Law as Social Science

Abstract

Abstract “Science” was powerfully attractive to the social scientists of the 1920s. The leftists among them had concluded that the progressive effort to educate the poor to rework capitalism had failed. Politics had given them Harding and his “return to normalcy,” the Teapot Dome scandal, and the collapse of the League of Nations. The people could not be taught to lead themselves. Walter Lippman had argued as much in his sardonic Public Opinion (1922). John Dewey came to a complementary conclusion in The Quest for Certainty (1929), claiming that people clung hardest to “eternal truths” when the times were most uncertain; their hold must be broken through scientific method. Others put the matter more strongly still-that scientific study of contemporary problems and their solution was the only sure means of social control. The new world or­ der, considered by intellectuals as diverse as Edward Bellamy and Justice Holmes, amounted to this-here, in the words of a leading social scientist of the 1920s, Charles Merriam: We are very rapidly approaching a time when it may be possible to decide not merely what types of law we wish to enact, but what types of person we wish to develop, either by the process of education or of eugenics ... to determine what sorts of creature are to be born, within important limits at least.