1932, Lionel Robbins gave the field its classic brief definition: "the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." Without scarcity, he held, there is no economic problem. The discipline divides into microeconomics, where the unit of analysis is a household or firm, and macroeconomics, where the unit is a whole economy. Linguistics investigates the cognitive and social aspects of human language, breaking into syntax, semantics, morphology, phonetics, and phonology. Ferdinand Saussure was one of the founders of twentieth-century linguistics, and the influence of Noam Chomsky pushed much of the field toward theories of the cognitive processing of language. Political science, meanwhile, has seen an upsurge in formal-deductive model building and quantitative hypothesis testing, while psychology takes its name from the Ancient Greek psyche, meaning soul or mind. These fields share a roof but not always a method.

• 6. The Father And His Heirs

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  Auguste Comte, who lived from 1798 to 1857, coined the term sociology in 1838 to describe a way of applying natural science principles to the social world. He proposed that social ills could be remedied through sociological positivism, an approach he laid out in The Course in Positive Philosophy and in A General View of Positivism, published in 1844. Though he is generally regarded as the Father of Sociology, Comte did not build the discipline's institutions. Émile Durkheim, who lived from 1858 to 1917, did. He developed positivism as a foundation for practical social research and set up the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1895. That same year he published his Rules of the Sociological Method, and in 1896 he founded the journal L'Année sociologique. His monograph Suicide, from 1897, studied suicide rates among Catholic and Protestant populations and separated sociological analysis from psychology and philosophy. Karl Marx rejected Comte's positivism yet still aimed to build a science of society grounded in historical materialism, and he was recognized as a founding figure of the discipline only after his death. Around the start of the twentieth century, a first wave of German sociologists, including Max Weber and Georg Simmel, developed sociological antipositivism. The field came to be seen as an amalgam of three modes of thought: Durkheimian positivism and structural functionalism, Marxist historical materialism and conflict theory, and Weberian antipositivism and verstehen analysis.

• 7. Making Women Visible

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  In 1969, feminist sociologists challenged the discipline's androcentrism at the American Sociological Association's annual conference. Their objection was that women were largely invisible in sociological studies, analysis, and courses. The complaint did not stay a complaint. It led to the founding of the organization Sociologists for Women in Society, and eventually to a new journal, Gender & Society. In the early 1970s, women sociologists kept pressing, questioning the paradigms the field had taken as settled. Today the sociology of gender is considered one of the most prominent sub-fields in the discipline, and new sub-fields keep appearing alongside it, from computational sociology to environmental sociology to actor-network theory.

• 8. Counting And Understanding

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  The Domesday Book of 1086 offers the earliest trace of the survey, the tool that lets social scientists reach millions of people at once. Some scholars instead pinpoint the origin of demography to 1663, with John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality. Either way, the counting came long before the philosophy that justified it. Social research divides into two broad schools. Quantitative designs approach social phenomena through quantifiable evidence, leaning on statistical analysis of many cases to build valid and reliable general claims. Qualitative designs emphasize understanding through direct observation, communication with participants, or analysis of texts, and may stress contextual and subjective accuracy over generality. In practice, researchers often combine the two as part of a multi-strategy design. Much of this work points outward, toward decisions that affect real lives. Social scientists conduct program evaluation, a systematic method for collecting and using information to judge whether projects, policies, and programs produce their intended effect. Stakeholders in both the public and private sectors want to know whether what they fund or vote for actually works, how much it costs per participant, and whether better alternatives exist. By the start of the twenty-first century, the reach of one of these disciplines had grown so far into the others that observers gave it a name: economic imperialism, the spread of economic reasoning into politics, law, religion, marriage, and family life.