Social Science 1 The Origins of the Social Sciences

Origin of the Social Sciences

The list of social sciences -- history, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, economics, political science, psychology, and geography is both too narrow and too broad. It is too broad because there are parts of the fields of history, geography, and psychology that should not be included as social sciences. For instance, parts of history and geography belong in humanities, and parts of psychology belong in the natural sciences. This list is too narrow because new social sciences are emerging, such as cognitive science and sociobiology, which incorporate new finding and new ways of looking at reality. There will be inevitable problems in defining and cataloging the social sciences because all knowledge is interrelated. Often it is difficult to know where one social science ends and another begins. Not only are the individual social sciences interrelated, the social sciences as a whole body are related to natural sciences and the humanities. The strains of the old song, The hip bones connected to the thigh bone, are quite appropriate to the social sciences. To understand psychology, it is helpful, even necessary, to understand physiology, and in order to understand economics it is necessary to understand psychology. Similar arguments can be made for all of the social sciences. It was because of this interconnection of all the social sciences that some day in the future there will be a unified social science, coexisting with all the individual social science theories but that day remains in the future. One of the difficulties presenting definitions and descriptions of the various social sciences is that social scientists themselves dont agree on what it is they do, or should be doing. In preparation, the author met with groups of social scientists specializing in specific fields and asked them to explain what it was that distinguished their field from others. There was little agreement among specialists in a particular social science, let alone among all social scientists. A cynic once said that economics is what economists do; if one replaced economics and economists with any of the other social sciences and its practitioners, one would have as good as definition as possible. Unfortunately, it would not be very helpful to those who did not know what social scientists do. On important difference among the individual social scientists did come out of these discussions: even when two social scientists are considering the same issue, because their training is different they focus on different aspects of that problem. Geographers fixate on spaces and spatial relativities; economists on market incentives; political scientists on group decision-making. Thus while we might not be able to define the domains of the various social scientist unambiguously, we can gain some insight into each by considering the training individual social scientists receive and the background that supports them. To do that we need to consider the history of each social science and considering their histories we can see how and why they developed and get a sense of what some of the specialists do. As is our way, we first take the broadest possible sweep of history, in an attempt to place the social sciences in their place relative to other fields of study. Then we change the focus of our analysis and take a closer look at the period when many of the social sciences developed and consider how and why they emerged as separate field of study (and how and why even now new social sciences are themselves emerging). Finally, we consider a representative of each of the social sciences: what he or she does. In the process, we give you a birds eye introduction to the various components of the group.

THE ROOTS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Natural scientists tell us that the world has been around for some six billion years and that living things have been around for at least three billion. We will go back, however, only about 2,600 years, when Western philosophy began on the fringes of ancient Greece (some theorist hold that it was the Greek response to the ideas from Eastern civilizations, but there are limits to even our broad sweep). The Greeks came to realize that their ancient account of how the world was created and administered by an enormous collection of gods, or pantheon was not the only possible explanation. They are credited with being the first to establish rational theory, independent of theological creed; to grasp rational concepts and use them as way of looking at reality and seeing logical connections; and to be empirical and anti-mystical. Two great Greek thinkers of the third and fourth centuries B.C., Plato and Aristotle, are responsible for establishing a basis for knowledge as we know it and deal with it today. The philosophical debates of the Greek period were, in many ways, the same ones that go on today, explaining how, when all things change, things must also be remain unchanging; otherwise, something would have to be created out of nothing a logical impossibility. These ideas would later develop into modern physics, including the laws of thermodynamics and the proposition that energy can neither be created nor destroyed merely transformed. The Greeks also considered many of the issues which later became the social sciences; for example, they considered the role of the state (political science); the way minds interact with society (psychology); and individuals interaction within

