The Human Sciences

Richard Olson

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.020

19 - The Human Sciences

from Part II - Disciplines

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Richard Olson

Edited by

Roy Porter

Show author details

Roy Porter: Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Historians have long seen the search for a viable “science of man [sic]” as a central feature of eighteenth-century intellectual life. David Hume’s (1711–1776) desire to be “the Newton of the moral Sciences” and his insistence in 1740 that “’tis at least worthwhile to try if the Sciences of man will not admit of the same accuracy which several parts of natural philosophy are found susceptible of” have been taken to represent the views of a huge number of intellectuals throughout the century and across all nations of Europe and North America. Moreover, the centrality of the human sciences to the Enlightenment project is acknowledged not only by those sympathetic to the goals of that project and fundamentally optimistic about its liberating consequences but also by those who have found the goals misdirected and the consequences fundamentally destructive.

The issue of how to portray the relationships between such twentieth-century professional disciplines as anthropology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, psychology, or sociology and various eighteenth-century attempts to establish human sciences is both extremely complex and a matter of intense debate. Eighteenth-century authors and readers often thought in terms of categories that differ from those in use today. Thus, for example, the phrases “the natural history of man” and “philosophical history” were frequently used to include many topics now included in anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, along with some that now belong to political science and aesthetics. At the same time, “anthropology” was used in German speaking regions to cover physiology as well as topics from the first three twentieth-century disciplines.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 436 - 462

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521572439.020 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972)Google Scholar

Baker, Keith Michael, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), Appendix A.Google Scholar

Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), especially chaps. 3 and 7.Google Scholar

Bitterli, Urs, Die “Wilden” und die “Zivilisierten”: Grundzuge einer Geistes-und Kulturgeschichte der europaisch uberseeischen Begeg-nung (Munich, 1976).Google Scholar

Blumenbach, , The Anthropological Treatises of Blumenbach, ed. Bendyshe, Thomas (London: Lon-man, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865).CrossRef Google Scholar

Bodin, Jean, The Six Bookes of the Commonweal, ed. McRae, Kenneth D. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).Google Scholar

Bowler, Paul, “John Millar, The Four-Stage Theory, and Women’s Position in Society,” History of Political Economy, 16 (1984).Google Scholar

Brandon, William, New Worlds for Old: Reports fom the New World and their Effect on the Development of Social Thought in Europe, 1500–1800 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

Buck, Peter, “People Who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century,” Isis, 73 (1982).CrossRef Google Scholar

Buffon, , Buffon: De l’homme, ed. Duchet, Michelle (Paris: Maspero, 1971).Google Scholar

Cassirer, Ernst, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964, from 1933 German original)Google Scholar

Condorcet, Anne Marie, “On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship,” in Condorcet, Selected Writings, ed. Baker, Keith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1976).Google Scholar

Crocker, Lester, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959)Google Scholar

D’Alembert, formulation of this principle, repeated in his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, translated and with an introduction by Schwab, Richard (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963)Google Scholar

de Condillac, Etienne Bonnet, Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac, ed. Le Roy, Georges, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947–51), 1.Google Scholar

de Condillac, Etienne, La Logique, trans. Albury, W. R. (New York: Abaris Books, 1980, from 1778 original).Google Scholar

de la Rivière, Mercier, L’ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (1767), cited in , Terence Hutchison, Before Adam Smith: The Emergence of Political Economy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).Google Scholar

Ferguson, Adam, An Essay On The History of Civil Society, ed. Forbes, Duncan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (London: Transaction Books, 1980 reprint of 1767 original).Google Scholar

Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon, 1965).Google Scholar

Foucault, , The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970).Google Scholar

Fox, C., Porter, R., and Wokler, R. (eds.), Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).CrossRef Google Scholar

Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1966–9).Google Scholar

Graham, Loren, Lepenies, Wolf, and Weingart, Peter (eds.), The Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983).CrossRef Google Scholar

Graunt, John, Natural and Political Observations … Made Upon the Bills of Mortality, ed. Wilcox, Walter (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939, from 1662 original).Google Scholar

Halley, Edmund, “An Estimate of the Degrees of Mortality Drawn from Curious Tables of Births and Funerals at the City of Breslau, with an Attempt to Ascertain the Price of Annuities upon Lives,” Philosophical Translations of the Royal Society in London, 17 (1693).Google Scholar

Hartley, David, Observations On Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (London: Thomas Tegg and Son, 1834, 6th ed.; 1st ed., 1749).Google Scholar

Helvétius, Claude Adrien, A Treatise on Man, trans. Hooper, W. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969).Google Scholar

Hjet, August Johannes, Det svenska tabrlltrerkets uppokomst, organisation och tidigare verk samhet (Helsingfors: O. W. Backmann, 1900).Google Scholar

Hume, David, An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature (London, 1740).Google Scholar

Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited with an introduction by Mossner, Ernest C. (New York: Penguin, 1969, from 1739 original).Google Scholar

Hutchison, Terence, Before Adam Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).Google Scholar

Kelley, Donald R., The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), passim.CrossRef Google Scholar

Kramnick, Isaac, “Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism,” Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 15ff.CrossRef Google Scholar

Lehman, William C., John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801 (Cambridge University Press, 1960).Google Scholar

Lehman, William C., John Millar of Glasgow: 1735–1801: His Life and Thought and His Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1961)Google Scholar

Lowood, Henry, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Forestry Management in Germany,” in Heilbron, J. L. and Rider, Robin E. (eds.), The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).Google Scholar

Macaulay, Catherine, Letters on Education (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974, reprinted from 1790 London original).Google Scholar

Marshall, P. J. and Williams, Glyndwr, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar

Meek, Ronald, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

Michelle, Duchet, Anthropologie et Histoire au siècle des lumiérs: Buffon, Voltaire, Helvétius, Diderot (Paris: François Maspero, 1971)Google Scholar

Millar, John, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779 ed.)Google Scholar

Montesquieu, , The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Nugent, Thomas, 2 vols. in 1 (New York: Hafner, 1949), vol. 1.Google Scholar

Moore, James and Silverthorne, Michael, “Gershom Carmichael and the Natural Jurisprudence Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Scotland,” in Hont, Istvan and Ignatieff, Michael (eds.), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

Moravia, Sergio, “The Enlightenment and the Sciences of Man,” History of Science, 17 (1980).Google Scholar

Reil, Peter, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).Google Scholar

Richards, Graham, Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas, 1600–1850 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Masters, Roger D. (New York: St. Martins, 1964).Google Scholar

Sheehan, B. W., Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge University Press, 1980), chap. 1.Google Scholar

Smith, Adam, Lectures on Jurisprudence, eds. Meek, R. L. et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).Google Scholar

Smith, D. W., Helvétius: A Study in Persecution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

Smith, Roger, “Does the History of Psychology Have a Subject?” History of the Human Sciences, 1 (1988)CrossRef Google Scholar

Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), especially note 2.Google Scholar

Book contents

19 - The Human Sciences

Summary

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive