The list of the world top 100 universities in social sciences elicits two obvious comments. First, the field looks like a private club with highly exclusive membership limited to 10 nations. All other fields have a wider span : engineering includes 20 nations, natural sciences 17, medicine 16, life sciences 13. Furthermore, it is an Anglo-Saxon turf, with the United States at the chair : 90% of the top 100 universities are located in the Anglo-Saxon world and 80% are to be found in North America.
What is the backstage situation of which these facts are the symptoms ? Let us try and risk an interpretation. Social science — incidentally, the debate is not yet closed about the appropriateness of the label science when applied to the social field, where the experimental or scientific method strictu sensu is inapplicable — encompasses disciplines such as sociology, economics, management and political science. Notwithstanding a variety of hues and flavors, the prevailing body of knowledge supporting these disciplines claims simultaneously a universal scope (extending from the capitalistic United States to the communist China), is uni-dimensional (there is one best doctrine in each discipline, be it behaviorism, neoclassical economics, shareholder value maximization or democratic rule of law), is normative (it does not care about what is, but states what it ought to be), and is mostly axiomatic (relies on dogma, not on proven facts).
Such a construct shares little with physics, astronomy or chemistry, where one can find contradictory and even irreconcilable facts and theories, in spite of all efforts to check theory against fact, and all attempts to design new experiments capable of establishing the proof. But it definitely resembles religion that also rests upon belief, and claims to be universal, to hold the truth and to show the way. Social science may well be the secular religion of our times, serving the unchecked ambition of today's would-be empires.
World top 100 universities in Social Science | |||
Country | Number | Population | Per capita |
| Million | (Nbr/Millionx100) | ||
| Australia | 1 | 21.8 | 4.6 |
| Canada | 8 | 34.3 | 23.3 |
| China, Hong Kong | 1 | 7.6 | 13.2 |
| Denmark | 1 | 5.5 | 18.2 |
| Israel | 2 | 7.5 | 26.7 |
| Netherlands | 4 | 16.6 | 24.2 |
| Norway | 1 | 4.8 | 20.6 |
| Switzerland | 1 | 7.6 | 13.1 |
| United Kingdom | 9 | 62.0 | 14.5 |
| United States | 72 | 320.5 | 22.5 |
| Median | 1.5 | 19.4 | |
| Average | 10.1 | 19.6 | |
| ¹ Browse the complete List of 200 best social science universities. | |||
Sources: Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai and UN Population Division
