History of the social sciences facts for kids
The social sciences are a group of subjects that study people and how they interact in society. This includes understanding human behavior, culture, and how societies are organized. Think of subjects like anthropology (the study of human societies and cultures), psychology (the study of the mind), and media studies (the study of how media affects us).
The idea of studying society in a scientific way, with clear rules and methods, is quite new. Long ago, thinkers like Confucius talked about social roles. But the scientific study of human society really started in the 1700s, during a time called the Age of Enlightenment. This period led to new ways of thinking about the world.
The social sciences grew out of "moral philosophy," which was a way of thinking about right and wrong and how society should work. Big events like the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution also influenced them. These revolutions changed society a lot, making people wonder how to understand and manage these changes. Early ideas were even included in the famous French encyclopedia by Diderot, with contributions from thinkers like Rousseau.
By the 1900s, people started using more numbers and experiments to study human behavior. This made social science fields more focused on data and measurements. Even natural sciences, like biology, became interested in how social science methods could help them understand human factors. Today, researchers often combine different methods to study human actions and their effects.
Contents
A Timeline of Social Science Ideas
Ancient Wisdom
Even in ancient times, people thought deeply about society.
- Plato wrote The Republic, an important book about how a fair society should be run.
- Aristotle also wrote about how societies are organized in his books like Politics.
Islamic Thinkers
During the Islamic Golden Age (a time of great learning), many important ideas came from Muslim scholars.
- Al-Biruni (who lived from 973 to 1048) wrote detailed studies comparing different cultures and religions. He is known for his work in anthropology.
- Ibn Khaldun (who lived from 1332 to 1406) explored ideas in demography (the study of populations), history, and sociology. His most famous work is Muqaddimah.
Early Modern Ideas
Around the 14th century, during the Renaissance, thinkers like Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme wrote about money. Later, in the 15th century, St. Antonine of Florence discussed economic processes. In the 16th century, scholars like Leonard de Leys and Luis Molina wrote about economics, focusing on how property could serve the "public good."
In the 17th century, thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke explored how societies should be governed. Hobbes believed that his book Leviathan was a scientific look at how a political society works.
By the 18th century, social science was often called "moral philosophy." This included studying topics like ethics, law, and how governments manage money and resources. Adam Smith, a famous economist, was a professor of moral philosophy. Many ideas from this time were collected in the Encyclopédie, a huge book of knowledge.
How Social Sciences Grew
In the 19th century, the term "social science" became more common.
- Auguste Comte (1797–1857) suggested that human understanding goes through three stages: religious, philosophical, and scientific. He believed the scientific stage used positive observation. Comte wanted to combine history, psychology, and economics into a scientific understanding of society. He thought that social problems could be fixed using a scientific approach called "positivism."
- Karl Marx was another early thinker who believed his studies of history were scientific.
- By the late 1800s, people started trying to use mathematical equations to describe human behavior.
Sociology, the study of society, was officially started by Comte in 1838. He first called it "social physics." Later, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) helped make sociology a formal subject. He set up the first sociology department in Europe in 1895 and wrote Rules of the Sociological Method.
Today, Durkheim, Marx, and Max Weber are seen as the main founders of social science. The term "social science" now covers many subjects that study human societies, separate from physical sciences and art.
The 20th Century
In the early 1900s, statistics became its own field of mathematics. Statistical methods were used more and more, even in biology.
Thinkers like Freud (in Austria) and William James (in the United States) tried to combine Charles Darwin's ideas about evolution with the study of human relationships. Freud's ideas about the mind and James's work on experimental psychology greatly influenced future studies.
John Dewey (1859–1952) was a strong supporter of using scientific methods in philosophy. He believed that understanding how people respond to problems involved three steps:
- Realizing there's a problem that needs a new solution.
- Gathering information about the problem.
- Testing ideas to solve the problem in the real world.
As the idea of measuring things with numbers became very important in physical sciences, people started to see the humanities (like history and literature) as leading to "social science." In 1924, a group of social scientists created the Pi Gamma Mu honor society to encourage different social science fields to work together.
Between the World Wars
The rise of factories and industries created many new social, economic, and political challenges. There was a need to manage resources and create education systems. The "Great War" (now called World War I) made people want more "scientific" and logical ways to make decisions, rather than emotional ones.
To manage large companies and governments, more data was needed. Numbers and charts could be understood faster than long texts. This led to more use of social science methods in other fields. For example, new subjects like social studies of medicine and neuropsychology started to combine different areas of study.
By the 1930s, this new way of making decisions became very important, especially with programs like the New Deal in the US. New schools and departments were created to train people who could measure human interactions and create models for decision-making. People believed that clear mathematical expressions could avoid errors found in traditional arguments.
See also
- Historiography, which is the study of how historians do their work
- Outline of social science
