Sills D. (ed.) International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Volume 19

Macmillan Company & The Free Press, 1968. — 459 p.The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences was first published in 1968 and was edited by David L. Sills and Robert K. Merton. It contains seventeen volumes and thousands of entries written by scholars around the world.Though the 1968 Encyclopedia was initially intended to "complement, not supplant" MacMillan's earlier, fifteen-volume Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, which had been published from 1930 to 1967 and was edited by American economists Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman and Alvin Saunders Johnson, it effectively replaced the earlier Encyclopaedia, in practice.The Encyclopedia is, first and foremost, the work of social scientists. It is part of the fabric of their professional literature— their journals, annals, proceedings, monographs, treatises, textbooks, and expository writings. It has been planned by social scientists, directed by social scientists, and edited by social scientists. The writers, with a number of important exceptions, are social scientists. Social scientists will be the most frequent users, although undoubtedly they will be a minority among students, journalists, lawyers, legislators, administrators, educators, other professional people, and all the other users.The question "What Are the Social Sciences?" is the title of Edwin R. A. Seligman's opening chapter in the Introduction to the earlier Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. Professor Seligman's first answer was to define the social sciences as "those mental or cultural sciences which deal with the activities of the individual as a member of a group." His second answer was to list the disciplines that were included in the encyclopedia. In so doing, he made a distinction between the social sciences (which he defined as politics, economics, law, anthropology, sociology, penology, and social work); the semi-social sciences (ethics, education, philosophy, and psychology); and the sciences with social implications (biology, geography, medicine, linguistics, and art).Scope of the Encyclopedia:Anthropology—includes cultural, economic, physical, political, social, and applied anthropology, as well as archeology, ethnography, ethnology, and linguistics.Economics—includes econometrics, economic history, the history of economic thought, economic development, agricultural economics, industrial organization, international economics, labor economics, money and banking, public finance, and certain aspects of business management.Geography—includes cultural, economic, political, and social geography, but not physical geography.History—includes the traditional subject-matter fields of history and the scope and methods of historiography.Law—includes jurisprudence, the major legal systems, legal theory, and the relationship of law to the other social sciences.Political science—includes public administration, public law, international relations, comparative politics, political theory, and the study of policy making and political behavior.
Psychiatry—includes theories and descriptions of the principal mental disorders and methods of diagnosis and treatment.Psychology—includes clinical, counseling, educational, experimental, personality, physiological, social, and applied psychology.Sociology—includes economic, organizational, political, rural, and urban sociology; the sociologies of knowledge, law, religion, and medicine; human ecology; the history of social thought; sociometry and other small-group research; survey research; and such special fields as criminology and demography.Statistics—includes theoretical statistics, the design of experiments, nonsampling errors, sample surveys, government statistics, and the use of statistical methods in social science research.The reader who consults the entry for each of these ten fields of study will find a guide or cross references to the major topical and biographical articles related to the discipline. In addition, a large number of articles present modern social thought about the arts, the major religions, and many of the professions.