Historians long thought the term science sociale was coined in 1789 by the revolutionary theorist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. Although he employed it just once in the first edition of Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État?, and it was replaced by a different phrase in later editions of the pamphlet, his usage was historically significant: it referred to the new science of politics that he believed was necessary to guide attempts at reform in France following the calling of the Estates General. For scholars, this lexical innovation was taken to illustrate both Sieyès’ predilection for conceptual novelty, and the importance of the French Revolution as a stage in the development of the modern social sciences. To some, Sieyès’ coining of the term science sociale was also the starting point for the gradual process that would see French sociology emerge as a distinct branch of knowledge in the nineteenth century.

This article discusses my discovery of an earlier and hitherto unexamined use of the term science sociale, and it explores the implications of this discovery for our understanding of the history of early French social science. I found that the term was used over twenty years before Sieyès in a little-known work by Victor Riquetti marquis de Mirabeau. A follower of François Quesnay, Mirabeau was one of the many writers who sought to publicize the original economic system known as physiocracy. Mirabeau, like Sieyès after him, employed the term science sociale only fleetingly. His usage, however, provides a new window into the origins and development of the idea of a science of society in eighteenth-century France.

Unlike later uses of the term, Mirabeau associated “social science” with the policies of economic and imperial expansion of modern European states; policies, he argued, that were a sure road to collapse. Placing this claim in the context of contemporary anxieties about the future of the French monarchy, I outline what this version of social science tells us about physiocracy and how it compares to the subsequent versions of the concept put forward in the works of Sieyès and the mathematician philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet.

The French Revolution remains central to any understanding of the history of early French social science. But by beginning this history in 1767, rather than 1789 or even 1838 (the year Auguste Comte coined the term sociologie), I think it becomes easier to see that this history was not one of gradual advancement. As this article suggests, this history was closely tied to the volatile politics of reform in France before, during and after the Revolution. It was, as such, defined less by continuity than by rupture, or, as I put it in the article, serial reinvention.

Image credits: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF

Three Versions of Social Science in Late Eighteenth-Century France by Thomas Lalevée