Social Science in Excelsis

Social science is a tent covering a wide variety of performances. Nor would it be right to say that they are all of the circus variety. Here in this collection of thirty-one papers and addresses (The State of the Social Sciences, University of Chicago Press, $6.00) one sees the new science on parade, and the differences are striking enough to be reassuring.

Contributions range all the way from the unrelieved horror of inanity and jargon of Murray Horwitz’s “Psychological Needs as a Function of Social Environments” to the subtle dialectic in which Leo Strauss reduces to absurdity the relativism embraced by many of his colleagues; from the overweening pretensions of James G. Miller’s “Toward a General Theory for the Behavioral Sciences,” with its frank dismissal of teleology, to the hard-headed questions propounded in James L. Cate’s “Humanism and the Social Sciences.”

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Richard M. Weaver

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Social science is a tent covering a wide variety of performances. Nor would it be right to say that they are all of the circus variety. Here in this collection of thirty-one papers and addresses (The State of the Social Sciences, University of Chicago Press, $6.00) one sees the new science on parade, and the differences are striking enough to be reassuring.

Contributions range all the way from the unrelieved horror of inanity and jargon of Murray Horwitz’s “Psychological Needs as a Function of Social Environments” to the subtle dialectic in which Leo Strauss reduces to absurdity the relativism embraced by many of his colleagues; from the overweening pretensions of James G. Miller’s “Toward a General Theory for the Behavioral Sciences,” with its frank dismissal of teleology, to the hard-headed questions propounded in James L. Cate’s “Humanism and the Social Sciences.”