History: In The Family of Social Sciences

Pre-Modern History and Modern Social Science Over the past few decades more and more history programmes have offered or required courses in historiography, to where this is now the case in more UK universities than not. Historians engaging explicitly with the ethics and philosophy of the field is surely a good thing. While such courses regularly focus on important issues of anachronism, orientalism, Whiggism, naratology, etc., to my knowledge the practical skills of justifiably using the Social Sciences to overcome some of these issues is not taught. That is, awareness of historiographical issues is taught, but more as a caveat to limit excessive proclamations about the past (especially causal ones) rather than as a precursor to being given the tools to make causal statements which are backed up with evidence – evidence provided by the social sciences but filtered through the skills of the historian. By 'social sciences', I am referring here to any discipline whose primary subject matter involves analysis of the actions of living humans, such as Sociology, Psychology, Law, Economics, Political Science, and any of the cognates, hybrids and specialisations of these.1 This is a distinction by subject matter, rather than by methods. I include both quantitative and qualitative work in this definition, and the full range of output from these fields, from broad social theories to minute statistical data and all in between. If it is researched data gather from living people about how they interact, then it is what I am referring to as the social sciences.

Historical Sociology is a branch of sociology, which states on – how the diverse societies of the world advance and develop through history. It entails at how the existing social structures, which most of the sociologists believe as natural are in fact shaped by complex social processes. Sociology and history are two different specific academic disciplines, and the relationship between the two is multifaceted, paradoxical and far from harmonious. Although the origins of the Historical Sociology can be referred back in two hundred years, there are still many aspects that make it much complicated to distinguish between the two disciplines. And to further explain the concept of these subjects, it leads to theoretical and methodological uncertainty as it generates a number of opposing topics.

Social Forces, 1995

Often mischaracterized as merely the application of social theory to past events and happenings, historical sociology is actually a distinct way of approaching, explaining, and interpreting general sociological problems. By situating social action and social structures ...

In this paper, I observe that the historiographies of the social sciences differ sensibly from those of the sciences. I start by proposing a three-part typology of this specific development and then look for the origin of these separate historiographies. I test three groups of hypothesis: (a) the social sciences are so much different from the 'hard sciences' that it is impossible to understand them using concepts and methods which have mostly been developed within the historiography of the 'hard sciences'; (b) the second hypothesis assumes that the object changes less than the look at it: hence, sharing their object, it suggests that these historiographies differ because the identity and aims of the scholars who write them differ; (c) it is neither the object nor the historiographers which differ, but their relation.

SOPHIA: An African Journal of Philosophy , 2006

In the past three or four decades, History and the Social Sciences have worked so closely together; especially with the rise of theoretical issues in history and the need for historical context in the Social Sciences. The Social Sciences which operate with theoretical generalizations inevitably require historical temporal dimension in its practice; while history needs the theories and generalizations (supplied by the Social Sciences) about the operations of society and process of change, which are the subject matter of history. This paper highlights the crucial nature of the relationship between History as a distinct discipline and the Social Sciences, especially in the areas of commonality of objectives and inter-dependence in sources and concepts required by both disciplines for effective practice. The need, therefore, is stressed for more intellectual harmony among historians and scholars in the Social Sciences as a result of the realities of interdependence (complementarity) and the inter-relatedness of History and Social Sciences' practice

Twenty-First Century Society, 2007

This is a report on an Academy of Social Sciences debate held on 15 March 2006. The debate concerned the nature, character and development of the social sciences. Four leading social scientists were asked to reflect upon the nature of the social sciences in the light of various transformations in both intellectual thought and in those processes that seem to be restructuring human life as we move into the 21st century. These changes in different ways seem to problematise the idea of what Bruno Latour refers to as a purified realm of social relations separate from other spheres and around which a social science(s) can be developed (Latour, 1993). Q1 Is there a distinct realm of the social and if there is what is it? What is the relationship between such a social realm and other domains? What does this imply for the kind of social science that might be undertaken? These questions were presented to the Academy debaters and all came up with interestingly different responses.

The massive dimensions which history has acquired means that historical theorists have to change approach and to place the mass perceptions of history at the centre of their attention.