Social Science

Social Science. The history of social science and the American republic are roughly conterminous. Both had their origins in the Enlightenment with its faith in progress and belief in the existence of natural laws. Most historians have maintained that the concept of society itself did not emerge in European thought until the sixteenth century and could not truly develop until the decline of feudalism and the development of individualism made the recognition of society's impact possible. For the first time, observers could perceive society as a separate structure with particular characteristics that might change over time. By the eighteenth century, figures such as Adam Smith, Montesquieu, and Condorcet were using factual data and scientific reasoning to discover new, empirically verifiable truths to replace the discarded models of the past. They perceived the social sciences as reform instruments that could provide unimpeachable guides to the construction of good societies.

In the United States, various versions of social science emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. Foremost among these claimants were college professors of moral philosophy and political economy. Primarily clergymen trained in the philosophy of Scottish commonsense realism, they saw existent social and economic conditions as synonymous with moral laws. In the South, George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) and other proslavery apologists praised Auguste Comte's emphasis upon social stability and portrayed the South as an example of Comte's ideal moral society. Finally, social statisticians sought to tabulate such social problems as crime and pauperism in order to reform American society with so‐called exact knowledge.

Such competition for the true science of society increased in the aftermath of the Civil War. Just as the Industrial and French revolutions in Europe had led to a questioning of traditional authority, so too did the Civil War in the United States. Consequently, the goal of an empirically valid science of society that all parties would accept became increasingly desirable. In 1865, a group of elite northeastern reformers met to form the American Social Science Association. Its twin goals were discovering what is and promoting what should be. Within the organization, radicals competed with academic specialists for controlling interest. Faced with questions of their expertise and objectivity, the specialists, beginning in the 1870s, gradually broke off to form their own disciplinary organizations.

As numerous scholars have noted, the social sciences have differed from nation to nation. In the United States, these disciplines have traditionally shared an emphasis on empirical quantification and practical research insistence upon scholarly objectivity, and a belief in American exceptionalism. Many of these attributes arose out of the disciplines’ late nineteenth‐century attempts to achieve public acceptance. Like physicians and lawyers, social scientists sought to win this approval through professionalization and the subsequent adoption of a regulative code of ethics, common training, and community sanction. Seeking this training and sanction via an alliance with the emerging universities, they found the allegedly objective use of the scientific method to be absolutely necessary within the politics of the universities. Conservative boards of trustees distrusted social scientists and frequently dismissed them for political activism or unpopular conclusions.

By the early twentieth century, individuals in all the social‐science disciplines were beginning actually to produce such empirical work rather than merely advocate it. In economics, young German‐trained scholars emphasized specific institutional studies in place of overarching theory. Historians embraced Leopold von Ranke's goal of recovering “Geschichte wie es eigentlich gewesen” (history as it really happened), with J. Franklin Jameson, the founder of the American Historical Review, calling for discrete, small‐scale studies without concern for overall synthesis. The political scientist Charles Merriam (1874–1953) abandoned the theoretical formalism of his teachers and laid out extensive plans for empirical political research. In anthropology, Franz Boas and his students replaced the evolutionary ranking of peoples and societies with concentration upon specific cultures. Psychology shifted from the introspective study of consciousness to a concern with behavior and applied psychology represented at its most extreme by the behaviorism of John B. Watson. Sociology retained both its theoretical and reformist characteristics the longest, but by the 1920s the University of Chicago school of sociology and its careful description of urban America was dominant.

World War I appeared to validate this approach. When the United States entered the war, the government turned to historians, political scientists, and psychologists to staff its Committee on Public Information and economists and statisticians to run the War Industries Board. Their success in these agencies led to corporate support for numerous research institutes. Emulation of the natural and physical sciences became a mantra. University of Chicago sociologist William Ogburn happily envisioned the day when journals of physics and sociology would become indistinguishable.

While a number of figures during the 1920s and 1930s demanded a return to theoretical work and personal activism, the opportunity of government service during World War II aroused American social scientists’ traditional interests in quantification and short‐term practicality. Becoming convinced that social experts could and should control individuals and societies, many continued after the war to work for government agencies and private corporations without questioning the use of their research. In the well‐publicized example of Project Camelot, begun in 1963 and exposed in 1965, a number of prominent social scientists secretly working for the Department of Defense designed specific counterinsurgency plans while relying on the cooperation and hospitality of their unsuspecting Latin American colleagues. Electoral polling and social survey research became two of the largest growth areas.

Simultaneously, however, émigré scholars such as Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt reinvigorated American social science with new methodologies. Disciplines quickly adopted innovations from other fields and nations. The structural social theory of the Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons became increasingly popular in political science and anthropology as well as in sociology. The “thick description” of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1923– ) precipitated a rise in qualitative methods across the disciplines. In history, the “Annales” school of history in France and the neo‐Marxism of British historian E.P. Thompson helped lead to a boom in local and social history. By the end of the twentieth century, such interdisciplinary and international perspectives had lessened the distinctive national characteristics of American social science. Qualitative methods rivaled quantitative ones; theoretical work was seen to be as practical as empirical studies; and the belief in a uniquely American social science had become as outmoded as the belief in the exceptionalism of American history.
See also Education: Collegiate Education; Education: The Rise of the University; Historiography, American; Mathematics and Statistics; Philosophy; Progressive Era; Secularization; Slavery.

Bibliography

Thomas Haskell , The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Authority, 1977.
Robert C. Bannister , Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1987.
Peter Novick , That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, 1988.
Dorothy Ross , The Origins of American Social Science, 1991.
Mark C. Smith , Social Science in the Crucible: The American Debate over Objectivity and Purpose, 1918–1941, 1994.
Ellen Herman , The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts, 1995.

Mark C. Smith