• The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642-1792 [top]
  Written by Richard Olson; Foreword by Michael S. Roth (General Editor of the Series "Twayne's Studies in Intellectual and Cultural History"
  First published in 1993 in the United States by Twayne Publishers, in paperback, 230pp, ISBN 0805786325
  Jacket art courtesy of The Francis Bacon Foundation, Claremont, California
  

About this book: This study provides a rich account of the variety of meanings of the social sciences of society in their earliest years and of the early development of the disciplines that now go under the name of the social sciences. The focus here is on economics, psychology, political science and the philosophy of history. The book examines the various strains of social science as they emerged from the constellation of social and intellectual themes important to early modern Europe. Olson's thesis is that psychology, politics and economics began with strong programmatic emphases and that they developed as social sciences in ways antithetical to their early agendas. The social sciences eventually helped to remake the social conditions out of which they had emerged. The book describes the traditions shaping their development and the problems that they helped to define so bridging the pre-modern and modern worlds. The book surveys the very different intellectual and national traditions of England, Germany, and France. It shows how the social sciences, emerging out of very different conditions, come to have strong affinities with one another. This intellectual history is richly contextual, yet it is based on a close reading of the relevant authors. Richard Olson's book points both to the traditions in religion and science within which the social sciences achieved importance, and to their very modern goals which reconfigured these traditions

Contents:
Foreword
1. Introduction
2. Contexts for the Emergence of the Social Sciences: Traditions of Social Discourse and the New Philosophies of the Scientific Revolution
3. Renaissance Naturalism and Political Economy in the German Cameralist Tradition
4. Rationalist Mechanical Philosophy and the Psychological Tradition of Social Science
5. Experimental Mechanical Philosophy, Political Arithmetic, and Political Economy in Seventeenth-Century Britain
6. Natural History, Historical Jurisprudence
7. Newton, Locke, and Changing Ideas About the Character of Science
8. Associationist and Sensationalist Psychologies, Political Radicalism, and Utilitarianism, 1700-1790
9. Political Economy and the Consolidation of Economic Liberalism
10. Philosophical History (Sociology) and the Emergence of Conservative Ideology, 1725-67
11. Fused Sciences and Mixed Ideological Messages: The Glasgow School of Hutcheson, Smith and Millar
12. Conclusion
Chronology; Notes and References; Bibliographic Essay; Index