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This volume offers one of the first systematic analyses of the rise of modern social science. Contrary to the standard accounts of various social science disciplines, the essays in this volume demonstrate that modern social science actually emerged during the critical period between 1750 and 1850. It is shown that the social sciences were a crucial element in the conceptual and epistemic revolution, which parallelled and partly underpinned the political and economic transformations of the modern world.
From a consistently comparative perspective, a group of internationally leading scholars takes up fundamental issues such as the role of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the shaping of the social sciences, the changing relationships between political theory and moral discourse, the profound transformation of philosophy, and the constitution of political economy and statistics.
List of contents
The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity.- The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity.- French Moralists and the Anthropology of the Modern Era: On the Genesis of the Notions of 'Interest' and 'Commercial Society'.- The Construction of the Social Sciences in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Germany.- The Transformation of Philosophy.- The Language of Mercantilism: The English Economic Discussion during the Seventeenth Century.- Natural Law and the Origins of Nationalökonomie: L.H. von Jakob.- Mathematics, Administrative Reform and Social Sciences in France at the End of the Eighteenth Century.- From Political Arithmetic to Social Statistics: How Some Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Social Sciences Were Implanted.- Certainty and Order, Liberty and Contingency: The Birth of Social Science as Empirical Political Philosophy.- About the Contributors.- Name Index.
Summary
This volume offers one of the first systematic analyses of the rise of modern social science. Contrary to the standard accounts of various social science disciplines, the essays in this volume demonstrate that modern social science actually emerged during the critical period between 1750 and 1850.
