social science

—social scientist.

1. the study of society and social behavior.

2. a science or field of study, as history, economics, etc., dealing with an aspect of society or forms of social activity.

[1775-85]

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Any discipline or branch of science that deals with the sociocultural aspects of human behaviour.

The social sciences generally include cultural anthropology, economics, political science, sociology, criminology, and social psychology. Comparative law and comparative religion (the comparative study of the legal systems and religions of different nations and cultures) are also sometimes regarded as social sciences.

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Introduction

      any discipline or branch of science that deals with human behaviour in its social and cultural aspects. The social sciences include cultural (or social) anthropology, sociology, social psychology, political science, and economics. Also frequently included are social and economic geography and those areas of education that deal with the social contexts of learning and the relation of the school to the social order. History (historiography) is regarded by many as a social science, and certain areas of historical study are almost indistinguishable from work done in the social sciences. Most historians, however, consider history as one of the humanities. It is generally best, in any case, to consider history as marginal to the humanities and social sciences, since its insights and techniques pervade both. The study of comparative law may also be regarded as a part of the social sciences, although it is ordinarily pursued in schools of law rather than in departments or schools containing most of the other social sciences.

      Since the 1950s the term behavioral sciences (behavioral science) has often been applied to the disciplines designated as the social sciences. Those who favour this term do so in part because these disciplines are thus brought closer to some of the sciences, such as physical anthropology and physiological psychology, which also deal with human behaviour. Whether the term behavioral sciences will in time supplant “social sciences” or whether it will, as neologisms so often have before, fade away is impossible to say. For the purposes of this article, the two terms may be considered synonymous.

      Although, strictly speaking, the social sciences do not precede the 19th century—that is, as distinct and recognized disciplines of thought—one must go back farther in time for the origins of some of their fundamental ideas and objectives. In the largest sense, the origins go all the way back to the ancient Greeks and their rationalist inquiries into the nature of humans, state, and morality. The heritage of both Greece and Rome is a powerful one in the history of social thought as it is in other areas of Western society. Very probably, apart from the initial Greek determination to study all things in the spirit of dispassionate and rational inquiry, there would be no social sciences today. True, there have been long periods of time, as during the Western Middle Ages, when the Greek rationalist temper was lacking. But the recovery of this temper, through texts of the great classical philosophers, is the very essence of the Renaissance and the Age of Reason in modern European history. With the Age of Reason, in the 17th and 18th centuries, one may begin.

Heritage of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Effects of theology

      The same impulses that led men in that age to explore the earth, the stellar regions, and the nature of matter led them also to explore the institutions around them: state, economy, religion, morality; above all, the nature of man himself. It was the fragmentation of medieval philosophy and theory, and, with this, the shattering of the medieval world view that had lain deep in thought until about the 16th century, that was the immediate basis of the rise of the several strands of specialized thought that were to become in time the social sciences.

      Medieval theology, especially as it appears in St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa theologiae, contained and fashioned syntheses from ideas about man and society—ideas indeed that may be seen to be political, social, economic, anthropological, and geographical in their substance. But it is partly this close relation between medieval theology and ideas of the social sciences that accounts for the longer time it took these ideas—by comparison with the ideas of the physical sciences (physical science)—to achieve what one would today call scientific character. From the time of the English philosopher Roger Bacon in the 13th century, there were at least some rudiments of physical science that were largely independent of medieval theology and philosophy. Historians of physical science have no difficulty in tracing the continuation of this experimental tradition, primitive and irregular though it was by later standards, throughout the Middle Ages. Side by side with the kinds of experiment made notable by Roger Bacon were impressive changes in technology through the medieval period and then, in striking degree, in the Renaissance. Efforts to improve agricultural productivity; the rising utilization of gunpowder, with consequent development of guns and the problems that they presented in ballistics; growing trade, leading to increased use of ships and improvements in the arts of navigation, including use of telescopes; and the whole range of such mechanical arts in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as architecture, engineering, optics, and the construction of watches and clocks—all of this put a high premium on a pragmatic and operational understanding of at least the simpler principles of mechanics, physics, astronomy, and, in time, chemistry.

      In short, by the time of Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th century, a fairly broad substratum of physical science existed, largely empirical but not without theoretical implications on which the edifice of modern physical science could be built. It is notable that the empirical foundations of physiology were being established in the studies of the human body being conducted in medieval schools of medicine and, as the career of Leonardo da Vinci so resplendently illustrates, among artists of the Renaissance, whose interest in accuracy and detail of painting and sculpture led to their careful studies of human anatomy.

      Very different was the beginning of the social sciences. In the first place, the church, throughout the Middle Ages and even into the Renaissance and Reformation, was much more attentive to what scholars wrote and thought about man's mind and his behaviour in society than it was toward what was being studied and written in the physical sciences. From the church's point of view, while it might be important to see to it that thought on the physical world corresponded as far as possible to what Scripture said—witnessed, for example, in the famous questioning of Galileo—it was far more important that such correspondence exist in matters affecting the nature of man, his mind, spirit, and soul. Nearly all the subjects and questions that would form the bases of the social sciences in later centuries were tightly woven into the fabric of medieval Scholasticism, and it was not easy for even the boldest minds to break this fabric.

Effects of the classics (classical literature) and of Cartesianism

      Then, when the hold of scholasticism did begin to wane, two fresh influences, equally powerful, came on the scene to prevent anything comparable to the pragmatic and empirical foundations of the physical sciences from forming in the study of man and society. The first was the immense appeal of the Greek classics during the Renaissance, especially those of the philosophers Plato and Aristotle. A great deal of social thought during the Renaissance was little more than gloss or commentary on the Greek classics. One sees this throughout the 15th and 16th centuries.

      Second, in the 17th century appeared the powerful influence of the philosopher René Descartes (Descartes, René). Cartesianism, as his philosophy was called, declared that the proper approach to understanding of the world, including man and society, was through a few simple, fundamental ideas of reality and, then, rigorous, almost geometrical deduction of more complex ideas and eventually of large, encompassing theories, from these simple ideas, all of which, Descartes insisted, were the stock of common sense—the mind that is common to all human beings at birth. It would be hard to exaggerate the impact of Cartesianism on social and political and moral thought during the century and a half following publication of his Discourse on Method and his Meditations. Through the Age of Reason and down through the Enlightenment in the later 18th century, the spell of Cartesianism was cast on nearly all those who were concerned with the problems of the nature of man and society.

      Both of these great influences, reverence for the classics and fascination with the geometrical-deductive procedures advocated by Descartes must be seen from today's vantage point as among the major influences retarding the development of a science of society comparable to the science of the physical world. It is not as though data were not available in the 17th and 18th centuries. The emergence of the national state carried with it evergrowing bureaucracies concerned with gathering information, chiefly for taxation, census, and trade purposes, which might have been employed in much the same way that physical scientists employed their data. The voluminous and widely published accounts of the great voyages that had begun in the 15th century, the records of soldiers, explorers, and missionaries who perforce had been brought into often long and close contact with primitive and other non-Western peoples, provided still another great reservoir of data, all of which might have been utilized in scientific ways as such data were to be utilized a century or two later in the social sciences. Such, however, was the continuing spell cast by the texts of the classics and by the strictly rationalistic, overwhelmingly deductive procedures of the Cartesians that, down until the beginning of the 19th century, these and other empirical materials were used, if at all, solely for illustrative purposes in the writings of the social philosophers.

Heritage of the Enlightenment

      There is also the fact that, especially in the 18th century, reform and even revolution were often in the air. The purpose of a great many social philosophers was by no means restricted to philosophic, much less scientific, understanding of man and society. The dead hand of the Middle Ages seemed to many vigorous minds in western Europe the principal force to be combatted, through critical reason, enlightenment, and, where necessary, major reform or revolution. One may properly account a great deal of this new spirit to the rise of humanitarianism in modern Europe and in other parts of the world and to the spread of literacy, the rise in the standard of living, and the recognition that poverty and oppression need not be the fate of the masses. The fact remains, however, that social reform and social science have different organizing principles, and the very fact that for a long time, down indeed through a good part of the 19th century, social reform and social science were regarded as pretty much the same thing could not have helped but retard the development of the latter.

