1 - The policy orientation: legacy and promise

Summary

THE POLICY SCIENCES APPROACHING MIDDLE AGE

The social sciences came into being as part of the modernization of Western societies in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the start they were preoccupied with the far-reaching effects of the transformation of traditional societies into modern ones. Their focus was on key features of the transformation. The ‘social question’, the rationalization of the world (in German debate captured by the term ‘die Moderne’), development of the national economy, and the rise of representative institutions were crucial concerns. But the social sciences were also part of the very process of social transformation. They were meant to contribute to the amelioration of social evils and provide a basis for the rational and enlightened ordering of societal affairs. Such were the ambitions of the founding fathers of social science, and so have their emergence and evolution been perceived by later generations:

The historical transformation of social inquiry from rational speculation to empirical research occurred, as part of the general conquest of philosophy by science, in nineteenth-century Europe. This decisive turn in intellectual history accompanied the institutional transformation which gave modern society its distinctive character. The great problems of the age issued from the newly uprooted and displaced class of industrial urban workers and their families. The roots of modern social science lie in its responsiveness to the needs of modern society for empirical, quantitative, policy-relevant information about itself.

(Lerner, 1959, pp. 15, 19)