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the market (economics). Thus the history of the social sciences begins with the Greeks. The history, however, is not continuous. Much of the Greek contribution to knowledge would have been lost (who knows what other contribution actually have been lost?) was it not for its preservation by Eastern civilizations. On their forays into the East during the Crusades (the religious wars in which Christians in Europe attempted to capture the Holy Lands). Europeans became reacquainted with the learning of the ancient Greeks, and they brought back the body of the ancient Greek learning to Europe, where it was generally available by the twelfth century. These ideas spread slowly throughout Europe over the next 300 years and by the middle of the fifteenth century, rediscovery of Greek civilization in Europe was widespread. Because the period from about 1453 (the fall of Constantinople) to the end of the seventeenth century was characterized by rebirth and proliferations of the ancient knowledge, it became known as the Renaissance (a French word meaning rebirth). The Renaissance must have been a wonderful time for scholars. The totality of knowledge was still comprehensible by the human mind. An ideal in the Renaissance was that an educated person could know everything and exercise all skills and social graces. A true Renaissance man was willing to take on all comers on any issue. As the store of knowledge grew, it became harder and harder to know everything, and so people began to specialize. A natural division opened, one between the humanities (the study of literature, music, and art) and physics. The physics part of this division was not refined enough and soon physics was broken up into empirical studies (which developed into the various natural sciences) and metaphysics (non-empirical studies which developed into philosophy. In the Middle Ages religion was so central to life that the study of religion was taken for granted and all other fields of study were ties together by religion. For example, painters painted religious pictures, musicians wrote religious music, and the study of literature was the study of the Bible and its commentators. Questions which today seem the obvious ones, such as: Why are people divided into classes?, And why are the poor poor? w ere simply not asked. Things were the way they were because that was Gods will. Once one knew Gods will. The issue was how to carry it out. For example, medieval scholar believed in a justprice and that collecting interest on savings was immoral. They taught those principles and condemned all of those who did not follow their teachings. As the Renaissance dawned and continued, that religious tie provoked tension as scholars in various fields of study came to conclusions different form the Churchs doctrines, beginning as long conflict between religious learning and beliefs and so-called rationalist learning and beliefs. The tension between the religious explanations and rationalist explanations was (and still is) inevitable. The rationalist approach places human reason above faith. In a rationalist, one looks for logical connections and is continually asking the questions: can you prove it? This meant that somehow the rationalists had to figure out what it meant to prove something. A religious approach places faith above reason. A religious explanation had no need to prove anything: explanations were accepted on faith. The problem was to interpret and accept Gods will. Throughout the Renaissance, rationalism more and more replaced religion as organizing principle of knowledge, and as it did, the various fields of knowledge became divided along rationalist lines. The humanities still reflected religious issues; the rationalist revolution came much later to the humanities. To the degree that they were considered, most of the issues we now classify under social sciences were studied as part of history. History was part of literature and the humanities, it was simply a documentation of what had happened it never asked why something happened. To ask why was failure to accept Gods will. Thus it was primarily from philosophy, not history that most of the social sciences emerged. The natural sciences and philosophy divided along modes of inquiry and answers to the question, Can you prove it? The study of philosophy itself evolved into a va riety of fields, such as logic, morals, and epistemology (the study of knowledge).

The Enlightenment The period in which rationalism definitely replaced religion as the organizing principle of knowledge is known as the Enlightenment, which began between 1650 A.D. and 1700 A.D. and continued for about 100 years, it is in this period that the development of the social sciences took hold and flourished. By the time of the Enlightenment, it had become evident that to know everything to be a Renaissance scholarwas impossible. Not only it was impossible to know everything; it was impossible to know about just one subject; say, all of physics or all of philosophy. Individuals began to specialize in their study. For instance, chemistry and astronomy were separated from physics. In the case of philosophy, as philosophers delved into their subject they further divided philosophy into parts. One part was metaphilosophy, the study of issues which most scholars agreed were not empirically testable. One such issue was: How many angels can stand on the head of a pin? The other division of philosophy dealt with issues which

