Constructing Cause in International Relations

ISBN: 9781107672888 出版年：2014 页码：208 Richard Ned Lebow Cambridge University Press

Social science is the ultimate Enlightenment project. Through reason it aspires to order and understand the social world, and implicitly to reorder it on the basis of this knowledge. The Enlightenment and social science alike were inspired in part by breakthroughs made by scientists in early modern Europe in understanding the physical world. The work of Galileo, Torricelli, and Newton generated the expectation that the physical world might be understood in terms of law-like statements, all of which could be unified in a larger theoretical edifice. Social science—also influenced by socio-political reflection and pre-Darwinist biology—modeled itself on this understanding of physics, which is still reflected in positivism and its various guises.