Rarely does the world see as versatile a figure as Herbert Simon. A Nobel laureate in economics, he was an accomplished political scientist, winner of a lifetime achievement award from the American Psychological Association, and founder of the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In all his work in all these fields, he pursued a single goal: to create a science that could map the bounds of human reason and so enlarge its role in human affairs.

Hunter Crowther-Heyck uses the career of this unique individual to examine the evolution of the social sciences after...