The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642-1792

240 Pages·1993·12.84 MB·English

by  Richard Olson

Twayne’s Studies in
Intellectual and Cultural LListory
Michael Roth, General Editor
Scripps College and the Claremont Graduate School
Liberalism Old and New
byj. G. Merquior
Renaissance Humanism
by Donald R. Kelley
Dissent and Order in the Middle Ages
by Jeffrey Burton Russell
Anarchism
by Richard D. Sonn
The Emergence
OE THE
Social Sciences
1642-1792
Richard Olson
Twayne Publishers • New York
Maxwell Macmillan Canada • Toronto
Maxwell Macmillan International • New York Oxford Singapore Sydney
The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642-1792
Twayne's Studies in Intellectual and Cultural History, No. 5
Copyright © 1993 by Richard Olson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Twayne Publishers Maxwell Macmillan Canada, Inc.
Macmillan Publishing Company 1200 Eglinton Avenue East
866 Third Avenue Suite 200
New York, New York 10022 Don Mills, Ontario M3C 3N1
Macmillan Publishing Company is part of the Maxwell Communication
Group of Companies.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olson, Richard, 1940-
The emergence of the social sciences, 1642-1792 / Richard Olson,
p. cm. — (Twayne's studies in intellectual and cultural
history ; no. 5)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8057-8607-4 — ISBN 0-8057-8632-5 (pbk.)
1. Social sciences—History. I. Title. II. Series.
H51.057 1993
300'.9—dc20 92-36978
CIP
10 987654321 (he)
10 987654321 (pb)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z3948-1984.©™
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Contents
Foreword vii
1. Introduction 1
2. Contexts for the Emergence of the Social Sciences:
Traditions of Social Discourse and the New
Philosophies of the Scientific Revolution 6
3. Renaissance Naturalism and Political Economy
in the German Cameralist Tradition 27
4. Rationalist Mechanical Philosophy and the
Psychological Tradition of Social Science 35
5. Experimental Mechanical Philosophy,
Political Arithmetic, and Political Economy
in Seventeenth-Century Britain 57
6. Natural History, Historical Jurisprudence,
and the Emergence of Traditions of Philosophical
History to the Time of Montesquieu 71
7. Newton, Locke, and Changing Ideas About the
Character of Science 83
8. Associationist and Sensationalist Psychologies,
Political Radicalism, and Utilitarianism, 1700-1790 96
9. Political Economy and the Consolidation of
Economic Liberalism, 1695-1775 118
V
Contents
10. Philosophical History (Sociology) and the
Emergence of Conservative Ideology^ 1725-67 138
11. Fused Sciences and Mixed Ideological Messages:
The Glasgow School of Hutcheson, Smith, and Millar 162
12. Conclusion 190
Chronology 197
Notes and References 201
Bibliographic Essay 213
Index 219
VI
Foreword
Twayne's Studies in Intellectual and Cultural History consists of
brief original studies of major movements in European intellectual
and cultural history, emphasizing historical approaches to continuity
and change in religion, philosophy, political theory, aesthetics,
literature, and science. The series reflects the recent resurgence of
innovative contextual as well as theoretical work in these areas, and
the more general interest in the historical study of ideas and cultures.
It will advance some of the most exciting work in the human sciences
as it stimulates further interest in cultural and intellectual history.
The books are intended for the educated reader and the serious
student; each combines the virtues of accessibility with original
interpretations of important topics.
Richard Olson's study provides a rich account of the variety of
meanings of the 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 quite antithetical to their early
agendas. The social sciences eventually helped to remake the social
conditions out of which they emerged. The book shows both the
traditions out of which the social sciences developed and the
Vll
Foreword
problems that they helped to define. In this way, Olson shows how
the early social sciences created a bridge between the pre-modern
and the modern world.
The Emergence of the Social Sciences 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 recon¬
figured these traditions.
Michael S. Roth
Scripps College and the
Claremont Graduate School
vm
1
J'
Introduction
i
his book has three major objectives. First, it seeks to characterize
and briefly analyze each of four major new and self-consciously
scientific traditions of discourse about humans and their institutions
which emerged in the seventeenth century and came to flourish in
the eighteenth. It will pay special attention to methodological
issues—explicit and implicit notions of how to formulate questions,
structure discourse, and evaluate arguments and evidence. In this
connection, it will address a variety of questions. What did the
initiators of these new approaches to social knowledge expect to gain
from applying scientific methods to their subjects? What did each
understand the central features of a scientific approach to be? How
did the differences in their answers to methodological questions lead
to distinctive and sometimes contradictory conclusions about the
extent and limits of human capacities to influence and consciously
shape institutions and events?
Second, it seeks to explore the ways in which preexistent social,
political, and intellectual conditions, interests, and beliefs shaped the
