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The Great Ideas of the Social Sciences

What are the most important ideas ever put forward in social science?

I’m not asking what are the best ideas, so the truth of them is only obliquely relevant: a very important idea may be largely false. (I think it still must contain some germ of truth, or it would have no plausibility.) Think of it this way: if you were teaching a course called “The Great Ideas of the Social Sciences,” what would you want to make sure you included?

The list:

  • The state as the individual writ large (Plato)
  • Man is a political/social animal (Aristotle)
  • The city of God versus the city of man (Augustine)
  • What is moral for the individual may not be for the ruler (Machiavelli)
  • Invisible hand mechanisms (Hume, Smith, Ferguson)
  • Class struggle (Marx, various liberal thinkers)
  • The subconscious has a logic of its own (Freud)
  • Malthusian population theory
  • The labor theory of value (Ricardo, Marx)
  • Marginalism (Menger, Jevons, Walras)
  • Utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill, Mill)
  • Contract theory of the state (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau)
  • Sapir-Worf hypothesis
  • Socialist calculation problem (Mises, Hayek)
  • The theory of comparative advantage (Mill, Ricardo)
  • Game theory (von Neumann, Morgenstern, Schelling)
  • Languages come in families (Jones, Young, Bopp)
  • Theories of aggregate demand shortfall (Malthus, Sismondi, Keynes)
  • History as an independent mode of thought (Dilthey, Croce, Collingwood, Oakeshott)
  • Public choice theory (Buchanan, Tullock)
  • Rational choice theory (who?)
  • Equilibrium theorizing (who?)

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