#2 Ross on the origins of American social science
The social sciences began in America by importing and adapting models of political economy, political science, and sociology developed in Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These were new ways of understanding the historical world, born out of a new kind of historical consciousness and shaped by the emerging contours of capitalist society. The social sciences originated in the eighteenth century in an effort to understand the character and future of modern society. Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748), Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), Condorcet’s Outline of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), and J. G. Herder's Ideas towards a Philosophy of History (1784-91) were exemplary texts of the new sciences. Premised on a decisive difference between modern society and its feudal and ancient forerunners, they envisioned social sciences that would guide modern society into the future. The effort to create social sciences was bound up with the discovery that history was a realm of human construction, propelled ever forward in time by the cumulative effects of human action, and taking new qualitative forms.
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, Cambridge 1991.
As a general introduction to the subject of its title, it is an invaluable book. Especially useful are its descriptions of how early American social scientists sometimes extended the implications of European social scientific discoveries somewhat further than European founders might have intended, not always with the most pleasant of consequences. That is a topic to return to when considering exhibits by, for example, Montesquieu or Herbert Spencer.