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History, archeology, and the other social sciences are so ubiquitous today. We don’t even
notice them. Whether it’s television shows about our shared distant past or the continual dinosaur
craze among elementary school boys, the fruits of our previous study populate today’s modern
consciousness. This, however, was not always the case. Only a couple hundred years ago, the social
sciences were the purview of a select few – if anyone at all – and the public had very little interest in or
time to devote to the advanced study of ourselves and our past. 19 th-Century Growth.
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Much of this changed during the 19th century, when studying humanity in both its past and current
states became far more popular among academics and scholars. Of course, 19 th century thinkers were not the
first to begin thinking about these subjects, as notable Greeks, such as Plato and Aristotle, and the Middle Age
intellectuals, like the Arav Ibn Khaldun, also dabbled in the social sciences.
However, the Enlightenment of the 18th century and the early 19th century fostered the growth of
philosophical objectivity among scholars and the study of the natural world. Humans were increasingly
considered part of this natural world, and as Darwin’s theories concerning the evolution of man began to be
accepted subjects of study as the more concrete sciences.
In addition to the growth of new ideas, 19th-century had been in contact with other civilizations for
over two centuries as the imperialist states of Western Europe spread their colonial grip over the world. As
they learned more about the strange customs and practices of foreign lands, Europeans were left to grapple
with the philosophical questions raised by the existence of cultures without any contact with Christianity or
Western society in general.
More concretely, Europeans looked for scientific reasons for their perceived cultural superiority that
allowed them to conquer and colonize the peoples who inhabited the far-flung territories. Out of these
factors and others grew an increased interest in studying humanity, its growth, and its characteristics in all of
its past, current and possible future forms.
➢ Anthropology
Much of this analysis and theorizing behind what the early archeologists found was done by
intellectuals engaged in a similarly new discipline: anthropology, the study of mankind’s origins,
development and beliefs. Theorizing about humanity’s past became necessary even before Darwin’s
evolutionary theories; in the early 19th century, archeologists began discovering human remains and
artifacts, which, even without the benefits of modern dating technology, were clearly far older than
the Bible suggested they should be. Darwin’s theories later in the century suggested a basic framework
for how man evolved. From there, anthropology took the torch and attempted.
➢ Economics
Is the science that concerns itself with economies, from how societies produce goods
and services, to how they consume them. It has influenced world finance at many important junctions
throughout history and is a vital part of our everyday lives. The assumptions that guide the study of
economics, have changed dramatically throughout history. In this article, well look at the history of
how economic thought has changed over time, and the major participants in its development.
Adam Smith is widely credited for creating the field of economics; however, he was inspired by
French writers, who shared his hatred of mercantilism. In fact, the first methodical study of how
economies work, was undertaken by these French physiocrats. Smith took many of their ideas and
expanded them into a thesis about how economies should work, as opposed to how they do work.
Smith believed that competition was self-regulating and that the governments should take no
part in business through tariffs, taxes and any other means, unless it was to protect free-market
competition. Many economic theories today are, at least in part, a reaction to Smith’s pivotal work in
the field.
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The increased focus on scarcity led Karl Marx to declare that the means of production were the
most important components in any economy. Marx took his ideas further and became convinced that
a class war was going to be initiated by the inherent instabilities he saw in capitalism.
However, Marx underestimated the flexibility of capitalism. Instead of creating a clear owner
and worker class, investing created a mixed class where owners and workers hold the interests of both
classes, in balance. Despite his overly rigid theory, Marx did accurately predict one trend: businesses
grew larger and more powerful, in accordance to the degree of free-market capitalism allowed.
➢ Geography
Geography was first systematically studied by the ancient Greeks, who also developed a
philosophy of geography; Thales of Miletus, Herodotus, Eratosthenes, Aristotle, Strabo, and Ptolemy
made major contributions to geography. The Roman contribution to geography was in the exploration
and mapping of previously unknown lands. Greek geographic learning was maintained and enhanced
by the Arabs during the Middle Ages. Arab geographers, among whom Idrisi, Ibn Battutah, and Ibn
Khaldun are prominent, traveled intensively for the purpose of increasing their knowledge of the
world. The journeys of Marco Polo in the latter part of the Middle Ages began the revival of geographic
interest outside the Muslim world.
