Political Sociology

The current division of labor within the social sciences is not set in stone. It is the histori­cal outcome of institutional and intellectual developments that also display national variation. In Britain the social sciences emerged out of political history and philosophy, and social research, often driven by philanthropy. In Continental Europe, where social and political science is closely associated with the training of national administrative elites, it emerged largely out of law. In the United States, where there is a strong tradition of political liberalism (egalitarianism plus small government), social research modeled itself early on the natural sciences (see Anderson 2003). In each case, the social sciences are closely associated with processes of nation-state formation and with the state's need to make society "legible" - and thus governable - by standardizing and collecting data (see Scott 1998).