DAY 15-19

Historical context of the emergence of the Social Sciences and the different disciplines.

Industrial Revolution
 Led to the rise of a factory-based industrial economy, an event that would be the subject of a number
of economic, political and social theories.
 It is known as a scientific revolution that focuses on the use of non-animal sources of power to labor
tasks.
 This revolution aims to utilize technology as a source of cultural information about the material
resources of the society in order to satisfy their wants and needs.
 With the proliferation of factories, poor and landless peasants from the farms started flocking to the
towns and cities to try their hand at factory work.
 In order to accommodate the influx of people, the number of residential tenements around factories
multiplied substantially. With this increase came the second major development in European society
– the emergence of great cities.
 While cities had long been a feature of European societies, the Industrial Revolution changed the
landscape from one that is largely agricultural to one that is urban and industrial. And people had to
cope with all of these changes.
 Despite being poor, many of the farm dwellers who moved to the highly congested and polluted
cities experienced not only problems with their health, but also a sense of isolation and estrangement
from the community, as cities were populated by people from different parts of the region. Crime
was prevalent and the work hours in factories were oppressive.
 In France, people started criticizing the monarchy and demanded that attention be paid to individual
rights. Calls for liberty, equality and fraternity then brought about a series of revolutions,
culminating in the creation of the French Republic in 1792.
 Coupled with findings from the discovery of peoples and cultures that came with various
expeditions, conditions then became favorable to the development of a distinct science that will
study all of these societal changes systematically.

Historical context of the emergence of the social sciences

1. SOCIOLOGY

AUGUSTE COMTE (1798-1857)

 A French philosopher who later founded the discipline the term of sociology.
 He was the first thinker to use the term social science and to coin the term sociology and
applied it to different disciplines.
 He theorized on what is called Positive Philosophy or positivism which is the application
of scientific methods and principles in the study of society that aims to battle the negative
perspective of the enlightenment.

HARRIET MARTINEAU (1802- 1876)

 She translated the work of Comte from French to English.
 She also became famous for writing the first book on sociological methods.

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 Her book entitled Society of America (1837) studied the religion, politics, child rearing
and immigration of the young nation. It focuses on the social class distinctions, gender
and race.

HERBERT SPENCER(1820-1903)
 A wealthy Victorian Englishman who did not consider correcting or improving the
society unlike Martineau. He simply looks forward to understand it better.
 He adapted the evolutionary view of the “survival of the fittest” and associated in to the
life condition of people stating that it is natural that some people are born rich while
others are poor.
 He proposes that society would eventually experience change and there is no need for
them to become highly critical of present social arrangements.

EMILE DURKHEIM (1858-1917)

 A French sociologist advanced the use of positivism in his study of suicide among
Europeans of varying socio-cultural backgrounds, a study that led to modern social
research.
 He used data on suicide rates to conclude that patterns of suicide stemmed from an
individual’s level of social integration in society.
Three patterns of suicide
1. Egoistic – it is committed by people who are not strongly supported by membership in a
cohesive social group.
 Examples are those people who committed suicide because of bullying.
2. Altruistic – it is committed by people who considered their own lives as unimportant and
also characterized by dying for a cause.
 Examples are those people who put their lives at stake because of advocacy, protest and
issues.
3. Anomic – people commit it when society is in crisis or in rapid change. It also causes
confusion among people.
 Examples are people who commit suicide because of economic issues and difficulties.

In 1895, he published Rules of Sociological Method, which outlined the methodologies

that sociological research needs to observe to be scientific.
He established the first European Department of Sociology in France and he became the
first professor.

MAX WEBER (1864-1920)

 A German sociologist who high lightened the application of the concept – verstehen- a
german word that means understanding or insight.
 He stated that in order to understand one’s behavior, people must learn the subjective
meanings people attach to their actions and how they themselves view and explain their
behavior.
 One of his best known works was The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism -
a study of the relationship between the ethics of ascetic Protestantism and the emergence
of the spirit of modern capitalism.
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 He analyzed the emergence of Capitalism in Germany to the kind of religion that the
current society has, the Protestantism specifically Calvinism.
 Calvinism forbids the uneconomical use of money, considered purchase of luxuries as sin
and encourage donations in charity.

2. GEOGRAPHY
Imago Mundi
 one of the earliest topographic maps of the world which the Babylonians created in
600 B.C
 Cartography or map-making became a valuable tool of empires, as the exploration
and colonization of peoples required a detailed study of regions and places.
 John Snow created a map plotting the spread of the cholera outbreak in London. This
map became significant in geography and let to the discipline’s reliance on thematic
maps to illustrate social characteristics.
Geography began as a study of the earth’s surface, later on branching into the study of
human-environment interactions as well.

Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) a British Geographer who pushed for the recognition
of geography as an academic discipline and promoted its teaching in universities.
He forwarded the Heartland theory, discussing the strategic importance of location for
world control. It is a geopolitical concept which analyzes the political and economic
success of the world's regions by geography.

Perhaps, an event that launched the study of geography on American soil was the creation
of the National Geographic Society in the late 1800s.
In the 1930s, American geographer Carl Sauer’s theory on the cultural landscape, as
fashioned from modifications to the physical environment, became significant in the
development of human geography.

3. ANTHROPOLOGY

Emerged from the Age of Exploration, in particular, from Italian explorer Marco Polo’s
study of human variation.

In Britain, E.B. Tylor (1823-1917) formulated a conceptualization of culture that was

later on developed and made more holistic by Polish anthropologist Bronislaw
Malinowski (1884-1942). He said that cultural elements are interdependent and
functional to the cultural group. He initiated the method of participant observation, to
study these elements and obtain an account of culture from native’s point of view. This
became the precursor of ethnographic fieldwork.

A.R RADCLIFFE-BROWN (1881- 1955)

 An English anthropologist furthered that cultures also tend toward equilibrium
He credited for the paradigm of Structural Functionalism.

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 FRANZ BOAS (1858-1942)
 A German geographer who joined a geographical expedition to Northern Canada. He
said that human characteristics develop from an adaptation to the physical
environment and that some of these physical traits can adjust to environmental factors.
Further, differences among humans are cultural not biological.\

4. PSYCHOLOGY
 Modern psychology was formalized in the late 1800s when German physiologist,
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), created the first psychology in 1879 at the University of
Leipzig. He was interested in studying the links between physiology, human thought and
behavior. He used the laboratory to embark on experimental studies on human
consciousness.

SIGMUND FRUED (1856- 1939)

 Modified the theories of Wundt, who had based his initial ideas from his patients’
behavior.
 He theorized on human personality and the importance of the unconscious in
personality development. As such, he is known as the founder of psychoanalysis.

5. POLITICAL SCIENCE
 Perhaps one of the older disciplines, emerging from the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.
Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics were among the
earliest conceptions of political systems and government.

NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI (1469-1527)

 A Italian politician and philosopher who often seen as the founder of modern political
scienc
 e.
 He necessitated a systematic and empirical study of political institutions. In The Prince,
he outlined his ideas of the state as a political organization, whether it is a republic or a
princedom.
 He described various types of regimes and said that the goals of a regime are glory and
survival.
 He advanced the notion of a strong ruler, maintaining that a leader needs to be “feared,
rather than loved” if he cannot be both.
 Political Science became a formal discipline in the United States in the late 1800s.

6. ECONOMICS

ADAM SMITH (1723-1790)

 A Scottish philosopher who considered as the founder of modern economics.
 In his treatise, An inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he
forwarded the philosophy of the free market.
 He said that if markets were left to themselves, they will regulate their own because of
the laws of supply and demand.
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 MAYNARD KEYNES (1883-1946)
 He said that government is needed to regulate the economy, otherwise it will fail.
 While the context of his theories was the Great Depression in Britain, his ideas
influenced modern macroeconomics.
 Economics then developed into a study of market behavior, answering questions that
pertain to when markets should be regulated.

7. HISTORY
 Is a social science that is often also regarded as part of the Humanities. Historical
accounts have always been essential to social science theories, but history became a
distinct discipline with the creation of modern nation-states following the two World
Wars. As nation-states emerged, there was a need to promote a sense of nationalism
among groups of people by giving them a shared history.

DAY 20

ASSESSMENT

A. Identify what discipline of the social sciences could expound or resolve the following issues
listed below.

1. Determining the exact age of a jaw bone fossil discovered in Ethiopia in 2013.

2. Understanding the principal reason why 27.9% of the Philippines population fall below the
poverty line in 2012.

3. Verifying the WHO report in 2014 that one person commits suicide every 40 seconds.

4. Expounding the salient points of Bangsamoro Basic Law and its relevance to the
Bangsamoro people.

5. Understanding variations in the development of speech and lauage among Filipino children.

B. Choose from the box the appropriate answer of the following questions.

1. Founder of modern economics. Imago Mundi

2. It is the earliest topographic maps. Auguste
Comte 3. Who founded the discipline the term of sociology?
Sigmund Frued 4. He used of positivism in his study of suicide.
Emile Durkheim 5. He is the founder of psychoanalysis.
Adam Smith

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