With the renaissance in Europe came the desire to explore unknown parts of the world that led
to the voyages of exploration and to the great discoveries. However, it was mercantile interest rather
than a genuine search for knowledge that spurred these endeavors. The 16 th and 17th cent.
reintroduced sound theoretical geography in the form of textbooks (the Geographia Generalis and
Bernhardus Varenius) and maps (Gerardus Mercator’s world map). In the 18 th cent geography began to
achieve recognition as discipline and was taught for the first time at the university level.
➢ Linguistics
The study of language, sometimes called the science of language. The subject has become a
very technical, splitting into separate fields: sound (phonetics and phonology), sentence structure
(syntax, structuralism, deep grammar), meaning (semantics), practical psychology (psycholinguistics)
and context of language choice (pragmatics). But originally, as practiced in the nineteenth century,
linguistics was philology: the history of words. Philologists tried to understand how words had changed
and by what principle. Why had the proto-European consonants changes in the Germanic branch:
Grimm’s Law? Voiceless stops, and voice aspirates to voiced stops. What social phenomenon was
responsible? None could be found. Worse, such changes were not general. Lines of descent could be
constructed, but words did not evolve in any Darwinian sense of simple to elaborate. One could group
languages as isolating (words had a single, unchanging root), agglutinizing (root adds affixes but
remains clear) and inflecting (word cannot be split into recurring units), but attempts to show how one
group developed into another broke down in hopeless disagreement. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-
1913).
➢ Political Science
Analyses of politics appeared in ancient cultures in works by various thinkers, including
Confucius (551-479 BC) in China and Kautilya (flourished 300 BC) in India. Writings by the historian Ibn
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Khaldun (1332-1406) in North Africa have greatly influenced the study of politics in the Arabic-
speaking world. But the fullest explication f politics has been in the West. Some have identified Plato
(428/427-348/347 BC), whose ideal of a stable republic still yields insights and metaphors, as the first
political scientist, though most consider Aristotle (384-322 BC), who introduced empirical observation
into the study of politics, to be disciplines true founder.
Aristotle’s students gathered descriptions of 158 Greek city-states, which Aristotle used to
formulate his famous sixfold typology of political systems. He distinguished political systems by the
number of persons ruling (one, few or many) and by whether the form was legitimate (rulers governing
in the interests of all) or corrupt (rulers governing in their own interests). Legitimate systems included
(rule by one), aristocracy (rule by the few), and polity (rule by the many), while corresponding corrupt
forms were tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. Aristotle considered democracy to be the worst form of
government, though in his classification it meant mob rule. The best form of government, a polity, as,
in contemporary terms, akin to an efficient, stable democracy. Aristotle presciently noted that a polity
functions best if the middle class is large, a point confirmed by modern empirical findings. Aristotle’s
classification endured for centuries and is still helpful in understanding political systems.
Plato and Aristotle focused on perfecting the polis (city-state), a tiny political entity, which for
the Greeks meant both society and political system. The conquest of the Mediterranean world and
beyond by Aristotle’s pupil Alexander the Great (336-323 BC) and, after his death, the division of his
empire among his generals brought large new political forms, in which society and political system
came to be seen as separate entities. This shift required a new understanding of politics. Hellenistic
thinkers, especially the Stoics, asserted the existence of a natural law that applied to all human beings
equally; this idea became the foundation of Roman legalism and Christian notions of equality (see
Stoicism). Thus, the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cirero (106-43 BC), who was strongly influenced by
the Stoics, was noteworthy for his belief that all human beings, regardless of their wealth or
citizenship, possessed an equal moral worth.
➢ Psychology
Let’s look at the beginning of psychology. The typical perception about psychology today is that
is consists mostly of practitioners: clinicians, counselors, and therapists trained in the helping
profession. Currently, that view is accurate: over half of the members of the APA identify themselves
as practitioners. However, the clinical and counseling areas of psychology did not emerge on a large
scale until about 1945, at the close of World War II.
So how did psychology get its start? Wilhelm Wundt founded the first exclusive psychology
laboratory in 1879; it was a laboratory that conducted experiments related to matters in experimental
psychology. However, the study of, and interest in, human behavior has been with us probably since
humans walked the earth. In fact, Hermann Ebbinghaus said it best in 1885, only six years after the
founding of psychology, when he said, “Psychology has a long past but a short history.” Our brief
review of the history of psychology traces some of the antecedent influences leading psychology to its
present status.