      Nevertheless, it would be wrong to discount the significant contributions to the social sciences that were made during the 17th and 18th centuries. The first and greatest of these was the spreading ideal of a science of society, an ideal fully as widespread by the 18th century as the ideal of a physical science. Second was the rising awareness of the multiplicity and variety of human experience in the world. Ethnocentrism and parochialism, as states of mind, were more and more difficult for educated people to maintain given the immense amount of information about—or, more important, interest in—non-Western peoples, the results of trade and exploration. Third was the spreading sense of the social or cultural character of human behaviour in society—that is, its purely historical or conventional, rather than biological, basis. A science of society, in short, was no mere appendage of biology but was instead a distinct discipline, or set of disciplines, with its own distinctive subject matter.

      To these may be added two other very important contributions of the 17th and 18th centuries, each of great theoretical importance. The first was the idea of structure. First seen in the writings of such philosophers as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau with reference to the political structure of the state, it had spread by the mid-18th century to highlight the economic writings of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. The idea of structure can also be seen in certain works relating to man's psychology and, at opposite reach, to the whole of civil society. The ideas of structure that were borrowed from both the physical and biological sciences were fundamental to the conceptions of political, economic, and social structure that took shape in the 17th and 18th centuries. And these conceptions of structure have in many instances, subject only to minor changes, endured in the contemporary study of social science.

      The second major theoretical idea was that of developmental change. Its ultimate roots in Western thought, like those indeed of the whole idea of structure, go back to the Greeks, if not earlier. But it is in the 18th century, above all others, that the philosophy of developmentalism took shape, forming a preview, so to speak, of the social evolutionism of the next century. What was said by such writers as Condorcet, Rousseau, and Adam Smith was that the present is an outgrowth of the past, the result of a long line of development in time, and, furthermore, a line of development that has been caused, not by God or fortuitous factors, but by conditions and causes immanent in human society. Despite a fairly widespread belief that the idea of social development is a product of prior discovery of biological evolution, the facts are the reverse. Well before any clear idea of genetic speciation existed in European biology, there was a very clear idea of what might be called social speciation—that is, the emergence of one institution from another in time and of the whole differentiation of function and structure that goes with this emergence.

      As has been suggested, these and other seminal ideas were contained for the most part in writings, the primary function of which was attack on the existing order of government and society in western Europe. Another way of putting the matter is to say that they were clear and acknowledged parts of political and social idealism—using that word in its largest sense. Hobbes (Hobbes, Thomas), Locke (Locke, John), Rousseau (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques), Montesquieu (Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de), Adam Smith (Smith, Adam), and other major philosophers had as vivid and energizing sense of the ideal—ideal state, ideal economy, ideal civil society—as any earlier utopian writer. These men were, without exception, committed to visions of the good or ideal society. Their interest in the “natural”—that is, natural morality, religion, economy, or education, in contrast to the merely conventional and historically derived—sprang as much from the desire to hold a glass up to a surrounding society that they disliked as from any dispassionate urge simply to find out what man and society are made of. The fact remains, however, that the ideas that were to prove decisive in the 19th century, so far as the social sciences were concerned, arose during the two centuries preceding.

The 19th century

      The fundamental ideas, themes, and problems of the social sciences in the 19th century are best understood as responses to the problem of order that was created in men's minds by the weakening of the old order, or European society, under the twin blows of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The breakup of the old order—an order that had rested on kinship, land, social class, religion, local community, and monarchy—set free, as it were, the complex elements of status, authority, and wealth that had been for so long consolidated. In the same way that the history of 19th-century politics, industry (industrialization), and trade is basically about the practical efforts of human beings to reconsolidate these elements, so the history of 19th-century social thought is about theoretical efforts to reconsolidate them—that is, to give them new contexts of meaning.

      In terms of the immediacy and sheer massiveness of impact on human thought and values, it would be difficult to find revolutions of comparable magnitude in human history. The political, social, and cultural changes that began in France and England at the very end of the 18th century spread almost immediately through Europe and the Americas in the 19th century and then on to Asia, Africa, and Oceania in the 20th. The effects of the two revolutions, the one overwhelmingly democratic in thrust, the other industrial-capitalist, have been to undermine, shake, or topple institutions that had endured for centuries, even millennia, and with them systems of authority, status, belief, and community.

      It is easy today to deprecate the suddenness, the cataclysmic nature, the overall revolutionary effect of these two changes and to seek to subordinate results to longer, deeper tendencies of more gradual change in western Europe. But as many recent historians have pointed out, there was to be seen, and seen by a great many sensitive minds of that day, a dramatic and convulsive quality to the changes that cannot properly be subsumed to the slower processes of continuous evolutionary change. What is crucial, in any event, from the point of view of the history of the social thought of the period, is how the changes were actually envisaged at the time. By a large number of social philosophers and social scientists, in all spheres, those changes were regarded as nothing less than of earthquake intensity.

      The coining or redefining of words is an excellent indication of men's perceptions of change in a given historical period. A large number of words taken for granted today came into being in the period marked by the final decade or two of the 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th. Among these are: industry, industrialist, democracy, class, middle class, ideology, intellectual, rationalism, humanitarian, atomistic, masses, commercialism, proletariat, collectivism, equalitarian, liberal, conservative, scientist, utilitarian, bureaucracy, capitalism, and crisis. Some of these words were invented; others reflect new and very different meanings given to old ones. All alike bear witness to the transformed character of the European social landscape as this landscape loomed up to the leading minds of the age. And all these words bear witness too to the emergence of new social philosophies and, most pertinent to the subject of this article, the social sciences as they are known today.

Major themes resulting from democratic and industrial change

      It is illuminating to mention a few of the major themes in social thought in the 19th century that were almost the direct results of the democratic and industrial revolutions. It should be borne in mind that these themes are to be seen in the philosophical and literary writing of the age as well as in social thought.

      First, there was the great increase in population. Between 1750 and 1850 the population of Europe went from 140,000,000 to 266,000,000; in the world from 728,000,000 to well over 1,000,000,000. It was an English clergyman-economist, Thomas Malthus (Malthus, Thomas Robert), who, in his famous Essay on Population, first marked the enormous significance to human welfare of this increase. With the diminution of historic checks on population growth, chiefly those of high mortality rates—a diminution that was, as Malthus realized, one of the rewards of technical progress—there were no easily foreseeable limits to growth of population. And such growth, he stressed, could only upset the traditional balance between population, which Malthus described as growing at geometrical rate, and food supply, which he declared could grow only at arithmetical rate. Not all social scientists in the century took the pessimistic view of the matter that Malthus did but few if any were indifferent to the impact of explosive increase in population on economy, government, and society.

      Second, there was the condition of labour (labour, division of). It may be possible to see this condition in the early 19th century as in fact better than the condition of the rural masses at earlier times. But the important point is that to a large number of writers in the 19th century it seemed worse and was defined as worse. The wrenching of large numbers of people from the older and protective contexts of village, guild, parish, and family, and their massing in the new centres of industry, forming slums, living in common squalor and wretchedness, their wages generally behind cost of living, their families growing larger, their standard of living becoming lower, as it seemed—all of this is a frequent theme in the social thought of the century. economics indeed became known as the “dismal science,” because economists, from David Ricardo to Karl Marx, could see little likelihood of the condition of labour improving under capitalism.

