Richard E. Wagner, Emeritus Professor of Economics, George Mason University, US

‘An impressive work that reflects a career spent in dedicated study of the most fundamental problems of the social sciences and will be of interest to scholars working in areas related to the philosophy of the social sciences or the history of liberal thought.’

• Contents: Preface 1. Society as analytical object: some methodological challenges 2. Systems theory and parts-to-whole relationships 3. Cooperation, conflict, and the social organization of human activity 4. Rationality and the Janus-faced character of human reason 5. Markets, law, and moral imaginations: order theory redux 6. Main Street, Wall Street, and City Hall: exploring their entanglement 7. Civilizing processes and the social question reprised 8. Thymology, spiritedness, and the social organization of human activity 9. Rationality within systems: how time integrates subjective and objective probability 10. A portmanteau of themes in closing References Index

Richard E. Wagner, Emeritus Professor of Economics, George Mason University, US

‘An impressive work that reflects a career spent in dedicated study of the most fundamental problems of the social sciences and will be of interest to scholars working in areas related to the philosophy of the social sciences or the history of liberal thought.’

• Contents: Preface 1. Society as analytical object: some methodological challenges 2. Systems theory and parts-to-whole relationships 3. Cooperation, conflict, and the social organization of human activity 4. Rationality and the Janus-faced character of human reason 5. Markets, law, and moral imaginations: order theory redux 6. Main Street, Wall Street, and City Hall: exploring their entanglement 7. Civilizing processes and the social question reprised 8. Thymology, spiritedness, and the social organization of human activity 9. Rationality within systems: how time integrates subjective and objective probability 10. A portmanteau of themes in closing References Index

Richard E. Wagner, Emeritus Professor of Economics, George Mason University, US

‘An impressive work that reflects a career spent in dedicated study of the most fundamental problems of the social sciences and will be of interest to scholars working in areas related to the philosophy of the social sciences or the history of liberal thought.’

• Contents: Preface 1. Society as analytical object: some methodological challenges 2. Systems theory and parts-to-whole relationships 3. Cooperation, conflict, and the social organization of human activity 4. Rationality and the Janus-faced character of human reason 5. Markets, law, and moral imaginations: order theory redux 6. Main Street, Wall Street, and City Hall: exploring their entanglement 7. Civilizing processes and the social question reprised 8. Thymology, spiritedness, and the social organization of human activity 9. Rationality within systems: how time integrates subjective and objective probability 10. A portmanteau of themes in closing References Index