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7–8; George W. , Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1968), chap. 2; Sergio Moravia, La Scienza dell’uomo nel Settecento (Bari: Guis Laterza & Figli, 1970). Roy Porter, “Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 53–87, esp. pp. 73–4; also, in same volume, Gary Hatfield, “Remaking the Science of Mind: Psychology as Natural Science,” pp.

We might be tempted to frame the history of social science as a relentless process of advancing specialization, just as the history of natural science has often been conceived as a sequence of disciplinary separations from a once-unified philosophy. But such an understanding is no more satisfactory for social than for natural knowledge. Not least among its shortcomings is its privileging of the pure life of the intellect, the vita contemplativa, over the interventions and engagements of scientific life in practice.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Genres and Objects of Social Inquiry 17 convincing account of the ties between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. 2 The search for a science of politics and society meant an effort to rise above appeals to passion and ignorance. The philosophes saw it as spreading light (lumi`eres), and much of their writing was for a select audience – not of specialists, but of the enlightened. In some ways, the move to a language of social science was designed to undercut the authority of mere political will, and to replace it with something more detached and objective: simultaneously to vindicate human freedom and to subject it to standards of reason.