Category:The birth of social science 1850-1914

The category of thinking we now call "social science" really came to demarcate itself as a field in the late 19th century. This happened because various thinkers began to try to systematically describe collective phenomena in an empirical way, and developed new methodologies for doing so. These thinkers begin to argue that there is something called "society" that is separate from individual psychology or human biology, and requires its own forms of description. The disciplines of Sociology and Social Anthropology grow out of an attempt to describe these aggregate phenomena.

During these early years the primary theoretical conversation centered on Positivism, Evolutionism and the beginnings of Functionalism. Marxism, Romanticism and Nominalism were also important currents of thought.

Key thinkers in this conversation include:

Charles Darwin, Auguste Compte, Herbert Spencer, Lewis Henry Morgan, James Frazer, Edward Burnett Taylor, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Gabriel Tarde and the later Karl Marx.