      Third, there was the transformation of property. Not only was more and more property (real and personal property) to be seen as industrial—manifest in the factories, business houses, and workshops of the period—but also the very nature of property was changing. Whereas for most of the history of humankind property had been “hard,” visible only in concrete possessions—land and money—now the more intangible kinds of property such as shares of stock, negotiable equities of all kinds, and bonds were assuming ever greater influence in the economy. This led, as was early realized, to the dominance of financial interests, to speculation, and to a general widening of the gulf between the propertied and the masses. The change in the character of property made easier the concentration of property, the accumulation of immense wealth (wealth and income, distribution of) in the hands of a relative few, and, not least, the possibility of economic domination of politics and culture. It should not be thought that only socialists saw property in this light. From Edmund Burke through Auguste Comte, Frédéric Le Play, and John Stuart Mill down to Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim, one finds conservatives and liberals looking at the impact of this change in analogous ways.

      Fourth, there was urbanization—the sudden increase in the number of towns and cities in western Europe and the increase in number of persons living in the historic towns and cities. Whereas in earlier centuries, the city had been regarded almost uniformly as a setting of civilization, culture, and freedom of mind, now one found more and more writers aware of the other side of cities: the atomization of human relationships, broken families, the sense of the mass, of anonymity, alienation, and disrupted values. sociology particularly among the social sciences turned its attention to the problems of urbanization. The contrast between the more organic type of community found in rural areas and the more mechanical and individualistic society of the cities is a basic contrast in sociology, one that was given much attention by such pioneers in Europe as the French sociologists Frédéric Le Play and Émile Durkheim (Durkheim, Émile); the German sociologists Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel (Simmel, Georg), and Max Weber (Weber, Max); the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet; and, in America, by the sociologists Charles H. Cooley (Cooley, Charles Horton) and Robert E. Park (Park, Robert E.).

      Fifth, there was technology (technology, history of). With the spread of mechanization, first in the factories, then in agriculture, social thinkers could see possibilities of a rupture of the historic relation between man and nature, between man and man, even between man and God. To thinkers as politically different as Thomas Carlyle (Carlyle, Thomas) and Karl Marx (Marx, Karl), technology seemed to lead to dehumanization of the worker and to exercise of a new kind of tyranny over human life. Marx, though, far from despising technology, thought the advent of socialism would counteract all this. Alexis de Tocqueville (Tocqueville, Alexis de) declared that technology, and especially technical specialization of work, was more degrading to man's mind and spirit than even political tyranny. It was thus in the 19th century that the opposition to technology on moral, psychological, and aesthetic grounds first made its appearance in Western thought.

      Sixth, there was the factory (factory system) system. The importance of this to 19th-century thought has been intimated above. Suffice it to add that along with urbanization and spreading mechanization, the system of work whereby masses of workers left home and family to work long hours in the factories became a major theme of social thought as well as of social reform.

      Seventh, and finally, mention is to be made of the development of political masses—that is, the slow but inexorable widening of franchise and electorate through which ever larger numbers of persons became aware of themselves as voters and participants in the political process. This too is a major theme in social thought, to be seen most luminously perhaps in Tocqueville's Democracy in America, a classic written in the 1830s that took not merely America but democracy everywhere as its subject. Tocqueville saw the rise of the political masses, more especially the immense power that could be wielded by the masses, as the single greatest threat to individual freedom and cultural diversity in the ages ahead.

      These, then, are the principal themes in the 19th-century writing that may be seen as direct results of the two great revolutions. As themes, they are to be found not only in the social sciences but, as noted above, in a great deal of the philosophical and literary writing of the century. In their respective ways, the philosophers Hegel, Coleridge, and Emerson were as struck by the consequences of the revolutions as were any social scientists. So too were such novelists as Balzac and Dickens.

New ideologies (ideology)

      One other point must be emphasized about these themes. They became, almost immediately in the 19th century, the bases of new ideologies. How men reacted to the currents of democracy and industrialism stamped them conservative, liberal, or radical. On the whole, with rarest exceptions, liberals welcomed the two revolutions, seeing in their forces opportunity for freedom and welfare never before known to mankind. The liberal (liberalism) view of society was overwhelmingly democratic, capitalist, industrial, and, of course, individualistic. The case is somewhat different with conservatism and radicalism in the century. Conservatives, beginning with Edmund Burke (Burke, Edmund), continuing through Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich) and Matthew Arnold (Arnold, Matthew) down to such minds as John Ruskin (Ruskin, John) later in the century, disliked both democracy and industrialism, preferring the kind of tradition, authority, and civility that had been, in their minds, displaced by the two revolutions. Theirs was a retrospective view, but it was a nonetheless influential one, affecting a number of the central social scientists of the century, among them Auguste Comte and Tocqueville and later Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. The radicals accepted democracy but only in terms of its extension to all areas of society and its eventual annihilation of any form of authority that did not spring directly from the people as a whole. And although the radicals, for the most part, accepted the phenomenon of industrialism, especially technology, they were uniformly antagonistic to capitalism.

      These ideological consequences of the two revolutions proved extremely important to the social sciences, for it would be difficult to identify a social scientist in the century—as it would a philosopher or a humanist—who was not, in some degree at least, caught up in ideological currents. In referring to such minds as Saint-Simon, Comte, Le Play among sociologists, to Ricardo, the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Say, and Marx among economists, to Jeremy Bentham and John Austin among political scientists, even to anthropologists like the Englishman Edward B. Tylor and the American Lewis Henry Morgan, one has before one men who were engaged not merely in the study of society but also in often strongly partisan ideology. Some were liberals, some conservatives, others radicals. All drew from the currents of ideology that had been generated by the two great revolutions.

New intellectual and philosophical tendencies

      It is important also to identify three other powerful tendencies of thought that influenced all of the social sciences. The first is a Positivism that was not merely an appeal to science but almost reverence for science; the second, humanitarianism; the third, the philosophy of evolution.

      The Positivist appeal of science was to be seen everywhere. The rise of the ideal of science in the Age of Reason was noted above. The 19th century saw the virtual institutionalization of this ideal—possibly even canonization. The great aim was that of dealing with moral values, institutions, and all social phenomena through the same fundamental methods that could be seen so luminously in such areas as physics and biology. Prior to the 19th century, no very clear distinction had been made between philosophy and science, and the term philosophy was even preferred by those working directly with physical materials, seeking laws and principles in the fashion of a Newton or Harvey—that is, by persons whom one would now call scientists.

      In the 19th century, in contrast, the distinction between philosophy and science became an overwhelming one. Virtually every area of man's thought and behaviour was thought by a rising number of persons to be amenable to scientific investigation in precisely the same degree that physical data were. More than anyone else, it was Comte (Comte, Auguste) who heralded the idea of the scientific treatment of social behaviour. His Cours de philosophie positive, published in six volumes between 1830 and 1842, sought to demonstrate irrefutably not merely the possibility but the inevitability of a science of man, one for which Comte coined the word “sociology” and that would do for man the social being exactly what biology had already done for man the biological animal. But Comte was far from alone. There were many in the century to join in his celebration of science for the study of society.

      Humanitarianism, though a very distinguishable current of thought in the century, was closely related to the idea of a science of society. For the ultimate purpose of social science was thought by almost everyone to be the welfare of society, the improvement of its moral and social condition. Humanitarianism, strictly defined, is the institutionalization of compassion; it is the extension of welfare and succour from the limited areas in which these had historically been found, chiefly family and village, to society at large. One of the most notable and also distinctive aspects of the 19th century was the constantly rising number of persons, almost wholly from the middle class, who worked directly for the betterment of society. In the many projects and proposals for relief of the destitute, improvement of slums, amelioration of the plight of the insane, the indigent, and imprisoned, and other afflicted minorities could be seen the spirit of humanitarianism at work. All kinds of associations were formed, including temperance associations, groups and societies for the abolition of slavery and of poverty and for the improvement of literacy, among other objectives. Nothing like the 19th-century spirit of humanitarianism had ever been seen before in western Europe—not even in France during the Enlightenment, where interest in mankind's salvation tended to be more intellectual than humanitarian in the strict sense. Humanitarianism and social science were reciprocally related in their purposes. All that helped the cause of the one could be seen as helpful to the other.

