The Origins of American Social Science

ISBN-13: 9780521350921 / Angielski / Twarda / 1990 / 536 str.

Dorothy Ross

Opis

Focusing on the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, and history, this book examines how American social science came to model itself on natural science and liberal politics. Professor Ross argues that American social science receives its distinctive stamp from the ideology of American exceptionalism, the idea that America occupies an exceptional place in history, based on her republican government and wide economic opportunity. Under the influence of this national self-conception, Americans believed that their history was set on a millennial course, exempted from historical change and from the mass poverty and class conflict of Europe. Before the Civil War, this vision of American exceptionalism drew social scientists into the national effort to stay the hand of time. Not until after the Civil War did industrialization force Americans to confront the idea and reality of historical change. The social science disciplines had their origin in that crisis and their development is a story of efforts to evade and tame historical transformation in the interest of exceptionalist ideals. This is the first book to look broadly at American social science in its historical context and to demonstrate the central importance of the national ideology of American exceptionalism to the development of the social sciences and to American social thought generally.

Recenzje

"This is a complex and important book....This is intellectual history at its very best, never failing to connect ideas to a 'real world' of economic power, highbrow culture, and professional anxieties." Canadian Journal of History

Spis treści

Introduction; Part I. European Social Science in Antebellum America: 1. The discovery of modernity; 2. The American exceptionalist vision; Part II. The Crisis of American Exceptionalism, 1865–1896: 3. Establishment of the social science disciplines; 4. The threat of socialism in economics and sociology; Part III. Progressive Social Science, 1896–1914: 5. The liberal revision of American exceptionalism; 6. Marginalism and historicism in economics; 7. Toward a sociology of social control; 8. From historico-politics to political science; Part IV. American Social Science As The Study Of Natural Process, 1908–1929: 9. Modernist historical consciousness and American liberal change; 10. The advent of scientism; Epilogue; Footnote abbreviations; Footnotes.