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could, in principle at least, be empirically tested. For instance: What type of political organization of society is preferable? It is from the second division that the social sciences evolved. (They were called sciences because they were in principle meant to be empirically tested). The Enlightenment spawned social science because the Enlightenment rejected the assumption that the classical world of the Greeks and the Romans was perfect. In the Enlightenment (roughly, the whole of the eighteenth century), there was a general belief that civilization had improved and that so, too, should be the thinking about civilization. Moreover, in the seventeenth century, just preceding the Enlightenment, there was continual turmoil a long drawn out war between France and England and a religious conflict between the Catholics and Protestants about how to interpret Gods will. That fight broke down the religious e xplanations and made one very much aware of social problems. Which of the two explanations, Catholic or Protestant, was right/ why were they fighting? What could be done about it? The social sciences developed as individuals attempted to explain those social problems and suggest what could be done to solve them. While the existence of social problems that require solution may seem obvious to you, this was not always so obvious. This view is the product of the Enlightenment, which establishes mans three humiliations, the belief that: 1. 2. 3. The earth is not the center of the universe; We are creatures of nature like other animals; Our reasoning ability is subject to passions and subconscious desires.

Before we experienced these humiliations, thinkers could rely on an order established by God. Social problems were set up by God and were to be accepted or endured. Only after the beginning of the Enlightenment did people begin to believe that society and culture are themselves products of history and the evolution of culture that they had changed and would continue to change. As is often the case, the change in viewpoint had a paradoxical counterpoint, and human beings humiliation was accompanied by a belief in human beings power. If society could change, then the change could be, at least to some extent, guided and directed by human beings.

From Philosophy to Social Science The evolution of philosophy into the social sciences can be seen in France, where philosophers joined together to produce an encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot and Jean dAlembert, appeared over the years from 1751 to 1780. The full title of this encyclopedia proclaimed it to be rational dictionary of science, art, and industry. Unlike earlier compilations, it contained systematic articles on man, society, and method, and a number of the social sciences can be traced to this mammoth work. There are many ways to look at social problems, and as scholars began considering human beings in reference to their social environment the diversity soon become apparent. The history of each of the social sciences becomes hopelessly tangles with that of each of the others at this point. In the Enlightenment, scholars were debating with one another and ideas were quickly evolving. To capture even a flavor of the interaction and debate leads to a formidable morass, hardly conducive to a social science course. So we shall cut the Gordian knot here, forget most of the 1 interaction, and considering the history of each of the social sciences separately. Thus, in the next section we consider the history of each of the social sciences, and provide a profile of one illustrative figure form each discipline. We begin our survey with political science because parts of it are the closest to political philosophy, which was the key concern of Enlightenment thinkers. Then we continue with a look at the development of the various social sciences and how they have evolved since people first identified them as subjects for study.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE We will call one of the earliest Enlightenment thinkers, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the father of political science. Rather than rely on tradition and the doctrine of divine right, Hobbes built a rationalist explanation for existing government. To do so, he speculated on what life would be like in a pure state of nature. He argued that people were
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Once upon a time, Gordius, the king of an Asian country, tied an intricate knot and foretold that whoever could undo it would become ruler of all Asia. Many tried but all failed until Alexander the Great, who was already king in Greece, arrived on his march of the world conquest. He took one look and then slashed it through with a single bold stroke of his sword. Alexander lived 356 B.C. to 323 B.C. (he was on such a fast track he died at age 33).

