theory

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1921/histmat/intro.htm

Bourgeois scholars speak of any branch of learning with mysterious awe, as if it were a thing produced in heaven, not on earth. But as a matter of fact any science, whatever it be, grows out of the demands of society or its classes. No one takes the trouble to count the number of flies on a window-pane, or the number of sparrows in the street, but one does count the number of horned cattle. The former figures are useful to no one; it is very useful to know the latter. But it is not only useful to have a knowledge of nature, from whose various parts we obtain all our substances, instruments, raw materials, etc,; it is just as necessary, in practice, to have information concerning society. The working class, at each step in its struggle, is brought face to face with the necessity of possessing such information. In order to be able to conduct its struggle with other classes properly, it is necessary for the working class to foresee how these classes will behave. For this it must know on what circumstances the conduct of the various classes, under varying conditions, depends. Before the working class obtains power, it is obliged to live under the yoke of capital and to bear in mind constantly, in its struggle for liberation, what will be the behavior of all the given classes. It must know on what this behavior depends, and by what such behavior is determined. This question may be answered only by social science. If the working class has conquered power, it is under the necessity of struggling against the capitalist governments of other countries, as well as against the remnants of counter-revolution at home; and 'it is also obliged to reckon with the extremely difficult tasks. of the organization of production and distribution. What is to be the nature of the economic plan; how is the intelligentsia to be utilized; how are the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie to be trained to communism. how shall experienced administrators be raised from the ranks of the workers; how shall the broad masses of the working class itself, as yet only slightly class-conscious, be reached; etc., etc., - all these questions require a knowledge of society in order to answer them properly, a knowledge of its classes, of their peculiarities, of their behavior in this case or that; they require a knowledge also of political economy and the social currents of thought of the various groups in society. These questions show the need for the social sciences. The practical task of a reconstruction of society may be correctly solved by the application of a scientific policy of the working class, i.e., a policy based on scientific theory; this scientific theory, in the case of the proletarian, is the theory founded by Karl Marx.

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Bourgeois scholars always maintain that they are the representatives of so called "pure science", that all earthly sufferings, all conflicting interests, all the ups and downs of life, the hunt for profit, and other earthly and vulgar things have no relation whatever with their science. Their conception of the matter is approximately the following: the scholar is a god, seated on a sublime eminence, observing dispassionately the life of society in all its varying forms; they think (and yet more loudly proclaim) that vile "practice" has no relation whatever with pure "theory". This conception is of course a false one; quite the contrary is true: all learning arises from practice. This being the case, it is perfectly clear that the social sciences have a class character. Each class has its own practice, its special tasks, its interests and therefore its view of things. The bourgeoisie is concerned chiefly with safeguarding, perpetuating, solidifying, extending the rule of capital. The working class is concerned in the first place with the task of overthrowing the capitalist system and safeguarding the rule of the working class in order to reconstruct life. It is not difficult to see that bourgeois practice will demand one thing, and proletarian practice another; that the bourgeoisie will have one view of things, and the working class another; that the social science of the bourgeoisie will be of one type, and that of the proletariat unquestionably of a different type.

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Among the social sciences there are two important branches which consider not only a single field of social life, but the entire social life in all its fulness; in other words, they are concerned not with any single set of phenomena (such as, economic, or legal, or religious phenomena, etc.), but take up the entire life of society, as a whole, concerning themselves with all the groups of social phenomena. One of these sciences is history; the other is sociology. In view of what has been said above it will not be difficult to grasp the difference between them. History investigates and describes how the current of social life flowed at a certain time and in a certain place (for example, how economy and law and morality and science, and a great number of other things, developed in Russia, beginning in 1700 and going down to 1800 ; or, in China, from 2000 B.C. to 1000 A.D.; or, in Germany, after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871; or in any other epoch and in any other country or group of countries). Sociology takes up the answer to general questions, such as: what is society? On what does its growth or decay depend? What is the relation of the various groups of social phenomena (economic, legal, scientific, etc.), with each other; how is their evolution to be explained; what are the historical forms of society; how shall we explain the fact that one such form follows upon another; etc., etc.? Sociology is the most general (abstract) of the social sciences. It is often referred to under other names, such as: "the philosophy of history", "the theory of the historical process", etc.

It is evident from the above what relation exists between history and sociology. Since sociology explains the general laws of human evolution, it serves as a method for history. If, for example, sociology establishes the general doctrine that the forms of government depend on the forms of economy, the historian must seek and find, in any given epoch, precisely what are the relations, and must show what is their concrete, specific expression. History furnishes the material for drawing sociological conclusions and making sociological generalizations, for these conclusions are not made up of whole cloth, but are derived from the actual facts of history. Sociology in its turn formulates a definite point of view, a means of investigation, or, as we now say, a method for history.

Professionally I've always been in STEM because I need to eat, but academically all of my interests are in social sciences and the humanities more broadly. Those fields are important because they add extra lenses of context for the material development of STEM. As society becomes more complex, we need to know the hows and whys and what ifs to anticipate and address crises. Where they have an incomplete understanding, because they're studying parts of a greater body like all physical scientists study the same universe that information is confirmed or denied by the same basic processes. Anything that doesn't intersectionally fit ends up being rejected by the bigger picture. If you don't have a humanities background of some kind, you're blind to the whole sociopolitical and sociohistorical and intellectual roots/impact of what you're studying. Your experimental subject did not just fall out of a coconut tree. It exists in the context of all in which it lives and what came before it.