The social sciences have a long history as a source of law

Today the disciplines of the social sciences are generally taken to be anthro­pology, economics, geography, history, political science, psychology, sociology and their applications: education, planning, public administration and social work.

By the late 1700s, the following disciplines now considered social sciences were reasonably well established: political science, economics, history and geography. Men had studied these subjects from time immemorial. They used what they took for knowledge about them in the development of their law. In the late 1700s, a great change occurred in Europe and America. The term ‘social science’ appeared. It was an accompaniment of new and changing goals that went along with an expansion of intellectual horizons. Much of mankind changed its authorities. Those that did felt emancipated. The American and French revolutions were only two of the many results of the new ideas about how people should live. It is especially significant that the term ‘social science’ almost always appears before 1800 in connection with education.

Most people and their leaders believed in progress. They thought that progress could be attained primarily through more and better education. They thought it possible that the mighty advances of physics, chemistry and the other physical and biological sciences made by the early nineteenth century could be utilized for the study of mankind. The cleavages between science and philosophy and those between philosophy and theology grew ever wider, until a thoroughly secularized knowledge system separated them.

The history of modern social science and the development of law are inexorably related. Better understanding of these relationships will almost certainly improve the theoretical basis of the connections between theory and practice in the social sciences. Study of them requires inquiry into the roots of our present-day concepts and hypotheses. It cannot be emphasized too often that most of the terms and ideas in use today in both law and social science evolved long before the modern development of either.