Introduction

Between January 1923 and January 1929, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial supported the creation of five university-based ‘research centres’. Each centre had a special focus. The London School of Economics focused especially on economic research. The University of Chicago focused on interdisciplinary urban research. The University of North Carolina focused on race relations. Columbia University focused especially on intersections between law, politics and other fields in the social sciences. Harvard University focused on industrial psychology, while also experimenting with a methodological shift from social ethics to empirical analysis.

Origins of Social Science

By the 1920s, persons involved in academic social science made great strides toward becoming ‘professionals’ in their fields of expertise. Persons in the sciences of economics, sociology, political science and social psychology could all perhaps even come to believe that their science was the central social science.

The idea of a ‘science’ of humans living in society far predates the 1920s. Among the ancient Greeks in the western tradition, one can find keen insights in social, political, economic and even anthropological thought – but it was ‘thought’, not ‘science’. In much more recent times it can be a challenge to commit to any exact order of the emergence of the ‘modern’ sciences of humans and societies. David Hume in 1741 wrote his essay, ‘That Politicks may be reduc'd to a Science’.