social science, 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 is regarded by many as a social science, and certain areas of historical study are almost indistinguishable from work done in the social sciences.
The idea that human society could be studied "scientifically" gained prominence throughout the Western world during the nineteenth century largely as a result of the triumphs of the sciences of nature, especially physics and biology. If the application of scientific method to the natural order increased our knowledge and enabled us to create new industries and technologies, might not the application of this method to human beings enable us to understand ourselves and bring our affairs under more rational control? Although the hope implied in this question was given its earliest and most influential formulations by European thinkers--especially Auguste Comte of France and John Stuart Mill of Great Britain--the United States proved to be the primary national setting in which the project of developing a "science of society" flourished. American intellectuals created a formidable complex of professional organizations, journals, and attendant institutions designed to advance this project. The history of social science, while in large part an episode in international history, is also a major episode in the intellectual history of the United States.
European social scientists have often claimed to possess more philosophical sophistication than do their American colleagues, to have pursued projects of greater theoretical significance, and to have maintained a more critical perspective on the power structure of their own societies. Although these comparisons have sometimes been overdrawn, it is true that American social scientists have excelled in data-gathering, in the development of research institutions, and in the volume of research completed. It was by means of a creativity more institutional than intellectual that American social science established itself decisively between about 1880 and World War I. During those years American scholars created a variety of specialized professional organizations (e.g., the American Economic Association, founded 1885; the American Political Science Association, 1903; and the American Sociological Society, 1905) and coordinated the activities of these organizations with the operation of two other vital institutions developed simultaneously: the journals in which social science research could be published (e.g., the American Journal of Sociology and the American Political Science Review) and the discipline-defined departments (e.g., economics, sociology, and psychology) in universities around which both doctoral and undergraduate programs were organized. No individual American social scientist of this era made intellectual contributions remotely as original or as enduring as those made in Germany by Max Weber, in England by Alfred Marshall, or in France by Émile Durkheim. Nevertheless, in America the enterprise of specialized, professional social science was firmly and extensively in place.
A major source of the growth of social science in the United States was the widespread hope of middle-class reformers that "experts" would be able to solve many of the social problems that had become manifest in an urban, industrial society with a largely immigrant labor force. Could poverty, corruption, crime, monopoly, and inefficiency be contained by new knowledge and by expert administration? Not only might the social sciences help legislatures and philanthropists address these problems; they might produce a class of "social engineers" ready to manage human affairs. Especially during the Progressive Era, public discussion of social science emphasized this potential contribution to public policy and administration.
Although this technocratic impulse remained prominent within American social science and in the outlook of many people who supported it, two rather different impulses gained strength in the 1920s and proved equally enduring. One was the conviction that the business of social scientists was simply to advance knowledge. In this view, knowledge might be put to good use by politicians, journalists, and everyday citizens, but the role of social scientists themselves was strictly research and theoretical analysis. This "pure science" perspective was evident, for example, in Recent Social Trends (1933), a massive analysis of American society and its problems commissioned by President Herbert Hoover. This perspective became more sharply etched in what came to be called the "behaviorist" and "empiricist" movements of the post-World War II era, as exemplified in quantitative studies of voting behavior. The classic study of this sort was The American Voter (1960), by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, William Miller, and Donald Stokes.
The second nontechnocratic impulse installed the social scientist in the role of public moralist previously filled by the clergy and by men and women of letters. Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) combined an anthropologist's report of fieldwork in the South Pacific with a social critic's opinions concerning the basic values that ought to inform the lives of Americans. Mead developed a genre of social scientific writing for a large public that was later adopted by a great many of her contemporaries and successors, including the psychologist B. F. Skinner, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, and the sociologists David Riesman and Daniel Bell. Some of these scholars were said to be too journalistic by their pure science contemporaries within American social science, but the latter, in turn, were accused of being narrowly scientistic and of exaggerating their own methodological affinities with physicists.
Although the distinctions among technocrats, pure researchers, and public moralists cut across disciplinary lines, it is those lines between disciplines that have most defined the work and self-image of American social scientists since the Progressive Era. By that time, the sociologists, political scientists, and economists had sorted themselves out from one another and from the historians, with whom the political scientists especially had been closely associated. By that time, also, the psychologists were becoming more sharply set apart from the philosophers, with whom they often continued to share university departments. Anthropology had always been a distinctive enterprise in America, having begun with museums rather than with universities and reform organizations as its primary institutional home. Yet by 1920 the anthropologists were advancing quickly into academia, even if by means of departments shared with sociologists. Hence much of the history of American social science is a history of specific disciplines, each of which has maintained its own agendas for research and its own shifting theoretical premises. Each of these disciplines, moreover, has become increasingly specialized into subdisciplines, each possessed of its own journals and national professional societies. This is especially true of psychology: some university departments of psychology have become little more than administrative devices for the management of what amounts to four or five distinctive, departmentlike programs in undergraduate education as well as graduate training and research.
