ABSTRACT
7The separate social sciences emerged in the nineteenth century out of a recognition of the distinction between the state and society. This distinction has never been an absolute one and has always been phrased in a number of different ways; public/private, politics/economics, state/market, law-legal order/mores-moral or normative order, and most sweepingly collectivist/individualist in the contrast between socialism and capitalism. Conceptually, it has provided the basis for the differentiation of the social sciences as academic disciplines. Economics, primarily concerned with the workings of the market, was originally called “political economy.” “Political science,” “public law and government,” “politics,” and simply “government” are different departmental names in American universities for the same discipline studying the state as an institutional complex and politics as competing efforts to control or influence it, the first being much the most common. “Sociology” has often been defined as the study of “civil society,” identified since the early nineteenth century with those areas of social life distinct and separate from the state. Sociology has also been described more invidiously as “the science of leftovers,” consisting of areas that had not been preempted by economics, political science, and law. Civil society includes in its scope the market economy, but by the end of the last century “sociology” had become identified with social life apart from both the economy and the state, particularly by Durkheim and his followers in France.