      The third of the intellectual influences is that of evolution. It affected every one of the social sciences, each of which was as much concerned with the development of things as with their structures. An interest in development was to be found in the 18th century, as noted earlier. But this interest was small and specialized compared with 19th-century theories of social evolution. The impact of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859, was of course great and further enhanced the appeal of the evolutionary view of things. But it is very important to recognize that ideas of social evolution had their own origins and contexts. The evolutionary works of such social scientists as Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Marx had been completed, or well begun, before publication of Darwin's work. The important point, in any event, is that the idea or the philosophy of evolution was in the air throughout the century, as profoundly contributory to the establishment of sociology as a systematic discipline in the 1830s as to such fields as geology, astronomy, and biology. Evolution was as permeative an idea as the Trinity had been in medieval Europe.

Development of the separate disciplines

      Among the disciplines that formed the social sciences, two contrary, for a time equally powerful, tendencies at first dominated them. The first was the drive toward unification, toward a single, master social science, whatever it might be called. The second tendency was toward specialization of the individual social sciences. If, clearly, it is the second that has triumphed, with the results to be seen in the disparate, sometimes jealous, highly specialized disciplines seen today, the first was not without great importance and must also be examined.

      What emerges from the critical rationalism of the 18th century is not, in the first instance, a conception of need for a plurality of social sciences, but rather for a single science of society that would take its place in the hierarchy of the sciences that included the fields of astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology. When, in the 1820s, Comte wrote calling for a new science, one with man the social animal as the subject, he assuredly had but a single, encompassing science of society in mind—not a congeries of disciplines, each concerned with some single aspect of man's behaviour in society. The same was true of Bentham, Marx, and Spencer. All these minds, and there were many others to join them, saw the study of society as a unified enterprise. They would have scoffed, and on occasion did, at any notion of a separate economics, political science, sociology, and so on. Society is an indivisible thing, they would have argued; so, too, must be the study of society.

      It was, however, the opposite tendency of specialization or differentiation that won out. No matter how the century began, or what were the dreams of a Comte, Spencer, or Marx, when the 19th century ended, not one but several distinct, competitive social sciences were to be found. Aiding this process was the development of the colleges and universities (university). With hindsight it might be said that the cause of universities in the future would have been strengthened, as would the cause of the social sciences, had there come into existence, successfully, a single curriculum, undifferentiated by field, for the study of society. What in fact happened, however, was the opposite. The growing desire for an elective system, for a substantial number of academic specializations, and for differentiation of academic degrees, contributed strongly to the differentiation of the social sciences. This was first and most strongly to be seen in Germany, where, from about 1815 on, all scholarship and science were based in the universities and where competition for status among the several disciplines was keen. But by the end of the century the same phenomenon of specialization was to be found in the United States (where admiration for the German system was very great in academic circles) and, in somewhat less degree, in France and England. Admittedly, the differentiation of the social sciences in the 19th century was but one aspect of a larger process that was to be seen as vividly in the physical sciences and the humanities. No major field escaped the lure of specialization of investigation, and clearly, a great deal of the sheer bulk of learning that passed from the 19th to the 20th century was the direct consequence of this specialization.

Economics (classical economics)

      It was economics that first attained the status of a single and separate science, in ideal at least, among the social sciences. That autonomy and self-regulation that the Physiocrats (physiocrat) and Adam Smith (Smith, Adam) had found, or thought they had found, in the processes of wealth (capitalism), in the operation of prices, rents, interest, and wages during the 18th century became the basis of a separate and distinctive economics—or, as it was often called, “political economy”—in the 19th. Hence the emphasis upon what came to be widely called laissez-faire. If, as it was argued, the processes of wealth operate naturally in terms of their own built-in mechanisms, then not only should these be studied separately but they should, in any wise polity, be left alone by government and society. This was, in general, the overriding emphasis of such thinkers as David Ricardo (Ricardo, David), John Stuart Mill (Mill, John Stuart), and Nassau William Senior (Senior, Nassau William) in England, of Frédéric Bastiat (Bastiat, Frédéric) and Jean-Baptiste Say (Say, J.-B) in France, and, somewhat later, the Austrian school of Carl Menger (Menger, Carl). This emphasis is today called “classical” in economics, and it is even now, though with substantial modifications, a strong position in the field.

      There were almost from the beginning, however, economists who diverged sharply from this laissez-faire, classical view. In Germany especially there were the so-called historical economists (historical school of economics). They proceeded less from the discipline of historiography than from the presuppositions of social evolution, referred to above. Such men as Wilhelm Roscher and Karl Knies in Germany tended to dismiss the assumptions of timelessness and universality regarding economic behaviour that were almost axiomatic among the followers of Adam Smith, and they strongly insisted upon the developmental character of capitalism, evolving in a long series of stages from other types of economy.

      Also prominent throughout the century were those who came to be called the Socialists (socialism). They too repudiated any notion of timelessness and universality in capitalism and its elements of private property, competition, and profit. Not only was this system but a passing stage of economic developments; it could be—and, as Marx was to emphasize, would be—shortly supplanted by a more humane and also realistic economic system based upon cooperation, the people's ownership of the means of production, and planning that would eradicate the vices of competition and conflict.

political science

      Rivalling economics as a discipline during the century was political science. The line of systematic interest in the state that had begun in modern Europe with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, among others, widened and lengthened in the 19th century, the consequence of the two revolutions. If the Industrial Revolution seemed to supply all the problems frustrating the existence of a stable and humane society, the political-democratic revolution could be seen as containing many of the answers to these problems. It was the democratic revolution, especially in France, that created the vision of a political government responsible for all aspects of human society and, most important, possessed the power to wield this responsibility. This power, known as sovereignty, could be seen as holding the same relation to political science in the 19th century that capital held to economics. To a very large number of political scientists, the aim of the discipline was essentially that of analyzing the varied properties of sovereignty. There was a strong tendency on the part of such political scientists as Bentham (Bentham, Jeremy), Austin (Austin, John), and Mill in England and Francis Lieber (Lieber, Francis) and Woodrow Wilson (Wilson, Woodrow) in the United States to see the state and its claimed sovereignty over human lives in much the same terms in which classical economists saw capitalism.

      Among political scientists there was the same historical-evolutionary dissent from this view, however, that existed in economics. Such writers as Sir Henry Maine (Maine, Sir Henry) in England, Numa Fustel de Coulanges (Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis) in France, and Otto von Gierke (Gierke, Otto Friedrich von) in Germany declared that state and sovereignty were not timeless and universal nor the results of some “social contract” envisaged by such philosophers as Locke and Rousseau but, rather, structures formed slowly through developmental or historical processes. Hence the strong interest, especially in the late 19th century, in the origins of political institutions in kinship, village, and caste, and in the successive stages of development that have characterized these institutions. In political science, as in economics, in short, the classical analytical approach was strongly rivalled by the evolutionary. Both approaches go back to the 18th century in their fundamental elements, but what is seen in the 19th century is the greater systematization and the much wider range of data employed.

Cultural anthropology

      In the 19th century, anthropology also attained clear identity as a discipline. Strictly defined as “the science of man,” it could be seen as superseding other specialized disciplines such as economics and political science. In practice and from the beginning, however, anthropology concerned itself overwhelmingly with small-scale preindustrial societies. On the one hand was physical anthropology, concerned chiefly with the evolution of man as a biological species, with the successive forms and protoforms of the species, and with genetic systems. On the other hand was social and cultural anthropology: here the interest was in the full range of humankind's institutions, though its researches were in fact confined to those found among existing preliterate or “primitive” peoples in Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas. Above all other concepts, “culture” was the central element of this great area of anthropology, or ethnology (cultural anthropology), as it was often called to distinguish it from physical anthropology. Culture, as a concept, called attention to the nonbiological, nonracial, noninstinctual basis of the greater part of what one calls civilization: its values, techniques, ideas in all spheres. Culture, as defined in Tylor's landmark work of 1871, Primitive Culture, is the part of man's behaviour that is learned. From cultural anthropology more than from any other single social science has come the emphasis on the cultural foundations of man's behaviour and thought in society.