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deep-down brutes and needed a string government to protect them from themselves. Hobbes stated that peace as achieved among individuals by all parties voluntarily limiting their personal freedom in order to gain social stability; he held that when people emerge from natural anarchy to create a state, they begin by limiting their freedom. With this argument he justified that absolute authority of kings to rule. Were we not ruled by such authority, there would be chaos and we would all be worse off. His reasoning was taken up by John Locke (1632-1704) who specifically looked at the part of Hobbes argument for the right of kings to rule. Locke agreed that we would be worse off in chaos, but argued that chaos was not the only alternative. He argued that the rights of individuals look precedence over the rights of kings and that the only justification for any political power was public good. The difference between the two views is the following: Whereas Hobbes view allowed no changes in the existing order, Lockes view was that any government that violated its trust was itself invalid and that certain individual rights, such as the right to own property, were prior to the rights of government. Lockes view of natural rights, which was later reflected i n the United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitutions Bill of Rights, included freedom of worship, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech and it is a fundamental part of Western political theory. In the mid-eighteenth century a third great political philosopher, jean Jacques Rousseau, carried through the work of Locke and Hobbes, he argued that individuals were basically good and that the stable society could exist only when its members were emotionally secure and the society itself had a foundation in reality. The political philosophers, following the work of Plato and Aristotle, were in many ways pot political scientists as we know that profession today. They were social scientists and were willing to use whatever set of arguments or analysis that was relevant to the issue at hand. Thus they discussed sociology, economics, and psychology simultaneously with interwoven with discussions of politics. Their arguments were abstract, but they reflected the political turmoil of that time. Moreover, the arguments not only reflected but also influenced the political turmoil, and those of the noted figures of the Enlightenment were used by the various sides if the major political revolutions which occurred in the late 1700s. Somewhere in the twentieth century political philosophy has evolved into political science, which includes the study of political philosophy along with the analytic study of government, using the methods of social science. Recent developments of political science have not been in political philosophy but have been analyzing the theory and workings of a democratic model, using the empirical works symbolic of science in drawing conclusions about the way democracies work. One example of the theoretical approach is the study of interest groups and the effect the interaction of these interest groups had on government. A leader in this new interest group approach is the political scientist Robert Dahl. As the pure theory of political science has developed, other subareas, such as public policy and government, have developed which combine a variety of ways of approaching political science. Conducting polls is an important technique of these subgroups. Thus the field of political science today is divided into numerous subareas, including the study of political philosophy; the study of the theory of interest groups and the abstract working of democracy; the study of public policy and government institutions; the study of international policies; and the study of public administration.

HISTORY OF ECONOMICS As political philosophy evolved it became apparent that it had two aspects: politics, which developed into political science; and economics, which developed into political economy, which, in turn, developed into what we now call economics. As part of the study of political economy, economics has a long history. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle wrote about political economy and what they called a just price. Through the Middle Ages, that concept of the just price remained, and the religious theorist Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) made it an important part of his moral code. According to Aquinas, it was immoral to charge interest and take advantage of another person by exacting too high a price (an unjust price). In the Enlightenment, as rationalism replaced religion as the originating theme of knowledge, issues of morality faded (they were metaphysical questions), and political philosophers interested in economics turned to other questions, such as what is the basis of the wealth of society. These questions became more and more important with the emerging trade among nations. Modern economics began with the English social philosopher Adam Smith, who, in 1776, wrote the seminal book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of nations. Smith interest was not confined to economics; it was also based on psychology and views about human beings; and, like the social philosophers Hume and Locke, he focused upon our ability to make contracts and exchanges. He wrote, Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and