emergent traditions of social science. With rare exceptions, the new
social sciences inherited their principal problems and many of their
initial value orientations from the traditions of discourse they sought
to supplant or reform; moreover, they were all initiated to serve
particular political, social, economic, or religious interests. In spite of
the fact that most of the new social scientists wanted to claim that
their methods freed them from biases associated with special parti-
1
Introduction
san interests, it is unquestionably true that ideological assumptions
were either unwittingly or intentionally incorporated into every
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century attempt to formulate a scien¬
tific approach to social subject matter. Some social-scientific tradi¬
tions were initiated in an attempt to stabilize or perfect existing
political and social institutions; others sought to accelerate and guide
political change; still others claimed to be indifferent to social and
governmental forms and capable of improving the quality of human
life within any social and political structure. Their initial aims had a
bearing on the character of each tradition, and they must be
considered if we are to understand the early social sciences.
Together, the first and second goals of this work address what
recent scholars sometimes call the '"social construction" of the early
social sciences. They presume that these sciences, like all other
human creations, are shaped by the conditions in which they
emerge. New sciences, in particular, are responses to contemporary
understandings of the character of science drawn from knowledge of
other scientific activities, to specific social and economic circum¬
stances and commitments, and to the special interests they are
intended to serve.
The third goal of the work is quite different from the first two and
is both more ambitious and more problematic. It is to explore the
ways in which the emergent traditions of social science operated to
reconstruct the intellectual and social contexts out of which they
emerged. Like every other form of human creative activity, the
sciences operate both as mirrors that reflect features of the culture
which produces them and as lamps which illuminate features of that
culture's future.
Ironically, in no case that I know of did any of the social sciences
that emerged in the seventeenth century effectively serve the major
interests that its earliest advocates sought to further. A psychological
tradition was initiated by Thomas Hobbes to defend political abso¬
lutism and monarchy; yet, as we shall see, it was transformed during
the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries into the chief
buttress of radical social and political positions, including secular
socialism and individualistic feminism. Similarly, a sociological tra¬
dition initiated by James Harrington was aimed at undermining the
monarchy and promoting republicanism in seventeenth-century
England; yet, by the end of the eighteenth century it had become a
central prop for reactionary political platforms that sought a return
to an imagined absolutist past, a system of feudal vassalage, or even.
2
Introduction
in some cases, a preagrarian primitivism. A tradition of political
economy initiated by William Petty in order to increase the capabili¬
ties of a central government to manage resources for the general
well-being of its citizens and to '"level" their economic standing soon
became the foundation of liberal economic doctrines that served
principally to limit the role of the state to the protection of private
property and rejected notions of distributive justice. Finally, a
tradition of cameralism, intended by Ludwig von Sekendorf and
Johann Becher to improve the intensely personal and paternalist rule
of German princes and to increase the efficiency and productivity of
their es'tates, contributed to generating some of the most impersonal,
bureaucratic, and inefficient governmental practices of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.^
It thus seems that early social-scientific traditions took on lives of
their own which turned their impact almost directly against the
intentions of their initiators. This perversion of original intent seems
peculiarly apt, for if there was a single general principle embraced by
all of the social-scientific traditions by the middle of the eighteenth
century it was one which is often called "the law of unintended
consequences." The most widely cited and ironic expression of this
general notion appeared in Bernard Mandeville's The Grumbling
Hive, or Knaves Turned Honest (1705) which was eventually expanded
into The Fable of the Bees. Mandeville emphasized the seemingly
perverse fact that though the wealthy intended only to aggrandize
themselves through conspicuous consumption, their vain habits
served to stimulate commercial activity and provide jobs for the poor
and industrious:
whilst luxury
Employed a Million of the Poor,
And odious Pride a Million more;
Envy itself, and Vanity,
Were Ministers of industry;
Their darling folly—fickleness
In diet, furniture, and dress—
That strange, ridiculous vice, was made
The very wheel that turned the trade.
At the hands of such social theorists as Charles-Louis de Secondat,
baron de Montesquieu, Giambattista Vico, Adam Smith, Adam
Ferguson, and Edmund Burke, this notion was generalized to an
3