Some of these American social scientific disciplines became known throughout the world for distinctive intellectual orientations that endured for decades. American anthropologists, for example, were distinguished by their practice of cross-cultural analysis, which undermined the claims to absolute validity made on behalf of the norms of any particular culture. This anthropology of the Boasian school (so called for its leader, Franz Boas) supplanted an "evolutionary" school dominant in the nineteenth century. The Boasians largely controlled American anthropology from the era of World War I until the 1960s. Even thereafter, the most widely discussed American anthropologist of the 1970s and 1980s, Clifford Geertz, worked in the Boasian tradition.
American psychologists were sharply divided into several competing schools, the most prominent of which from the 1930s through the 1970s was the anti-introspective behaviorist school led by Clark Hull and B. F. Skinner. Many of the advances made by the behaviorists resulted from research carried out on laboratory animals, especially rats.
American economists have excelled in the refinement and mathematical modeling of laws believed to operate in capitalist economies. Although the maverick Thorstein Veblen is a famous counterexample, most leading economists in modern America have been called neoclassical because of their broad affinities with the highly rationalist classical theorists (e.g., Adam Smith and David Ricardo) of the early era of capitalist development. Among the most influential of these American neoclassical theorists in the period since World War II have been the Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, and Herbert Solow.
Sociology and political science have been more intellectually diverse than the other social scientific disciplines in the United States. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, however, the functionalist orientation of Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton defined a large portion of the work done by American sociologists. The functionalists tended to see society as an equilibrium of forces and interests, subject to change through adaptation to novel conditions. The diversity of American political scientists was narrowed in the 1960s by the behaviorist revolution of which The American Voter, cited above, was an exemplary agent. Traditionalists committed to the study of political theory and political institutions sometimes resisted the behaviorists' emphasis on quantitative, large-data-base research with the result that political science became the most contentious of the disciplinary communities within American social science.
Yet for all their disciplinary identity, American social scientists carried out two cross-disciplinary projects of considerable public importance during the third quarter of the twentieth century. The first was the critique of the theoretical and empirical bases for racial discrimination in the United States. Some of the relevant social scientific research was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its pivotal 1954 ruling against segregated public schools, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In the ensuing era, intensive public discussion of race in American life drew upon the work of social scientists of every discipline. Sociologists were especially successful in demonstrating the falsity of many traditional ideas about race, and their work charted the destructive effects of racism on the lives of black Americans.
The second major cross-disciplinary project was directed at what were often called the developing nations of the third world. The experience of postcolonial societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America was interpreted within the terms of a theory of modernization, according to which every society passes successively through the stages already seen in the modern history of the industrialized West. In this view, the basic social structural, economic, and cultural transformations that took place in Great Britain, Germany, France, and the United States could be expected to unfold in Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia, and other modernizing nations. This theory was articulated in the shadow of the American-Soviet rivalry and was sometimes offered frankly as the basis for an anticommunist program of world economic development. This was true, for example, of one of the most widely cited formulations of the theory, The Stages of Economic Growth (1959) by the economist Walter W. Rostow. The refinement and critical revision of modernization theory was carried out by the political scientist David Apter, the sociologist Daniel Lerner, and a host of scholars in many disciplines.
The intellectual diversity that always characterized social science in America remains more pronounced than ever and renders more difficult any effort to generalize about it as a single entity. Although the concept of social science was originally a means of encouraging and enabling what was once a novel and specific set of projects devoted to the scientific study of society, this set of projects, once firmly established and elaborated by several generations of energetic and creative scholars, outgrew the late nineteenth century's notion of what it meant to be scientific. By the late twentieth century individuals and groups within many of the social science disciplines were doing work very similar to that being carried out simultaneously by historians, philosophers, and other humanistic scholars, even literary critics. The line between science and nonscience that meant so much to early sociologists and political scientists, especially, seemed less portentous to their well-established successors. That "blurred genres" were a prominent feature of the 1970s and 1980s was suggested by Clifford Geertz, and many people came to regard the concept of social science as little more than a convenient administrative category for dealing with a sprawling expanse of enterprises not easily absorbed into natural science, nor into the even more multitudinous humanities.
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