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deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog, and that nobody ever saw one animal by its gesture and natural cry signify to another, This is mine; that, yours. I am willing to give this for that. He argu ed that this ability to exchange was one of the fundamental differences between human beings and other forms of life and that markets would develop in which people could undertake this action. As those markets developed, individuals self -interest would make humankind better off. He wrote, Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. Smith was arguing against another political-economic viewpoint of the time, which was called mercantilism. Under mercantilism the state played the central role in deciding who was allowed to do what, smiths work had definite policy overtones and suggested that the state should leave to individuals the process of deciding who should do what. These ideas, which fit in with the liberal ideas of the timeof freedom and the natural rights of individualscame to be embraced within the views of economics and are classified under the term laissez-faire policies. Smiths work establishes what became known as the classical school of economics, and political economists who were members of that school, such as David Ricardo (1772-1823) and John Stuart Mill (1860-1973), made very important contributions to the development of classical economic theory. Ricardo formulated theories of value, wages, rent, and profit, and held that the economy was an elaborate mechanism with interrelated parts. John Stuart Mill was known both as a political philosopher and an economist, and his Principles of Political Economy (1851) was the classic text for decades. His central focus, however, was on individual freedom and, unlike some earlier laissez-faire economists, he advocated a variety of programs, such as worker education, taxation of unearned gains from land, and redistribution of wealth, which would make that individual freedom a reality. Karl Marx (1818-1883) was an economist, political theorist, and sociologist and he continued the class analysis characteristic of the classical economists, except he did not see the harmony that Ricardo saw; instead, he saw conflict among classes, a conflict which he predicted would end in a revolution of the proletariat and the overthrow of the capitalist system. That overthrow did not come in any way that Marx foresaw, but the passage of time has shown us an evolution in the nature of the capitalist system in the economy. An important economist in that evolution is John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), who developed modern macroeconomic theory. Contemporary economists who have played an important role in the development of modern economics include Raul Samuelson and James Tobin. Samuelson won a Nobel prize in economics for his role in making economics a mathematical science. Tobin won a Nobel prize for his work on monetary theory. HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY As we described political science and economics, you noticed that sociological issues were very much a part of them. Sociology has as much claim to those histories as do politics and economics. Sociology has as much claim to those histories as do politics and economics. Sociology as a separate field, however, developed in reaction to the failure of economists and political scientists to consider a set of social issues. Human beings have been thinking about their relationships to other human beings ever since human beings began to think about anything. We want to be more precise than that about the history of sociology, and we can identify sociological thought in wiring as early as those of Confucius (about 500 B.C.), Aristotle, Plato, Ibn Khaldoun (fourteenth century A.D.), and so on into modern times. The term sociology was coined in 1838 by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), but we can see the beginnings of modern sociology some time before it became necessary to find a name to separate this study from other disciplines. In England in the 1760s, highly developed questionnaires were being used by Arthur Young who, riding around the country on horseback, surveyed the population. By 1800 the questionnaire and case study methods were well established. Despite these earlier beginnings, Auguste Comte is known as the father of sociology. Later important sociologists include Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who studied the problem of social statics and dynamics and compared human societies to living organisms. He argued that just as the heart and lungs of animals are interdependent, so are the various parts of society, such as the state, the economy, and social institutions. Similarly, applying Darwins theory of evolution to human societies, he held that societies evolve and that this evolution is a natural process. He strongly opposed proposals for social reform on the grounds that these might interfere with the natural evolutionary process, A quite different view of social progress can be found in the work of Karl Marx, who deserves to be called both a sociologist and economist along with the designations political scientist, historian, and philosopher. Marx did not see social harmony and an inevitability of progress, as did Spencer. Instead, he saw history as class conflict, a struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and he argued that eventually the inherent contradictions within the capitalist economic system would cause the exploited majority to overthrow the ruling minority.

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Two other important sociologists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century are Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Max Weber (1884-1920). Durkheim emphasized shared, or collective, beliefs and values as that part of society which held groups together. He was one of the first sociologists to conduct a very exacting statistical study. His hypothesis for the study, a study of suicide, was that the act of suicide is influenced by social forces and is not simply an individual decision. Much of max Webers work can be seen as a debate with the ghost of Karl Marx. While Marx thought the overthrow of capitalism was inevitable, Weber saw trends towards greater social equality as inevitable. He emphasized the positive nature of the work of Comte and specifically argued that sociologists should be value-free, and that their personal convictions and biases should never creep into their research or conclusions as, he argued, they had into the work of Marx. Recent sociologists include Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), who developed a variety of what are called grand theories; Robert Merton (1910- ), who has developed a variety of abstract models of society; and C. Wright Mills (1961-1962), who criticized the trend to higher theoretical issues and the movement away from sociologists as observers of society.

HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY As you saw in the discussion of sociology, the interaction of people with each other is an important part of that study. If one is going to study the interaction of people, it is logical to study the behavior of individuals as individuals that is, the behavior of a person. It is a collection of such persons, after all, that makes a group of people. As we have pointed out in discussion the other fields, up until about 1700, and indeed, continuing through the 1700s, political philosophy integrated what has since become the various social sciences. Thus in the work of Plato and Aristotle we can see very definite systematic treatments of the workings of the mind and of the interrelationship between physiological and mental processes and concepts of consciousness. We can see this, too, in the work of John Locke. In the 1700s, theory of the mind progressed and developed into the twin doctrines of sensationism and associationism. Sensationism is the theory that there are no innate ideas and that knowledge is derived from experience only. Associationism is the theory that all consciousness is the result of the combination of certain simple elements from the experience of the senses. In the work of such writers as David Hartley (1705-1757), we see the development of neural basis of conscious processesin other words, our minds are physically related to physical stimuli through nerve endings. Combined with the advances occurring in the empirical sciences, especially the biological sciences, these developments were to lead to modern psychology. In the late nineteenth century Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) established, at the University of Leipzig, the first laboratory of experimental psychology. He sought to identify the elements of consciousness and discover the principles by which they are combined. He advocated study by the observation of human behavior. He was known for his encyclopedic grasp of facts, for prolific publications over a period of more than 60 years, and for his influence on a wide array of students, including many from America. In the United States William James (1842-1910), brother if the famous novelist Henry James, was the first to establish a laboratory of psychology, and in 1890 he published Principles of Psychology, the first general psychology text. Much of what we today consider the subject matter and the practice of psychology, as exemplified by psychological and psychoanalytic advisors, comes not so much from the tradition of Wundt or James but from the work of a doctor, Sigmund Freud. Although he was trained as a physician, Freud early became convinced that many of the problems his patients brought him did not have a physical basis, but were, instead, the result of mental disorders; and he discussed and developed a variety of ideas concerning childhood sexuality and unconscious motivation as accounting for all types of behavior. His theory was that many physical and mental illnesses are cause by psychic trauma suffered in early life. He developed a technique called free association, by means of which patients are encouraged to recall these early wounds from their unconscious to their conscious where they can b e dealt with and gotten rid ofin short, where they are no longer repressed. He fostered an entire school of clinical psychology and although there have been many modifications to and disagreements with his theories, the basic structure of psychoanalysis today is still Freudian. His theories have also widely influenced education, arts, and literature. Other important developments occurred in the twentieth century with the work of Jean Piaget (1896-1980), who studied the mental processes of children, and B.F. Skinner, who theorized that individuals respond to positive and negative reinforcement. This work has played an important role in modern psychological practice. Another trend in psychology is social psychology, and it is exemplified in the work of Carl Rogers (1902-), who put the human (back) in the discussion of human nature. What we know as social psychology is essentially a hybrid of psychology and sociology and as is likely to be taught in the sociology department as it is in the psychology department.

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HISTORY OF ANTHROPOLOGY Some psychologists have argued that psychology ties sociology and anthropology together. If it does, it is time for us, then, to go on to a discussion of anthropology. In considering the history of anthropology, it is useful to separate physical anthropology from cultural anthropology. Physical anthropology had its origins in archeology, which itself is a part of history. Archeology developed as people discovered the artifacts of history (usually by digging them up; sometimes by stumbling over them) and grew significantly in importance with the publication, in 1859, of Charles Darwins The Origin of Species. This book set forth Darwins theory of evolution, which argued that we had evolved from earlier life forms. Archeologists spread out to search for evidence of those earlier life forms. When they found the artifacts they naturally pondered the nature of the earlier society that had left such traces. They spent more and more time thinking about how their finds had changed views of past societies and of earlier life, and physical anthropology developed from this research. Anthropology was first taught for credit at the University of Vermont in 1886 by a professor named George Perkins Marsh. Since there are some three billion years to cover, modern physical anthropologists specialize. Some look for evidence of the origins of human beings. Others focus on past cultures, such as the Greek cultures, the Egyptian cultures, or the American Indian culture. The study of past cultures led to an expansion of anthropology into the study of currently existing societies and cultures, such as the aborigines of Australia or certain tribes of Africa, physically removed from our own. Initially, the study of cultural anthropology was carried out by amateurs who went into various cultures to live and to discover and record what they found in an effort to preserve these cultures before they died out. The study of these cultures provided insight into past cultures, but also provided insight into our own culture. Recognition of this led to the expansion of the domain of cultural anthropology to the study of the way in which all societies and cultures develop. Cultural anthropology was raised to the level of a social science by Franz Boas at Columbia University at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his writing he provided new insights to the different directions in which cultures can go. One of his top students, Margaret Mead, went to Samoa in the 1920s and became one of the best known anthropologists. As anthropology has grown, so too have further divisions within anthropology. Recently one of the most active braches of anthropology has been linguistic anthropology, which studies human beings through the medium of language and grammar.