      Scarcely less than political science or economics, cultural anthropology shared in the themes of the two revolutions (French Revolution) and their impact on the world. If the data that cultural anthropologists actually worked with were generally in the remote areas of the world, it was the effects of the two revolutions that, in a sense, kept opening up these parts of the world to more and more systematic inquiry. And, as was true of the other social sciences, the cultural anthropologists were immersed in problems of economics, polity, social class, and community, albeit among preliterate rather than “modern” peoples.

      Overwhelmingly, without major exception indeed, the science of cultural anthropology was evolutionary in thrust in the 19th century. Edward B. Tylor (Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett) and Sir John Lubbock (Lubbock, John, 1st Baron Avebury) in England, Lewis Henry Morgan (Morgan, Lewis Henry) in the United States, Adolf Bastian (Bastian, Adolf) and Theodor Waitz in Germany, and all others in the main line of the study of primitive culture saw existing native societies in the world as prototypes of their own “primitive ancestors,” fossilized remains, so to speak, of stages of development that western Europe had once gone through. Despite the vast array of data compiled on non-Western cultures, the same basic European-centred objectives are to be found among cultural anthropologists as among other social scientists in the century. Almost universally, then, the modern West was regarded as the latest point in a line of progress that was single and unilinear and on which all other peoples in the world could be fitted as illustrations, as it were, of Western man's own past.

Sociology

      Sociology came into being in precisely these terms, and during much of the century it was not easy to distinguish between a great deal of so-called sociology and social or cultural anthropology. Even if almost no sociologists in the century made empirical studies of primitive peoples, as did the anthropologists, their interest in the origin, development, and probable future of mankind was not less great than what could be found in the writings of the anthropologists. It was Auguste Comte who coined the word sociology, and he used it to refer to what he imagined would be a single, all-encompassing, science of society that would take its place at the top of the hierarchy of sciences—a hierarchy that Comte saw as including astronomy (the oldest of the sciences historically) at the bottom and with physics, chemistry, and biology rising in that order to sociology, the latest and grandest of the sciences. There was no thought in Comte's mind—nor was there in the mind of Herbert Spencer (Spencer, Herbert), whose general view of sociology was very much like Comte's—of there being other, competing social sciences. Sociology would be to the whole of the social world what each of the other great sciences was to its appropriate sphere of reality.

      Both Comte and Spencer believed that civilization as a whole was the proper subject of sociology. Their works were concerned, for the most part, with describing the origins and development of civilization and also of each of its major institutions. Both declared sociology's main divisions to be “statics” and “dynamics,” the former concerned with processes of order in society, the latter with processes of evolutionary change in society. Both men also saw all existing societies in the world as reflective of the successive stages through which Western society had advanced in time over a period of tens of thousands of years.

      Not all sociologists in the 19th century conceived their discipline in this light, however. Side by side with the “grand” view represented by Comte and Spencer were those in the century who were primarily interested in the social problems that they saw around them—consequences, as they interpreted them, of the two revolutions, the industrial and democratic. Thus in France just after midcentury, Frédéric Le Play (Le Play, Frédéric) published a monumental study of the social aspects of the working classes in Europe, Les Ouvriers européens, which compared families and communities in all parts of Europe and even other parts of the world. Alexis de Tocqueville (Tocqueville, Alexis de), especially in the second volume of his Democracy in America (1835), provided an account of the customs, social structures, and institutions in America, dealing with these—and also with the social and psychological problems of Americans in that day—as aspects of the impact of the democratic and industrial revolutions (Industrial Revolution) upon traditional society.

      At the very end of the 19th century, in both France and Germany, there appeared some of the works in sociology that were to prove more influential in their effects upon the discipline in the 20th century. Ferdinand Tönnies (Tönnies, Ferdinand (Julius)), in his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887; translated as Community and Society), sought to explain all major social problems in the West as the consequence of the West's historical transition from the communal, status-based, concentric society of the Middle Ages to the more individualistic, impersonal, and large-scale society of the democratic-industrial period. In general terms, allowing for individual variations of theme, these were the views of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Émile Durkheim (all of whom also wrote in the late 19th and early 20th century). These were the men who, starting from the problems of Western society that could be traced to the effects of the two revolutions, did the most to establish the discipline of sociology as it was practiced for much of the 20th century.

social psychology

      Social psychology as a distinct discipline also originated in the 19th century, although its outlines were perhaps somewhat less clear than was true of the other social sciences. The close relation of the human mind to the social order, its dependence upon education and other forms of socialization, was well known in the 18th century. In the 19th century, however, an ever more systematic discipline came into being to uncover the social and cultural roots of human psychology and also the several types of “collective mind” that analysis of different cultures and societies in the world might reveal. In Germany, Moritz Lazarus (Lazarus, Moritz) and Wilhelm Wundt (Wundt, Wilhelm) sought to fuse the study of psychological phenomena with analyses of whole cultures. Folk psychology, as it was called, did not, however, last very long in scientific esteem.

      Much more esteemed were the works of such men as Gabriel Tarde, Gustave Le Bon, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Émile Durkheim in France and Georg Simmel in Germany (all of whom also wrote in the early 20th century). Here, in concrete, often highly empirical studies of small groups, associations, crowds, and other aggregates (rather than in the main line of psychology during the century, which tended to be sheer philosophy at one extreme and a variant of physiology at the other) are to be found the real beginnings of social psychology. Although the point of departure in each of the studies was the nature of association, they dealt, in one degree or other, with the internal processes of psychosocial interaction, the operation of attitudes and judgments, and the social basis of personality and thought—in short, with those phenomena that would, at least in the 20th century, be the substance of social psychology as a formal discipline.

Social statistics and social geography

      Two final manifestations of the social sciences in the 19th century are social statistics and social (or human) geography. At that time, neither achieved the notability and acceptance in colleges and universities that such fields as political science and economics did. Both, however, were as clearly visible by the latter part of the century as any of the other social sciences. And both were to exert a great deal of influence on the other social sciences by the beginning of the 20th century: social statistics on sociology and social psychology pre-eminently; social geography on political science, economics, history, and certain areas of anthropology, especially those areas dealing with the dispersion of races and the diffusion of cultural elements. In social statistics the key figure of the century was a Belgian, Adolphe Quetelet (Quetelet, Adolphe), who was the first, on any systematic basis, to call attention to the kinds of structured behaviour that could be observed and identified only through statistical means. It was Quetelet who brought into prominence the momentous concept of “the average man” and his behaviour. The two major figures in social or human geography in the century were Friedrich Ratzel (Ratzel, Friedrich) in Germany and Paul Vidal de la Blache (Vidal de La Blache, Paul) in France. Both broke completely with the crude environmentalism of earlier centuries, which had sought to show how topography and climate actually determine human behaviour, and they substituted the more subtle and sophisticated insights into the relationships of land, sea, and climate on the one hand and, on the other, the varied types of culture and human association that are to be found on earth.

      In summary, by the end of the 19th century all the major social sciences had achieved a distinctiveness, an importance widely recognized, and were, especially in the cases of economics and political science, fully accepted as disciplines in the universities. Most important, they were generally accepted as sciences in their own right rather than as minions of philosophy.

The 20th century

      What was seen in the 20th century was not only an intensification and spread of earlier tendencies in the social sciences but also the development of many new tendencies that, in the aggregate, made the 19th century seem by comparison one of quiet unity and simplicity in the social sciences.

      In the 20th century, the processes first generated by the democratic and industrial revolutions proceeded virtually unchecked in Western society, penetrating more and more spheres of once traditional morality and culture, leaving their impress on more and more nations, regions, and localities. Equally important, perhaps in the long run far more so, was the spread of these revolutionary processes to the non-Western areas of the world. The impact of industrialism, technology, secularism, and individualism upon peoples long accustomed to the ancient unities of tribe, local community, agriculture, and religion was first to be seen in the context of colonialism, an outgrowth of nationalism and capitalism in the West. The relations of the West to non-Western parts of the world, the whole phenomenon of the “new nations,” represented vital aspects of the social sciences.

