Table of Contents

1. Sociality and Social Science 2. The Rise of the Age of Science 3. Social Laws 4. Political Theory and Political Philosophy 5. Physiocracy: The First Economic Model 6. The Methodology of Modelling 7. The Scottish Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century 8. Progress and Perfection 9. Classical Political Economy 10. The Idea of Harmonious Order 11. Utilitarianism 12. French Positivism and the Beginnings of Sociology 13. The Marxian Theory of Society 14. The Methodology of History 15. The Development of Sociological Theory 16. Biology, Social Science, and Social Policy 17. The Development of Economic Theory 18. The Foundations of Science

About the Author

H. Scott Gordon

Reviews

This book is about what modern social science is and how it came to be what it is. The ideas that we carry around with us have their own history, and his book tells us where these ideas came from.' - James M. Buchanan, George Mason University and Nobel Laureate in Economics

`Professor Gordon has created a work of rare authority in this riveting and beautifully written history of the social sciences. The book is at once scholarly and popular.' - Mark Blaug

`This is a major work which is set to become a classic. Scott Gordon has written what is not only a scholarly and extremely useful survey of the development of ideas in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the present day, but also a thoroughly engaging and enjoyable book.' - The Economic Journal