THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF SCIENCE
volume 7
The Modern Social Sciences
Volume7ofThe Cambridge History of Scienceprovides a history of the con-
cepts, practices, institutions, and ideologies of the social sciences (including
behavioral and economic sciences) since the eighteenth century. The authors
offer 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,
religion, and the professions. The43chapters 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. The volume also
features essays examining the involvement of the social sciences in gov-
ernment, business, education, culture, and social policy. This is a broad
cultural history of social science that analyzes the participation of the social
disciplines in the making of the modern world. The contributors, world
leaders in their respective specialities, engage with current historiographical
and methodological controversies and stake out positions of their own.
Theodore M. Porter is Professor of the History of Science in the Department
of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of
The Rise of Statistical Thinking,1820–1900(1986)andTrust in Numbers: The
Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life(1995) and coauthor ofThe
Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life(1989).
Dorothy Ross is the Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor of History at Johns Hopkins
University. She is the author ofG. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet
(1972) and The Origins of American Social Science(1991) and editor of
Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences,1870–1930(1994).Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008