      So too were certain other consequences, or lineal episodes, of the two revolutions. The 20th century was the century of nationalism, mass democracy, large-scale industrialism, and developments in communication and information technology beyond the reach of any 19th-century imagination so far as magnitude is concerned. It was also the century of mass warfare, of two world wars with tolls in lives and property greater perhaps than the sum total of all preceding wars in history. It was the century too of totalitarianism: Communist, Fascist, and Nazi; and of techniques of terrorism that, if not novel, reached a scale and an intensity of scientific application that could scarcely have been predicted by those who considered science and technology as unqualifiedly humane in possibility. It was a century of affluence in the West, without precedent for the masses of people, evidenced in a constantly rising standard of living and a constantly rising level of expectations.

      The last is important. A great deal of the turbulence in the 20th century—political, economic, and social—resulted from desires and aspirations that had been constantly escalating and that had been passing from relatively homogenous groups in the West to ethnic and racial minorities among them and, then, to whole continents elsewhere. Of all manifestations of revolution, the revolution of rising expectations is perhaps the most powerful in its consequences. For, once this revolution gets under way, each fresh victory in the struggle for rights, freedom, and security tends to magnify the importance of what has not been won.

      Once it was thought that, by solving the fundamental problems of production and large-scale organization, societies could ameliorate other problems, those of a social, moral, and psychological nature. What in fact occurred, on the testimony of a great deal of the most notable thought and writing, was a heightening of such problems. It would appear that as humans satisfy, relatively at least, the lower-order needs of food and shelter, their higher-order needs for purpose and meaning in life become ever more imperious (alienation). Thus such philosophers of history as Arnold Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin, and Oswald Spengler dealt with problems of purpose and meaning in history with a degree of learning and intensity of spirit not seen perhaps since St. Augustine wrote his monumental The City of God in the early 5th century, when signs of the disintegration of Roman civilization were becoming overwhelming in their message to so many of that day. In the 20th century the idea of progress, though it had certainly not disappeared, was rivalled by ideas of cyclical change and of degeneration of society. It is hard to miss the currency of ideas in modern times—status, community, purpose, moral integration, on the one hand, and alienation, anomie, disintegration, breakdown on the other—that reveal only too clearly the divided nature of man's spirit, the unease of his mind.

 There is to be seen too, especially during later decades of the century, a questioning of the role of reason in human affairs—a questioning that stands in stark contrast with the ascendancy of Rationalism in the two or three centuries preceding. Doctrines and philosophies stressing the inadequacy of reason, the subjective character of human commitment, and the primacy of faith rivalled—some would say conquered—doctrines and philosophies descended from the Age of Reason. Existentialism, with its emphasis on the basic loneliness of the individual, on the impossibility of finding truth through intellectual decision, and on the irredeemably personal, subjective character of man's life, proved to be a very influential philosophy in the 20th century, though it did not supplant the influence of religious belief in most parts of the world. Freedom, far from being the essence of hope and joy, can represent the source of man's dread of the universe and of his anxiety for himself. Søren Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard, Søren)'s 19th-century intimations of anguished isolation as the perennial lot of the individual had rich expression in the philosophy and literature of the 20th century.

      It might be thought that such intimations and presentiments as these have little to do with the social sciences. This is true in the direct sense perhaps but not true when one examines the matter in terms of contexts and ambiences. The “lost individual” has been of as much concern to the social sciences as to philosophy and literature. Ideas of alienation, anomie, identity crisis, and estrangement from norms are rife among the social sciences, particularly, of course, those most directly concerned with the nature of the social bond, such as sociology, social psychology, and political science. In countless ways, interest in the loss of community, in the search for community, and in the individual's relation to society and morality have had expression in the work of the social sciences. Between the larger interests of a culture and the social sciences there is never a wide gulf—only different ways of defining and approaching these interests.

Marxist influences

      The influence of Marxism in the 20th century must not be missed. For hundreds of millions of persons, the ideas of Marx (Marx, Karl), as communicated by Lenin, had profound moral, even bordering on religious, significance. But even in those parts of the world, the West foremost, where Communism exerted little direct political impact, Marxism remained a potent source of ideas. The central concepts of social stratification and the location and diffusion of power in the social sciences come straight from Marx's insights. Far more was this the case in the Communist countries—the former Soviet Union, other eastern European countries, China, and even Asian countries in which no Communist domination existed. In all these countries, Marx's name was virtually sacrosanct.

      But, though Marxism had relatively little direct impact on the social sciences as disciplines in the West, it had enormous influence on states of mind that were closely associated with the social sciences. Especially was this true during the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression. Socialism remains for many an evocative symbol and creed. Marx remains a formidable name among intellectuals and is still, without any question, a principal intellectual source of radical movements in politics. Such a position cannot help but influence the contexts of even the most abstract of the social sciences.

      What Marx's ideas have suggested above all else in a positive way is the possibility of a society directed not by blind forces of competition and struggle among economic (economic planning) elements but instead by directed planning. This hope, this image, proved a dominant one in the 20th century even where the influence of Marx and of Socialism was at best small and indirect. It was this profound interest in central planning and governance that gave almost historic significance to the ideas of the English economist John Maynard Keynes. What is called Keynesianism has as its intellectual base a very complex modification of the classical doctrines of economics—one set forth in Keynes's famous The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1935–36. Of greater influence, however, than the strictly theoretical content of this general theory is the political impact that Keynesian ideas have had on Western democracies. For out of these ideas came the clear policy of governments dealing directly with the business cycle, of pumping money and credit into an economic system when the cycle threatens to turn downward, and of then lessening this infusion when the cycle moves upward. Above all other names in the West, that of Keynes became identified with such policy in the democracies and with the general movement of central governments toward ever more active and constant regulation of processes once thought best left to what the classical economists thought of as natural laws. True, the root ideas of the classical economists are found in modified form in the works of later economists such as the American Milton Friedman. But it would not be unfair to say that Keynes's name has become associated with democratic economic planning and direction in much the way that Marx's name is associated with Communist economic policies.

Freudian influences

      In the general area of personality, mind, and character, the writings of Sigmund Freud (Freud, Sigmund) had influence on 20th-century culture and thought scarcely less than Marx's. His basic theories of the role of the unconscious mind, of the lasting effects of infantile sexuality, and of the Oedipus complex extended far beyond the discipline of psychoanalysis and even the larger area of psychiatry to areas of several of the social sciences. Anthropologists have applied Freudian concepts to their studies of primitive cultures, seeking to assess comparatively the universality of states of the unconscious that Freud and his followers held to lie in the whole human race. Some political scientists have used Freudian ideas to illuminate the nature of authority generally, and political power specifically, seeing in totalitarianism, for example, the thrust of a craving for the security that total power can give. sociology and social psychology have been influenced by Freudian ideas in their studies of social interaction and motivation. From Freud came the fruitful perspective that sees social behaviour and attitudes as generated not merely by the external situation but also by internal emotional needs springing from childhood—needs for recognition, authority, self-expression. Whatever may be the place directly occupied by Freud's ideas in the social sciences today, his influence upon 20th-century thought and culture generally, not excluding the social sciences, was hardly less than Marx's.

Specialization and cross-disciplinary approaches

      A major development in the social sciences of the 20th century was the vast increase in the number of social scientists involved, in the number of academic and other centres of teaching and research in the social sciences, and in their degree of both comprehensiveness and specialization. The explosion of the sciences generally in the 20th century included the explosion of the social sciences. Not only was there development and proliferation but there was also a spectacular diffusion of the social sciences. Beginning in a few places in western Europe and the United States in the 19th century, the social sciences, as bodies of ongoing research and centres of teaching, came to be found almost everywhere in the world. In considerable part this followed the spread of universities from the West to other parts of the world and, within universities, the very definite shift away from the hegemony once held by humanities alone to the near-hegemony held today by the sciences, physical and social.

