What are the Social Sciences?

The social sciences are essentially branches of philosophy that we moderns study by applying the scientific method to social behavior.

In the popular mind, the social sciences study society and the interrelationship of individuals and groups within it. In a nutshell, their subjects include sociology, political science, economics, psychology and a host of others related to these four, as well as history and law from the humanities.

But today’s social sciences are really combinations of the philosophical and mathematical learning that began with the ancient Liberal Arts tradition. Seen in this way, the infamous decline of the humanities is not as drastic as it is often presented.

What we moderns call “social reality” was already considered by ancient philosophers like Thales of Miletus and Plato, who scrutinized the world, the human person, and society. Plato’s Republic was a study in how to found a society that we moderns still consider. Often thought of as an economic theorist, Adam Smith was essentially a moral philosopher who studied economic activity, hoping to show the Scottish Highlanders a way out of poverty. John Locke was a philosopher who studied political activity, hoping to show Europe a way to expand political freedom and limit war. Auguste Compte imagined a new social order in the wake of the French Revolution, and his positivistic approach planted the intellectual seeds of sociology.

All these ways of thinking assume the fundamentally philosophical insight that reality possesses some order that humanity can know. Ancient philosophers studied this order and an approach to education, the Liberal Arts, that uses logic, language, and mathematics to understand whatever reality—spiritual, physical, or both—that the person encounters. The trivium taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium taught math and its ancient applications: geometry, astronomy, and music. Physics, chemistry, and biology are modern applications of math and the scientific method.

The social sciences integrate most clearly the trivium and quadrivium from the ancient Liberal Arts tradition. The hard sciences lean so heavily on math and the scientific process that we overlook the underlying philosophical insight about order. The humanities study human qualities so deeply that we overlook the typical, even universal, structures of personhood and society. The social sciences lean on both because they study human behavior writ large in populous modern societies.

We need the depth of humanistic learning to understand the human beings who act and the breadth of scientific investigation to understand the shifting trends among many actors in today’s large, interconnected populations. The social sciences are a complicated affair, so it helps to recall the holistic vision initiated by the ancients. When we do so, the social sciences stand out as branches of philosophy fostered by the liberal arts tradition, whose seeds lie in both the conceptualization, logic and language skills of the ancient trivium and the mathematical skills of the ancient quadrivium, developed by modern mathematicians, and applied via the scientific method.