ABSTRACT
WHAT ARE THE SOCIAL SCIENCES?
The social sciences started to develop as areas of study during the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European Enlightenment when new scientific approaches were applied to understanding the ways that societies were organized and people made decisions. For an essay in an undergraduate European intellectual history class at City College in the 1960s, my instructor asked us to discuss, “To what extent were later Enlightenment thinkers Newtonian?” Sir Isaac Newton believed that the physical universe obeyed natural laws that could be described with mathematical precision. The teacher wanted us to examine efforts by thinkers like John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Adam Smith in Great Britain; Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau in France; and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison in the United States to adapt Newton’s view of the physical world so they could develop a calculus describing the world of human interrelationships.
