Mirabeau named social science in 1767, long before it had departments
When Mirabeau put the words social science into print in 1767, the idea of studying society the way physicists study nature was still new. Auguste Comte later went further and called the field social physics. Today the label covers everything from archaeology and linguistics to economics, psychology and political science.
Social science studies societies and the relationships among the people in them. The term once meant sociology alone, the original science of society founded in the 18th century, but it now stretches across a dozen or so disciplines, among them economics, psychology, geography, linguistics, political science and the study of management.
The field emerged from the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment after 1651, a period that transformed what counted as scientific, and it was shaped by the industrial and French revolutions. Diderot's great encyclopedia, with contributions from Jean-Jacques Rousseau among others, reflects its 18th-century beginnings. Positivism, which trusted knowledge grounded in actual sense experience and shunned metaphysical speculation, was a strong influence. Comte took the phrase science sociale from Charles Fourier and argued that social physics resembled the natural sciences.
After Comte the discipline branched several ways. Large statistical surveys spread across the United States and Europe. Émile Durkheim studied what he called social facts, while Vilfredo Pareto developed metatheory. Max Weber championed understanding social phenomena from within and insisted on separating description from prescription, and economics pushed to become a hard science. Around the start of the 20th century many fields swapped experiments for mathematical models and became heavily quantitative, and hybrid disciplines such as sociobiology, neuropsychology and bioeconomics blurred boundaries with the natural sciences. Karl Popper and Talcott Parsons shaped later developments.
Methods still divide practitioners. Positivists model their tools on the natural sciences and build testable theories, whereas interpretivists rely on social critique or symbolic interpretation. Many researchers now mix quantitative and qualitative approaches, and big data and computational tools are used to study behaviour in digital settings. Sociology in Italy, for instance, had to fight slowly for recognition against philosophy and theology. Researchers have yet to agree on a method linking a grand theory to the many middle-range theories that organise growing data banks.
Source: Social science
