Dorothy Ross - Böcker

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. Professor Ross shows how each of the social science disciplines, while developing their inherited intellectual traditions, responded to change in historical consciousness, political needs, professional structures, and the conceptions of science available to them. This is a comprehensive book, which looks 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.

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. Professor Ross shows how each of the social science disciplines, while developing their inherited intellectual traditions, responded to change in historical consciousness, political needs, professional structures, and the conceptions of science available to them. This is a comprehensive book, which looks 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.

This volume provides a history of the concepts, practices, institutions, and ideologies of social sciences (including behavioural and economic sciences) since the eighteenth century. It offers original, synthetic accounts of the historical development of social knowledge, including its philosophical assumptions, its social and intellectual organization, and its relations to science, medicine, politics, bureaucracy, philosophy, religion, and the professions. Its forty-two chapters include inquiries into the genres and traditions that formed social science, the careers of the main social disciplines (psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, history, and statistics), and international essays on social science in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It also includes essays that examine the involvement of the social sciences in government, business, education, culture, and social policy. This is a broad cultural history of social science, which analyzes from a variety of perspectives its participation in the making of the modern world.