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Changing Social Science to Serve Human Welfare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Duncan MacRae Jr.
Duncan MacRae Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill
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Extract

The long-debated issue whether social scientists should be concerned with improving the human condition, and if so how they should attempt this task, has been raised afresh in the exchange of views between Lee Benson (1978) and Warren Miller (1978) on “Changing Social Science to Change the World.” Before plunging into this debate, however, I should like to suggest that all of us who participate in it are viewing the world from a particular occupational perspective. Some years ago, when George Lundberg’s Can Science Save Us? (1947) was current, a friend suggested to me that a prior question was, “Should science save us?” He may have meant, as Miller suggests, that saving or changing the world is not the principal task of social scientists; or in another meaning, he may have been anticipating more recent critics in noting that a world “saved” by social science might not be one in which everyone would prefer to live. I hope that our efforts will not be counter-productive.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 3 , Issue 3-4 , 1979 , pp. 227 - 241
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1979

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