      In the 21st century specialization has been as notable a tendency in the social sciences as in the biological and physical sciences. This is reflected not only in varieties of research but also in course offerings in academic departments. Whereas not very many years ago, a couple of dozen advanced courses in a social science reflected the specialization and diversity of the discipline even in major universities with graduate schools, today a hundred such courses are found to be not enough.

      Side by side with this strong trend toward specialization, however, is another, countering trend: that of cross-fertilization and interdisciplinary cooperation. At the beginning of the 20th century, down in fact until World War II, the several disciplines existed each in a kind of splendid isolation from the others. That historians and sociologists, for example, might ever work together in curricula and research projects would have been scarcely conceivable prior to about 1945. Each social science tended to follow the course that emerged in the 19th century: to be confined to a single, distinguishable, if artificial, area of social reality. Today, evidences are all around of cross-disciplinary work and of fusion within a single social science of elements drawn from other social sciences. Thus there are such vital areas of work as political sociology, economic anthropology, psychology of voting, and industrial sociology. Single concepts such as “structure,” “function,” “alienation,” and “motivation” can be seen employed variously to useful effect in several social sciences. The techniques of one social science can be seen consciously incorporated into another or into several social sciences. If history has provided much in the way of perspective to sociology or anthropology, each of these two has provided perspective, and also whole techniques, such as statistics and survey, to history. In short, specialization is by no means without some degree at least of countertendencies such as fusion and synthesis.

      Another outstanding characteristic of each of the social sciences in the 20th century was its professionalization. Without exception, the social sciences became bodies of not merely research and teaching but also practice, in the sense that this word has in medicine or engineering. Down until about World War II, it was a rare sociologist or political scientist or anthropologist who was not a holder of academic position. There were economists and psychologists to be found in banks, industries, government, even in private consultantship, but the numbers were relatively tiny. Overwhelmingly the social sciences had visibility alone as academic disciplines, concerned essentially with teaching and with more or less basic, individual research. All this changed profoundly, and on a vast scale, during the late 20th century. Today there are as many economists and psychologists outside academic departments as within, if not more. The number of sociologists, political scientists, and demographers to be found in government, industry, and private practice rises constantly. Equally important is the changed conception or image of the social sciences. Today, to a degree unknown before World War II, the social sciences are conceived as policy-making disciplines, concerned with matters of national welfare in their professional capacities in just as sure a sense as any of the physical sciences. Inevitably, tensions have arisen within the social sciences as the result of processes of professionalization. Those persons who are primarily academic can all too easily feel that those who are primarily professional have different and competing identifications of themselves and their disciplines.

Nature of the research

      The emphasis upon research in the social sciences has become almost transcending within recent decades. This situation is not at all different from that which prevails in the physical sciences and the professions in this age. Prior to about 1945, the functions of teaching and research had approximately equal value in many universities and colleges. The idea of a social (or physical) scientist appointed to an academic institution for research alone, or with research preponderant, was scarcely known. Research bureaus and institutes in the social sciences were very few and did not rival traditional academic departments and colleges as prestige-bearing entities. All of that was changed decisively beginning with the period just after World War II. From governments and foundations, large sums of money passed into the universities—usually not to the universities as such, but rather to individuals or small groups of individuals, each eminent for research. Research became the uppermost value in the social sciences (as in the physical) and hence, of course, in the universities themselves.

      Probably the greatest single change in the social sciences during the second half of the 20th century was the widespread introduction of mathematical and other quantitative methods, all of which were aided by increasingly sophisticated computer technology. Without question, economics is the discipline in which the most spectacular changes of this kind have taken place. So great is the dominance of mathematical techniques here—resulting in the eruption of what is called econometrics to a commanding position in the discipline—that, to the outsider, economics today almost appears to be a branch of mathematics. But in sociology, political science, social psychology, and anthropology, the impact of quantitative methods, above all, of statistics, has also been notable. No longer does statistics stand alone, a separate discipline, as it did in effect during the 19th century. This area today is inseparable from each of the social sciences, though, in the field of mathematics, statistics still remains eminently distinguishable, the focus of highly specialized research and theory.

      The use of computers (computer) and of all the complex techniques associated with computers has become a staple of social-science research and teaching. Through the data storage and data retrieval of electronic computers, working with amounts and diversity of data that would call for the combined efforts of hundreds, even thousands of technicians, the social sciences have been able to deal with both the extensive and intensive aspects of human behaviour in ways that would once have been inconceivable. The so-called computer revolution in modern thought has been, in short, as vivid a phase of the social as the physical sciences, not to mention other areas of modern life. The problem as it is stated by mature social scientists is to use computers in ways in which they are best fitted but without falling into the fallacy that they can alone guide, direct, and supply vital perspective in the study of man.

      Closely related to mathematical, computer, and other quantitative aspects of the social sciences is the vast increase in the empiricism of modern social science. Never in history has so much in the way of data been collected, examined, classified, and brought to the uses of social theory and social policy alike. What has been called the triumph of the fact is nowhere more visible than in the social sciences. Without question, this massive empiricism has been valuable, indispensable indeed, to those seeking explanations of social structures and processes. Empiricism, however, like quantitative method, is not enough in itself. Unless related to hypothesis, theory, or conclusion, it is sterile, and most of the leading social scientists of today reflect this view in their works. Too many, however, deal with the gathering and classifying of data as though these were themselves sufficient.

      It is the quest for data, for detailed, factual knowledge of human beliefs, opinions, and attitudes, as well as patterns and styles of life—familial, occupational, political, religious, and so on—that has made the use of surveys and polls another of the major tendencies in the social sciences of this century. The poll data one sees in news reports are hardly more than the exposed portion of an iceberg. Literally thousands of polls, questionnaires, and surveys are going on at any given moment today in the social sciences. The survey or polling method ranks with the quantitative indeed in popularity in the social sciences, both being, obviously, indispensable tools of the empiricism just mentioned.

Theoretical modes

      It is not the case, however, that interest in theory is a casualty of the 20th-century fascination with method and fact. Though there is a great deal less of that grand or comprehensive theory that was a hallmark of 19th-century social philosophy and social science, there are still those persons who are engrossed in search for master principles, for general and unified theory that will assimilate all the lesser and more specialized types of theory. But their efforts and results are not often regarded as successful by the vast majority of social scientists. Theory tends to be specific theory—related to one or other of the major divisions of research within each of the social sciences. The theory of the firm in economics, of deviance in sociology, of communication in political science, of attitude formation in social psychology, of divergent development in cultural anthropology are all examples of theory in every proper sense of the word. But each is, clearly, specific. If there is a single social science in which a more or less unified theory exists, with reference to the whole of the discipline, it is economics. Even here, however, unified, general theory does not have the sovereign sweep it had in the classical tradition of Ricardo and his followers before the true complexities of economic behaviour had become revealed.

Developmentalism

      Developmentalism is another overall influence upon the work of the social sciences. As noted above, an interest in social evolution was one of the major aspects of the social sciences throughout the 19th century in western Europe. In the early 20th century, however, this interest, in its larger and more visible manifestations, seemed to terminate. There was a widespread reaction against the idea of unilinear sequences of stages, deemed by the 19th-century social evolutionists to be universal for all mankind in all places. Criticism of social evolution in this broad sense was a marked element of all the social sciences, pre-eminently in anthropology but in the others as well. There were numerous demonstrations of the inadequacy of unilinear descriptions of change when it came to accounting for what actually happened, so far as records and other evidences suggested, in the different areas and cultures of the world.