HISTORY OF GEOGRAPHY The preceding section on anthropology gave you some idea of the worldwide distribution of human beings. Human beings are limited as to the conditions in which they can survive: they cannot be too hot or too cold, they need sufficient air and water, and they must be able to find or acquire other essentials of their lives, such as things to eat and methods of sheltering themselves. The study of geography tells us how geography shapes human life and how human beings have been shaped by their physical environment. Geography, like many of the other social sciences, was an organized field of knowledge as early as in ancient Greece. However, the study of geography as a social science was neglected until recently. In many ways, geography is the least formulated of the social sciences, and so we see time and energy spent by geographers in justifying their existence and tracing geographys origins. In some sense geography has always existed because people have been interested in things mappable. At one time, geography was essentially a study of regions and the physical characteristics of those regions. Geographers made the maps that explorers used. But map making hardly forms the subject of a social science. As with the other social science disciplines, the study of facts soon led to theorizing and rules to organize those facts. As this happened, geography, the field of map making and knowledge of where things are, evolved into geography, the social science. Because geography as a study developed so late, there is enormous interaction overlap between geography and other social sciences. For example, there are political geography, social geography, and economic geography, all of which analyze issues very similar to their counterparts in the relevant social science (political science, sociology, and economics). When geographers are pressed to explain how, say, economic geography differs from an economic analysis of the same issue, they reply that the geographer would likely put emphasis on spatial relations, whereas an economist would not. One of the theories used by geography is the central place theory. A central place is an intense agglomeration of human activity where goods are bought and sold, where ideas are exchanged, and where social, cultural, political,

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and religious institutions are located for the convenience of the people living around them. (Peter Gould, The National Geography, p. 91) Put simply, a central place is a city. The central place theory stated that these cities develop with a spatial regularity. It was not chance that civilization began in the Nile Delta or that New York City developed into the metropolis we know today. In the late nineteenth century, geography was a developing field of study, but in the 1920s and 1930s, one branch of geography, political geography, became intertwined to what became known as geopolitik. Geopolitik was used as a basis for German expansion beyond the traditional borders of that nation and as a justification for populous nations to seize territories and acquire lebensraumthat is, living space. World War II was fought, in part, to defeat these ambitions. In reaction, and in order not to be associated with geopolitik, many geographers in the 1950s and 1960s stayed entirely away from any discussion of politics or broader social issues and concentrated on the cataloging of physical phenomena. Most of these geographers were regional geographers who had intimate knowledge of the physical and the spatial dimensions of a particular region. In the 1970s, as the memory of geopolitik faded, social geography made a comeback and with comeback emerged a new focus on what geographers call systemic analysis the attempt to see patterns and rules in geographic manifestations and in geographys effect on culture and society.

