The Origins of British ‘Social Science’: Political Economy, Natural Science and Statistics, 1830–1835

Abstract

The history of ‘sociology’ as it has been written in the last generation is largely a history of fictions. It is characterized by the various mythologies that Skinner isolated in 1969 in his attempt ‘to uncover the extent to which the current historical study of ethical, political, religious and other such ideas is contaminated by the unconscious application of paradigms whose familiarity to the historian disguises an essential inapplicability to the past’. In a now familiar argument - that to Construct a truly ‘historical’ history of ideas we must concentrate on the actual intentions of historical agents, setting those intentions within their wider social, and, above all, linguistic context – Skinner anatomized the varieties of intellectual disfiguration to such an enterprise: the ‘mythology of doctrines’ where ‘the historian issetby the expectation that each classic writer (in the history, say, of ethical or political ideas) will be found to enunciate some doctrine on each of the topics regarded as constitutive of his subject’; the ‘mythology of coherence’, which substitutes a spurious unity and homogeneity for the fragments of an agent’s thought; the ‘mythology’ of prolepsis’ by which the actions of an historical agent are invested with retrospective significance unacknowledged in the actual intentions of the agent at the time; and the ‘mythology of parochialism’ where ‘the historian may conceptualize an argument in such a way that its alien elements are dissolved into an apparent but misleading familiarity’.