The Application of the Social Sciences to History

The grandeur and the decadence of cities, fecundity, the poisons of prosperity and its vicissitudes, the ways in which wisdom or vanity can transfigure anguish these considerations are to be found in Herodotus. And if every age has not inspired its witnesses or historians to an equal degree, no historical work of value has ever been written in which the author has not had to deal with societies, economies, and psychologies. The antecedents of our social sciences can be found in these encounters between philosophy and history, the latter serving as the laboratory of the former. The problem, which today claims our attention, of the relationship between history and the social sciences is in fact as ancient as the right of each to exist independently of the other. If the specialization of each discipline is held to be a condition of its development, then the physical sciences, now separated also from philosophy, from whose dialectic they had first borrowed their concepts, have remained interdependent thanks to their common recourse to mathematics. The scope of the former is determined by that of the latter. Following the example of their elders, the young sciences of man have tried to establish themselves in the universe of quantitative relationships; in their turn they require, and always to an ever greater degree, electronic calculators which moreover owe them nothing, having been conceived by the union of mathematics and physics and born of them alone. The tested efficiency of certain of the applications of economic calculus, and the quality of certain sociological or historical works, prove in the same way that a branch of mathematics which is quite foreign to the social sciences can be used to perfection by their auxiliary branches. On the other hand, they in no way vouch for the theoretical unity of the knowledge of man. Present-day mathe

Political science · Social science · Sociology · Economic Theory and Institutions · History