Newton and the social sciences

An inquiry into the role of Newtonian science or the Newtonian natural philosophy in relation to the social sciences requires at the outset some careful definitions and distinctions. In the present chapter, I am concerned primarily with the social sciences as exemplified by economics and social theory, although my conclusions apply equally to other social sciences such as political science. A common fault of publications that discuss Newton in relation to the social sciences is the failure to make a distinction between some vague and usually unspecified values associated with the name of Newton (often known as “Newtonianism”) and a set of specific meanings of Newtonian science and Newtonian philosophy, including what I have called the Newtonian “style.”

For more than two centuries, the name of Newton has been invoked by natural scientists and social scientists in expressing the hope that their branch of knowledge might achieve the legitimacy with which Newton endowed rational mechanics. Thus, in the early nineteenth century, the anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier expressed the hope that his science would find “its Newton,” but he did not intend that paleontology should take the form of an extended mathematical exercise, nor even that paleontology should become quantitative. Similarly, in the mid-nineteenth century, when the American economist Roberts.