The history of the social science disciplines as we know them is a fairly recent one. The word ‘sociologie’ was invented by Auguste Comte in the 1820s; ‘political economy’ was first used (in French) in 1613 but did not become current until the second half of the eighteenth century. ‘Economics’ was first popularised in its modern sense by Alfred Marshall in his Principles of Economics (1890); in the 1740s the word was still being used as Aristotle had used it, to denote household management, an activity which included the control of slaves and wives among other possessions. The notion of a ‘science’ as a distinct discipline did not emerge clearly in England until well into the nineteenth century, and nor did the word ‘scientist’, invented by Whewell in 1840. Even more significantly, perhaps, the words ‘society’ and ‘social’ acquire their modern meanings in English and French only in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The contrast between society and the state was central to nineteenth-century German thought but rarely made explicit before that time (though it was anticipated by Thomas Paine, who wrote in 1776 that ‘society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness’).

Social thought, in other words, was until recently both intellectually diffuse, in the sense that ‘society’ or ‘societies’ had not yet clearly emerged as an object of study, and socially diffuse, in that the occupational role of ‘social scientist’, like that of ‘natural scientist’, had not yet emerged.