This volume provides a history of the concepts, practices, institutions, and ideologies of social sciences (including behavioural and economic sciences) since the eighteenth century. It offers original, synthetic accounts of the historical development of social knowledge, including its philosophical assumptions, its social and intellectual organization, and its relations to science, medicine, politics, bureaucracy, philosophy, religion, and the professions. Its forty-two chapters include inquiries into the genres and traditions that formed social science, the careers of the main social disciplines (psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, geography, history, and statistics), and international essays on social science in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It also includes essays that examine the involvement of the social sciences in government, business, education, culture, and social policy. This is a broad cultural history of social science, which analyzes from a variety of perspectives its participation in the making of the modern world.

Contributors: Theodore M. Porter, Dorothy Ross, Johan Heilbron, Stephen Turner, Antoine Picon, Eileen Yeo, Harry Liebersohn, Johnson Kent Wright, Jan Goldstein, Keith Tribe, Margaret Schabas, Terrell Carver, Mitchell Ash, Mary Morgan, James Farr, Robert Bannister, Adam Kuper, Marie-Claire Robic, Jacques Revel, Andrew Barshay, Jorge Balan, Jaromir Janousek, Irina Sirotkina, Alain Roussillon, Owen Sichone, Partha Chatterjee, Bettina Gransow, Peter Wagner, Alain Desrosieres, Peter Miller, Susan Herbst, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Julie Reuben, John Carson, Ellen Herman, Elizabeth Lunbeck, Rosalind Rosenberg, Elazar Barkan, David Hollinger, Michael Latham.