From Liberal Arts to Social Sciences: The Great Rebrand
How the liberal arts got embarrassed and put on a lab coat.
They don’t need to be ‘sciences’ to matter. They just need to be what they always were — the education of a free mind — and to stop being embarrassed about it.
An economics professor once corrected me for calling economics a "social study."
"This is a social science," he said, with the kind of quiet indignation you'd expect if someone had called his wife by the wrong name.
I remember thinking it was odd. Not that he cared, academics care about taxonomy the way dogs care about territory. But that the correction felt so necessary to him. As though the entire validity of what we were doing in that lecture theatre depended on the word "science" being in the title.
He wasn't alone. Somewhere in the back half of the twentieth century, an entire constellation of disciplines decided, almost in unison, that they didn't want to be what they were anymore. Economics, sociology, political theory, psychology, communications, anthropology — all of them had been, for centuries, comfortably housed under the banner of the liberal arts. And then, like a group of teenagers who've collectively decided their surname is embarrassing, they rebranded.
They became the social sciences.
The liberal arts are ancient. The term traces back to the Latin artes liberales — the skills considered essential for a free citizen to participate in civic life. Grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy. Seven disciplines. The trivium and the quadrivium. This was the intellectual infrastructure of Western education for the better part of two millennia.
Over time, the tent expanded. Philosophy settled in. History pulled up a chair. Literature made itself comfortable. Political theory arrived with strong opinions and a tendency to rearrange the furniture. Economics showed up late, smelling faintly of mathematics, and immediately asked for its own room.
And for a long time, this worked. The liberal arts were understood as the disciplines that made a person capable of thought. Not vocational training. Not technical skill. The cultivation of judgement, argument, interpretation, and civic participation. The education of a mind, not a profession.
Then the natural sciences happened.
Not literally — physics and chemistry had been around for centuries. But the twentieth century cemented their authority in a way that rearranged the entire hierarchy of knowledge. The atom was split. Antibiotics were mass-produced. We went to the moon. The scientific method didn't just work — it won. And it won so visibly, so materially, so undeniably, that everything else started measuring itself against it.
If you were a discipline that couldn't run a controlled experiment, you had a problem.
This is where the rebrand began. And the motivation was social, not intellectual.
If you were an economics professor in 1965, you had a choice. You could be a scholar of the liberal arts — grouped in with the philosophers and the historians and the people who study fourteenth-century French poetry. Or you could be a scientist. You could wear the lab coat of legitimacy. You could access the funding that flowed to scientific research. You could sit at the big table.
The word "science" didn't change what they were doing. It changed what people thought they were doing.
Sociology didn't start running double-blind experiments. Economics didn't suddenly become falsifiable in the way physics is. Political science — a term so aspirational it borders on parody — didn't discover laws of governance the way Newton discovered laws of motion. The disciplines stayed the same. The branding changed.
And it worked. Universities restructured. The Faculty of Arts became the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Departments that had been happy in the humanities for generations migrated across the corridor into the new wing with "Science" on the door. Funding followed. Prestige followed. The economists, in particular, built entire cathedrals of mathematical modelling and announced that they were doing something fundamentally different from those other liberal arts people — the ones with the tweed and the opinions.
The philosophers, to their credit, mostly refused to play along. They stayed where they were, continued doing what they'd been doing for twenty-five centuries, and watched with a mixture of amusement and contempt as their former neighbours put on lab coats.
Here's the thing that bothers me.
A science (a real science) makes predictions that can be tested. Chemistry predicts that two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom will form water. It does. Every time. Physics predicts the trajectory of a projectile. It follows. Biology predicts that a specific gene mutation will produce a specific protein malformation. It does.
Economics predicts... well. What does economics predict? It predicts that markets will behave rationally, except when they don't. It predicts that supply and demand will reach equilibrium, except during every interesting economic event in history. It predicted that the 2008 financial crisis wouldn't happen. It predicted that inflation would be "transitory." It predicted that austerity would produce growth.
It's not that economics is useless — far from it. Economic thinking is essential to understanding how resources move through societies. But calling it a science implies a level of predictive reliability that it simply does not have. Economics is a discipline of models, and models are useful precisely because they are simplified representations of reality. The moment you claim your model is reality, you've crossed from scholarship into faith.
Sociology has the same issue. It studies how societies organise, how power moves, how norms emerge and dissolve. These are profoundly important questions. But the "science" in social science implies that there are discoverable laws of social behaviour the way there are laws of thermodynamics. There aren't. There are patterns, tendencies, correlations, and very clever interpretive frameworks. That's not science. That's scholarship. And scholarship is fine.
I think the rebrand happened because of insecurity. And I think the insecurity was understandable.
If you're a sociologist in a university that's pouring money into the physics department because the Cold War demands it, you feel the ground shifting under you. If your funding depends on being categorised alongside the sciences rather than alongside the poets, you rebrand. It's rational behaviour. Economists of all people should understand that.
But the cost of the rebrand is real.
When you call something a science that isn't one, you distort public expectations of what it can deliver. Politicians cite economic "science" to justify policies that are actually ideological choices wearing empirical costumes. Sociological "findings" are presented as though they have the weight of clinical trials when they're based on surveys and interpretive analysis. The word "science" launders opinion into fact, and the public, reasonably trusting of actual science, extends that trust to disciplines that haven't earned it on the same terms.
Meanwhile, the liberal arts — the real ones that stayed honest about what they are — get defunded. Philosophy departments close. History programs shrink. Literature becomes a luxury. The disciplines that teach people how to think are treated as less serious than the ones that rebranded themselves as sciences but are really doing the same kind of interpretive, argumentative, perspectival work that philosophers have been doing since Athens.
The cruelest irony: the social sciences displaced the liberal arts by borrowing the prestige of the natural sciences, and in doing so, diminished the very tradition they came from.
Don’t get me wrong, I'm not saying that economics or sociology or political theory should be in any way abolished. These are vital, fascinating, deeply human pursuits. Understanding how societies work is as important as understanding how atoms work. Maybe more so.
What I'm arguing is that they should be honest about what they are.
They are liberal arts. The best of the liberal arts. The ones that grapple with the messiest, most consequential questions about how humans organise themselves, govern themselves, and distribute resources among themselves. That's not a lesser calling. It's an extraordinary one.
But it's not science. And pretending it is doesn't elevate the discipline — it erodes trust in the word "science" and abandons the tradition that gave these disciplines their meaning in the first place.
The liberal arts were named for freedom. Artes liberales — the skills of a free person. A person who could think, argue, interpret, and participate in civic life. That's what economics does at its best. That's what sociology does at its best. That's what political theory and communications and anthropology do at their best.
They don't need to be ‘sciences’ to matter. They just need to be what they always were — the education of a free mind — and to stop being embarrassed about it.
The philosophers never flinched. The rest of them could learn something from that.