Found modern social sciences

In our second module we encounter the first great social scientist. Adam Smith began his career as a moral philosopher, an educator whose ideas, while obviously important, were not so different from those of others writing at the same time. Like so many academics, he was shy and even somewhat reclusive. But in 1776, he published his study of political economy and the ways he described the world around him shattered older assumptions and sought to redefine the role of government, the state, capital accumulation and the social order. In other words, his Wealth of Nations was as revolutionary a document as were the writings we encountered in our first chapter.

Indeed, Smith’s ideas may have been even more revolutionary. Unlike Jefferson and the other political philosophers—perhaps we can call them political scientists—we looked at in the last unit; Smith was calling for a complete remaking of the social order, the creation of a new permanent underclass and the initiation of greed as the sole determinant of a man’s actions. Stop for a moment and think about the radical departure that was. Smith was born into a century that still believed in the will of God as the single most important factor in determining the affairs of the individual in society. He was raised a Calvinist in Scotland and was a believer in the rules of predestination, the idea that God had determined a man’s place in the world and the afterlife, and an individual had no way to change that fate. He left the world having posited that there was an invisible hand—a natural force similar in its imperative nature to Newton’s laws of physics—and not an activist God that determined the shape of society and the nature of the political, social, and economic world.

His “economic laws” that he said determined the nature of society are still motivating thinkers and politicians as they debate the role of government and the possibility that change can improve the lot of the common man. Heralded in by Christopher Columbus’ great voyages and the enormous flow of gold and silver that followed them, new money, new trade routes and new ideas about freedom all lead, by the 17th century, to a world where Europe and particularly England and France, were at the center of the world stage for the first time. The new ideas lead to a new sense that Europe and Europeans were entitled to rule the world. But before they got to do that, they would need to confront the issues of freedom and servitude and the rise of capitalism. To better explain their world, these new European nabobs would need new ways to express themselves, a new language found in new disciplines, the social sciences.

Chapter 3, The Worldly Philosophers.