HISTORY OF HISTORY If history is one of the social sciences, it is the oldest. History has been around since Herodotus (who worked during the middle of the fourth century B.C.) but long before him human beings had a need to make a record of what had happened. Cave dwellers 30,000 years ago made pictures on the walls, recounting past events or recording the success of their hunts. Other preliterate societies passed on the knowledge of events by long oral tales, which were memorized by one generation after another. But such recounting do not make history a social science. As we saw in our earlier discussion, history fell within the humanities, where important historians include Herodotus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and Henry Adams. No matter how detailed recountings may be, unless the discipline provides theories, rules, and organizations of rules, it is not a social science. Modern historians differ as to how much organization and rules they provide. Some historians belong to the humanities and some in the social sciences. However, there is no firm demarcation, since most historical narrative has had organization applied to it. Thus, historians are always bordering on social science. For example, the great historian Edward Gibbon (1734-1797), who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , provided general rules about civilization which are still of interest today. He specifically considered the problem of social change, differentiating three levels; technological improvements and change; legal, political, and economic infrastructure change, and achievements of cultural change. When history takes a social science approach to organizing, it is not only a social science, it is unified social science. Whether history is one of the humanities of one of the social sciences depends on who is presenting it. We have previously emphasized that social science is primarily concerned with rules and relationships among abstracts rather than among specific facts. While thats tru e, without a good sense of facts and a good knowledge of the society in which we live, those relationships would be meaningless. Indeed, to develop relationships we need to know what has happened and observed and use the empirical evidence around us to induce certain understandings, and then, through the use of logic, deduce a broader set of implications. Some historians have been primarily storytellers, and oftentimes wonderful story-tellers, who reconstructed major events of the past and considered the policies that were followed. They did not look for deeper rules and relationships, but were primarily in business to tell it like it was. That was history as one of the humanities. In the 1930s that changed, and a leading journal in history, called the Annales Histoires Economiques et Sociales (Historical, Economic, and Social Proceedings), founded by the French historian, Lucien Febvre, approached history in a different fashion. Instead of looking primarily at the visible history of the policymakers and ruling class, the new historians who were social science historians, were trying to reconstruct the lives of anonymous masses of men and women. In approaching this history, or from the ground up study, they used the latest findings in economics, geography, psychology, sociology, and all the social sciences in studying the past and drawing a set of lessons from the past. Ad they did this, historians became social scientists and made history a social science. There is no clear, sharp distinction between the humanities and social sciences. Good social scientists work with the heart and emotion of the humanist; and good humanist study is done with the eye, mind, and logic of the social scientist.

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THE EVOLVING SOCIAL SCIENCES Evolution and change are inevitable. Thus, it would be surprising if the divisions among the social sciences that currently exist still remain ten years from now. Indeed, with the development of new technology and technological advances in the physical sciences, the distinction among the various sciences is blurring and new sciences are developing. As these fields develop, the boundaries of the various social sciences change. Interaction among the various social sciences is bringing about new fields, such as economic psychology, psychological economics, and socio-political anthropology. In economics and political science, too, a group of economists is calling for the re-integration of these two fields into political economy, and some schools do have departments of political economy. It is not only within the social sciences that change is occurring. There is interaction between the natural and the social sciences. New developments in genetic theory have caused many to believe it is time for a new social science, called cognitive science, which combines psychology, linguistics, philosophy, social anthropology, and molecular biology. While it is still in the process of formation, a tentative definition of cognitive science is the study of how mind identifies problems and how it solves those problems. For instance, there are more ways to write a letter (the reason there are more ways that people who write is that there are all people plus the printing press and innumerable typefaces designed for it). Let us identify the problem as: how to recognize the letter s when we see it. We know the result of the exercise: everyone knows how to read can instantly recognize most renditions of letter s (the handwriting of a few college students and some physicians excepted). But we do not currently know how we do it. Or, how do you know the face of your roommate from the face of your mother from the face of the postman for the face of Robert Redford? There has been speculation about how the mind works for almost as long as there have been minds, theories, and even experiments, but few specific riddles have been conclusively solved. (in 1985 a theory, supported by scientific evidence, was published as to how human beings learn to recognize about 10,000 faces.) Whether these upstarts take hold remain to be seen, but that some change will take place is certain.
th

Reprinted from: Hunt EF and Colander DC (2002).Social Science: An Introduction to the Study of Society. 11 ed. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

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THE HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE

Ancient Greece 600 BC- AD 100 Physics Economics Arts and Humanities Psychology Roman Period A.D. 100- A.D. 500 Geography

FALL OF ROME Western Philosophy

Preservation of Greek Learning in Eastern Countries

Religion and the Crusades

Middle Ages 476

International Trade

Renaissance (1453-1690)

Physics Natural Sciences Chemistry Physics Astronomy

Metaphysics Philosophy

Arts and Humanities

Logic

Morals

Epistemology

Documentation and Proof

Induction

Deduction

The Enlightenment 1700-1800

Social Sciences

Political Philosophy

Political Science

Economics

Sociology

Anthropology

Geography

Psychology

History