As the belief that God directly controlled and influenced human behavior weakened during the nineteenthcentury, philosophers tried to construct a science of society, or social science. Social scientists rejected the ideathat human activities occur at random, and affirmed instead that all human activities reveal observed regularitiesor patterns. Gradually, social scientists refined such concepts as social class and kinship to explain thesepatterns.By the end of the nineteenth century, the quest for a unified social science was giving way to the rise ofthe social sciences. As knowledge became more technical and specialized, economists, political scientists,sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists each pursued different avenues of inquiry into social experience.Although social scientists in one field borrowed ideas from other fields, each field tended to develop its ownspecialized language, or jargon, and distinctive concepts. What began as an all-encompassing effort to identify asingle science of society became an enterprise marked by diversity, specialization, and often fragmentation.Today, the usual list of social sciences includes economics, political science, anthropology, psychology, andsociology. In addition, some view history as a social science.
52. Which of the following words best describes the nature of social sciences nowadays?
(A) diversified
(B) generalized
(C) panoramic
(D) unified
(E) chaotic