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Brain science and cognitive psychologists study how the
human mind thinks, remembers and learns. They apply
psychological science to understand how we make decisions
and perceive our world
Brain science and cognitive psychologists study how the
human mind thinks, remembers and learns. They apply
psychological science to understand how we make
decisions and perceive our world
➢ Sociology and Demography
Although sociology has its roots in the works of philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and
Confucius, it is a relatively new academic discipline. It emerged in the early nineteenth century in
response to the challenges of modernity. Increasing mobility and technological advances resulted in
the increasing exposure of people to cultures and societies different from their own. The impact of
this exposure was varied, but for some people it included the breakdown of traditional norms and
customs and warranted a revised understanding of how the world works. Sociologists responded to
these changes by trying to understand what hold social groups together and also to explore possible
solutions to the breakdown of social solidarity.
The Birth of Sociology
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The term sociology was coined by French philosopher Auguste Comte in 1838, who for the
reason is known as the “Father of Sociology.” Comte felt that science could be used to study the
social world. Just as there are testable facts regarding gravity and other natural laws, Comte thought
that scientific analyses could also discover the laws governing our social lives. It was in this context
that Comte introduced the concept of positivism to sociology - a way to understand the social world
based on scientific facts. He believed that, with this new understanding people could build a better
future. He envisioned a process of social change in which sociologists played crucial roles in guiding
society. Other events of that time period also influenced the development of sociology. The
nineteenth and twentieth centuries were times of many social upheavals and changes in the social
order that interested the early sociologists. the political revolutions sweeping Europe during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to a focus on social change and the establishment of social
order that still concerns sociologists today. Many early sociologists were also concerned with the
Industrial Revolution and rise of capitalism and socialism. Additionally, the growth of cities and
religious transformations were causing many changes in people’s lives.
Other classical theories of sociology from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
include Karl Marx, Emily Durkheim, Max Weber, W.E.B DuBois, and Harriet Martineau. As pioneers in
sociology, most of the early sociological thinkers were trained in other academic disciplines, including
history, philosophy, and economics. The diversity of their trainings is reflected in the topics they
researched, including religion, education, economics, inequality, psychology, ethics, philosophy, and
theology.
These pioneers of sociology all had a vision of using sociology to call attention to social
concerns and bring out social change. In Europe, for example, Karl Marx teamed with wealthy
industrialist Freidrich Engels to address class inequality. Writing during the industrial Revolution, when
many factory owners were lavishly wealthy and many factory workers despairingly poor, they attacked
the rampant inequalities of the day and focused on the role of capitalist economic structures in
perpetuating these inequalities. In Ger4many7, Max Weber was active in politics while in France, Emile
Durkheim advocated for educational reform. In Britain, Harriet Martineau advocated for the rights of
girls and women, and in the US, W.E.B. DuBois focused on the problem of racism. Sociology As A
Discipline.
The growth of sociology as an academic discipline in the United States coincided with the
establishment and upgrading of many universities that were including a new focus on graduate
departments and curricula on “modern subjects.” In 1876, Yale University’s William Graham Sumner
taught the first course identified as “sociology” in the United States. The University of Chicago
established the first graduate department of sociology in the United States in 1892 and by 1910, most
colleges and universities were offering sociology courses. Thirty years later, most of these schools had
established sociology departments. Sociology was first taught in high schools in 1911.
Sociology was also growing in Germany and France during this period. However, in Europe, the
discipline suffered great setbacks as a result of World Wars I and II. Many sociologists were killed or
fled Germany and France between 1933 and the end of World War II. After World War II, sociologists
returned to Germany influenced by their studies in America. The result was that American sociologists
became the world leaders in theory and research for many years.
Sociology has grown into a diverse and dynamic discipline, experiencing a proliferation of
specialty areas. The American Sociological Association (ASA) was formed in 1905 with 115 members.
By the end of 2004, it had grown to almost 14,000 members and more than 40 “sections” covering
specific areas of interest. Many other countries also have large national sociology organizations.
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The International Sociological Association (ISA) boasted more than 3,300 members in 2004
from 91 different countries. The ISA sponsored research committees covering more than 50 different
areas of interest, covering topics as diverse as children, aging, families, law, emotions, sexuality,
religion, mental health, peace and war, and work. The Marriage of Sociology and Demographics, First
point fertility is connected with the attitudes and of the social institutions Second, population changes
with the change in society, Third point, the labor force is concerned with the population structure.
Fourth, the family is related to demographic behavior.
Demography is a very important aspect of sociology and its discussion of family, city, minorities
and industrial sociology. It is also the study of culture, socialization, social stratification and others.
Thus, demography is part of sociology.
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