Are there 'laws' of social science. . . . . or is this just science-envy?

Many in the social sciences, perhaps these days especially, try to formulate all sorts of ‘laws’ of society, culture, and the like.  For decades, social sciences (including much of anthropology) have tried to make generalizations, implicitly or otherwise, of this sort.  My old graduate school professor, Leslie White, a terrifically thoughtful and interesting scholar, tried mightily to liken culture and its change (‘evolution’) to a force for the use and dispersion of energy–in a way, to make it a branch of chemistry or physics.  Sure, humans are made of chemicals and must follow laws of physics, energy, and so on.  But I think it didn’t catch on or get us anywhere, certainly not as more than a generalization, after the fact, but he, as did other anthropologists, characterized a hierarchy, a kind of inevitable parade, of world cultures–from hunter-gatherers, to early agriculturalists, on to nation-states.

The burden, or scourge, of science envy?
Sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and others have tried their damnedest to ‘legalize’ their field, to make it respectably precise, quantitative, and law-like.  That is, having the kind of bedrock basis as found in physics or chemistry–or even biology.

Ever since I was a graduate student in anthropology (but from a math and science background), I have thought that this was a kind of pretense, a bad case of physics-envy.  In the decades since then, I  have seen this take various forms and technophilifications.  Simple descriptions and informal attempts at generalization about world cultures, as in the above sort of hierarchy, have seemed to me forced.

There are those, going under various terms like post-modernism, who argue against this sort of thing, often noting that what is written is, or perhaps necessarily is to be understood in the eye and careerism of the beholder.  Their idea has been something like suggesting that we should accept the difference and not try to force things, indeed, instead to read social ‘science’ (or, for some, any science) as a social structure, to ‘deconstruct’ the explanations and behavior of scientists to show what they are really up to, vis-à-vis what they say they are doing.  They are not like physics and chemistry!

Well, a riposte by social science can include assertions that people are, after all, physical beings and that their cultures are their ways of living in the physical as well as social world, the latter of course also being ‘physical’ and therefore there must be some regularities, limits, or ‘laws’ of social life.

So are there, or must there be, rules, constraints, causes, or regularities, ineluctable truths that are formal enough to be called ‘laws’ when it comes to behaviors, societies, and cultures?  How can we know the answer–what kind of evidence could we bring to bear?  Or should social science professors’ careers and activities be judged in different terms?

If these fields don’t have legitimate analogs to the laws of the physical sciences, then what are the causes of the societal regularities that we observe, from language to courtesies and so on, that clearly lubricate human life if not, indeed, being fundamental to it?  Can they have no ’cause’?   Can the ’causes’ be unique to each circumstance–and if so, is that in itself a ‘law’, and if so,  how does the law work or get enforced?

These are not new questions.  For the past two or more centuries (or, maybe, going back at least to Plato and Aristotle et al.) these sorts of questions have been asked.  Surely life, of individuals and above all of societies, in humans and other species, has orderly patterns!  Do these not have ’causes’ of some sort?  If so, are they in some way ‘universal’ in their nature even if locally ad hoc in their results?

Can there be a real ‘science’ of society?  This has nothing to do with whether there can or should be departments with such names in universities!  Human society is, after all, built on layers of pretense.  But if no such science is possible, how is it that societies, chaotic in many ways, do have regularities!  These include social and family relations, property rules, boundaries, governments, status and wealth stratification, wars, borders and on and on.  Every society has at least some form of these attributes.

If social sciences are not really ‘sciences’ in the sense of physics and chemistry, which are based on rather simple universals, then what are they based on?

The questions are not new. They were written about by the ancients.  But I think that, other than various kinds of bureaucratic aspects of academic life, the questions are still largely unanswered.  Perhaps they are not yet well-posed questions–perhaps social and cultural causation needs some other kind of approach than imitation of physics.  But if that…..what?