Social Sciences (from Brittanica Online)

any discipline or branch of science that deals with human behaviour in its social and cultural aspects. The social sciences include cultural (or social) anthropology, sociology, social psychology, political science, and economics. Also frequently included are social and economic geography and those areas of education that deal with the social contexts of learning and the relation of the school to the social order. History is regarded by many as a social science, and certain areas of historical study are almost indistinguishable from work done in the social sciences. Most historians, however, consider history as one of the humanities. It is generally best, in any case, to consider history as marginal to the humanities and social sciences, since its insights and techniques pervade both. The study of comparative law may also be regarded as a part of the social sciences, although it is ordinarily pursued in schools of law rather than in departments or schools containing most of the other social sciences.

Since the 1950s the term behavioral sciences has often been applied to the disciplines designated as the social sciences. Those who favour this term do so in part because these disciplines are thus brought closer to some of the sciences, such as physical anthropology and physiological psychology, which also deal with human behaviour. Whether the term behavioral sciences will in time supplant “social sciences” or whether it will, as neologisms so often have before, fade away is impossible to say. For the purposes of this article, the two terms may be considered synonymous.

Although, strictly speaking, the social sciences do not precede the 19th century—that is, as distinct and recognized disciplines of thought—one must go back farther in time for the origins of some of their fundamental ideas and objectives. In the largest sense, the origins go all the way back to the ancient Greeks and their rationalist inquiries into the nature of man, state, and morality. The heritage of both Greece and Rome is a powerful one in the history of social thought as it is in so many other areas of Western society. Very probably, apart from the initial Greek determination to study all things in the spirit of dispassionate and rational inquiry, there would be no social sciences today.