      Beginning in the late 1940s and the 1950s, however, there was a resurgence of developmental ideas in all the social sciences—particularly with respect to studies of the new nations and cultures that were coming into existence in considerable numbers. Studies of economic growth and of political and social development have become more and more numerous. Although it would be erroneous to see these developmental studies as simple repetitions of those of the 19th-century social evolutionists, there are, nevertheless, common elements of thought, including the idea of stages of growth and of change conceived as continuous and cumulative and even as moving toward some more or less common end. At their best, these studies of growth and development in the new nations, by their counterposing of traditional and modern ways, tell a good deal about specific mechanisms of change, the result of the impact of the West upon outlying parts of the world. But as more and more social scientists have recently become aware, efforts to place these concrete mechanisms of change into larger, more systematic models of development all too commonly succumb to the same faults of unilinearity and specious universalism that early-20th-century critics found in 19th-century social evolution.

Social-systems approach

      Still another major tendency in all of the social sciences after World War II was the interest in “social systems.” The behaviour of individuals and groups is seen as falling into multiple interdependencies, and these interdependencies are considered sufficiently unified to warrant use of the word “system.” Although there are clear uses of biological models and concepts in social-systems work, it may be fair to say that the greatest single impetus to development of this area was widening interest after World War II in cybernetics—the study of human control functions and of the electrical and mechanical systems that could be devised to replace or reinforce them. Concepts drawn from mechanical and electrical engineering have been rather widespread in the study of social systems.

      In social-systems studies, the actions and reactions of individuals, or even of groups (collective behaviour) as large as nations, are seen as falling within certain definable, more or less universal patterns of equilibrium and disequilibrium. The interdependence of roles, norms, and functions is regarded as fundamental in all types of group behaviour, large and small. Each social system, as encountered in social-science studies, is a kind of “ideal type,” not identical to any specific “real” condition but sufficiently universal in terms of its central elements to permit useful generalization.

structuralism and functionalism

      Structuralism in the social sciences is closely related to the theory of the social system. Although there is nothing new about the root concepts of structuralism—they may be seen in one form or other throughout Western thought—there is no question but that in the present century this view of behaviour has become a dominant one in many fields. At bottom it is a reaction against all tendencies to deal with human thought and behaviour atomistically—that is, in terms of simple, discrete units of either thought, perception, or overt behaviour. In psychology, structuralism in its oldest sense simply declares that perception occurs, with learning following, in terms of experiences or sensations in various combinations, in discernible patterns or gestalten. In sociology, political science, and anthropology, the idea of structure similarly refers to the repetitive patternings that are found in the study of social, economic, political, and cultural existence. The structuralist contends that no element can be examined or explained outside its context or the pattern or structure of which it is a part. Indeed, it is the patterns, not the elements, that are the only valid objects of study.

      What is called functionalism in the social sciences today is closely related to structuralism, with the term structural-functional a common one, especially in sociology and anthropology. Function refers to the way in which behaviour takes on significance, not as a discrete act but as the dynamic aspect of some structure. Biological analogies are common in theories of structure and function in the social sciences. Very common is the image of the biological organ, with its close interdependence to other organs (as the heart to the lung) and the interdependence of activities (as circulation to respiration).

Interactionism

      Interaction is still another concept that had wide currency in the social sciences of the 20th century. Social interaction—or, as it is sometimes called, symbolic interaction—refers to the fact that the relationships among two or more groups or human beings are never one-sided, purely physical, or direct. Always there is reciprocal influence, a mutual sense of “otherness.” And always the presence of the “other” has crucial effect in one's definition of not merely what is external but what is internal. One acquires one's individual sense of identity from interactions with others beginning in infancy. It is the initial sense of the other person—mother, for example—that in time gives the child its sense of self, a sense that requires continuous development through later interactions with others. From the point of view of interactionist theory, all one's perceptions of and reactions to the external world are mediated or influenced by prior ideas, valuations, and assessments. Always one is engaged in socialization or the modification of one's mind, role, and behaviour through contact with others.

Future of the social sciences

      What has been covered in the preceding paragraphs may be the most that can be said within restricted compass about the social sciences of the 20th century without turning to the individual social sciences themselves and related disciplines. The concern here has been with only those major contextual influences, tendencies of overall character, and dominant ideas or theories that the social sciences taken as a whole manifest in one degree or other.

      There is one final aspect of the subject that must be considered briefly, for how it is resolved will have much effect upon the future of the social sciences in the West. This is the relation of the social sciences to organized society, to government and industry, and to other institutional centres of authority, especially in light of funding for research and the implications for scientific objectivity. The social sciences, it is said, must maintain their distance, their freedom, from bureaucratized government and industry. Otherwise they will lose their inherent powers of honest and dispassionate criticism of the ineffective or evil in society. Although there may be a certain amount of feeling ranging from the naïve to the politically revolutionary in such sentiments, they cannot be taken lightly, as is apparent from the serious consideration that is being given on a steadily rising scale to the whole problem of the relationship between social science and social policy.

      Since the inception of the social sciences—since, indeed, the time when the universities in the West came into being for the express purpose of training professional men in law, theology, and medicine—man has properly sought, through knowledge, to influence social policy, taking this latter term in the widest sense to include not merely the policies of national government but of local government, business, professions, and so on. What else, it may be asked, are the social sciences all about if it is not to use knowledge to improve social life; and how else but through influencing of the major institutions can such improvement take place?

      So much is true, comes the answering response. But in the process of seeking to influence the great agencies of modern power and function—of what is loosely called the Establishment—the social sciences may themselves become influenced adversely by the values of power and affluence to be found in these great agencies. They themselves may become identified with the status quo. What the social sciences should give, say the partisans of this view, is a continuation of the revolutionary or at least profoundly reformist tradition that was begun in the 18th century by the philosophers of reason who, detesting the official establishment of their day, sought on their own to transform it. What is today called objectivity or methodological rigour turns out to be, say these same partisans, acceptance of the basic values of reigning government and industry.

      It is this essential conflict regarding the purposes of the social sciences, the relation of the social sciences to government and society, and the role of the individual social scientist in society that bids fair at this moment to be the major conflict of the years ahead. How it is resolved may very well determine the fate of the social sciences, now less than two centuries old.

Robert A. Nisbet Ed.

Additional Reading

Preserved Smith, A History of Modern Culture, 2 vol. (1930–34, reprinted 1962), covering the years 1543–1776, is a classic in the history of ideas and the best single work on the period leading up to the emergence of the individual social sciences. James Westfall Thompson, A History of Historical Writing, 2 vol. (1942), is useful in this respect also. On the age immediately preceding the rise of the social sciences, the best study by far is Lester G. Crocker, Nature and Culture: Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment (1963), and An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (1959), recommended to be read or consulted in that order. The best general work on the history of the social sciences and the history of social philosophy in the West is Harry Elmer Barnes and Howard Becker, Social Thought from Lore to Science, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1952).Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (1962), is an important and fascinating treatment of the social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of the age in which the individual social sciences emerged in western Europe. Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (1966), although concerned primarily with sociology, deals with the specific ways in which the ideologies and themes of the democratic and industrial revolutions became translated into social theory. The same author's Social Change and History (1969) deals in detail with the incorporation of the theory of social evolution into the social sciences of the 19th century. For the rise and development of the individual social sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries, the following works are recommended. (Anthropology): Robert H. Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory (1937); and Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (1968). (Economics): Erich Roll, A History of Economic Thought, 3rd ed. rev. (1954); and the extremely readable Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 3rd ed. (1967). (Political science): George Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 3rd ed. (1959), best on the three centuries preceding the 20th; Francis W. Coker, Recent Political Thought (1934), excellent for the early 20th century; and Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (eds.), History of Political Philosophy (1963). (Sociology): Barnes and Becker, referred to above, for detailed information on the history of sociology in the 19th and early 20th centuries; Nisbet, also referred to above, dealing with the relation between political ideologies and the currents of sociological thought in the late 19th century; and Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought (1971), a very good general history of sociology in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and America. (Social psychology): Fay Berger Karpf, American Social Psychology: Its Origins, Development and European Background (1932), the best account of social psychology in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and Thomas C. Wiegele, Biology and the Social Sciences (1982), concerning the effect of biological research on social science disciplines.

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