History of the social sciences

The study of how disciplines that investigate society and human behavior, their theories, methods, and institutions developed over time.

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Enlightenment: An eighteenth-century intellectual movement that emphasized reason, observation, and reform. Its confidence in systematic inquiry helped make society itself an object of study.
Sociology: The systematic study of social relationships, institutions, and collective life. Its formation is a central strand in the history of social science.
Auguste Comte: A French philosopher who named sociology and advocated a science of society. His positivist program became an influential early blueprint for sociology.
Social survey: A systematic collection of information about people, households, or communities. Surveys turned poverty and living conditions into objects of organized empirical study.
Social planning: The deliberate design of policies and institutions to address social conditions. Social-scientific expertise increasingly informed state efforts to manage social change.
Comtean positivism: Auguste Comte’s view that knowledge should rest on observable facts and scientific laws. Comte proposed a science of society and gave sociology its name.
Anthropology: The study of human societies, cultures, and biological variation across time and place. Its changing fieldwork and concepts show how disciplines took distinct forms.
Émile Durkheim: A French sociologist who established social facts as a distinctive object of study. His methods helped secure sociology’s status as an academic discipline.
Participant observation: A research method in which investigators observe and take part in a group’s activities. Its adoption reshaped anthropology’s standards of evidence and fieldwork.
Eugenics: A movement seeking to improve human populations through selective reproduction. Its history exposes the harms of scientific authority applied to human difference.