Defining Social Science as Different From History

To establish their legitimacy, early American sociologists tried to identify how their field differed from more traditional fields of study. In 1921, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess reflected on the nature of history and sociology. Both, they Wrote, "are concerned with man as a person, as a 'political animal,' participating with his fellows in a common fund of social traditions and cultural ideals" (p. 10). According to these early qualitative American sociologists:

History ... seeks to reproduce and interpret concrete events as they actually occurred in time and space. Sociology ... seeks to arrive at natural laws and generalizations in regard to human nature and society, irrespective of time and place. . . . History seeks to find out what actually happened and how it all came about. Sociology ... seeks to ex¬plain, on the basis of a study of other instances, the nature of the process involved. (p. 11)


However, today many European and North American historians and sociologists reject Park and Burgess's formulation. Since the publication of Park and Burgess's classic Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921), historians have increasingly "compared instances" and have frequently adopted quantitative methods to do so. Sociologists have come to recognize that the great nineteenth-century European sociologists, now canonized as classic theorists, were not writing theory that "reject[s] the application of theoretical statement to the empirical world, declaring empirical evidence to be irrelevant for . . . theorizing" (Scheuch, 1992, p. 769). Rather, they were writing "theory of . . . "—theory relevant to empirical issues. Their questions were as broad as, What is the meaning of capitalism for contemporary societies? To glean answers, they had to "do, history." To address the historical processes relevant to their questions, they examined cross-national data. Some of these data were quantitative.