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Age of System:

Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science

ISBN-13: 9781421417103
Publisher: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Imprint: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
By Hunter Heyck
Price: AUD $124.00
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Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 14/11/2015
Format: Hardback 272 pages Weight: 0g
Categories: History of science [PDX]

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Before the Second World War, social scientists struggled to define and defend their disciplines. After the war, 'high modern' social scientists harnessed new resources in a quest to create a unified understanding of human behaviour and to remake the world in the image of their new model man.In Age of System, Hunter Heyck explains why social scientists shaped by encounters with the ongoing 'organizational revolution' and its revolutionary technologies of communication and control embraced a new and extremely influential perspective on science and nature, one that conceived of all things in terms of system, structure, function, organization, and process. He also explores how this emerging unified theory of human behaviour implied a troubling similarity between humans and machines, with freighted implications for individual liberty and self-direction. These social scientists trained a generation of decision-makers in schools of business and public administration, wrote the basic textbooks from which millions learned how the economy, society, polity, culture, and even the mind worked, and drafted the position papers, books, and articles that helped set the terms of public discourse in a new era of mass media, think tanks, and issue networks. Drawing on close readings of key texts and a broad survey of more than 1,800 journal articles, Heyck follows the dollars and the dreams of a generation of scholars that believed in 'the system.' He maps the broad landscape of changes in the social sciences, focusing especially intently on the ideas and practices associated with modernization theory, rational choice theory, and modelling. A highly accomplished historian, Heyck relays this complicated story with unusual clarity.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. High Modern Social Science
2. Patrons of the Revolution
3. The Magical Year 1956, Plue or Minus On
4. Producing Reason
5. Modernity and Social Change in American Social Science
6. A Model Science?
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Index

""In Age of System, Heyck has given science studies and the history of science a useful and needed book. It will be an important resource for those of us who study the history of the human sciences, and for anyone whose work is touched by the rise and fall of the ""New Deal/Cold War consensus""""

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Age of System:

Understanding the Development of Modern Social Science