When the core social science disciplines first took shape in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of the central challenges was to understand various ills produced by a modern industrializing, urbanizing, and increasingly technological society. Those problems included everything from political corruption and other threats to democracy to economic slumps, social ills associated with a wide variety of things including immigration, prostitution, sweat shops, and labor unrest, cultural (mal)adjustments, and individual neurosis. The study of such matters was destined to remain salient for scholars, indeed right up to the present day. Yet explicit discussion and debate about “social problems” per se developed unevenly across the disciplines. Interest in particular problems such as crime or discrimination or inequality waxed and waned as well. So, how exactly did sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and other students of the human sciences understand what a social problem...
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