Which Thinkers Will Define Our Future?
Social science today rests on a canon of works that examine the social, political, and economic makeup of the Western European world between 1450 and 1900. But which works should we use to guide us through the problems of the twenty-first century?
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BERKELEY – Several years ago, it occurred to me that social scientists today are all standing on the shoulders of giants like Niccolo Machiavelli, John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim. One thing they all have in common is that their primary focus was on the social, political, and economic makeup of the Western European world between 1450 and 1900. Which is to say, they provide an intellectual toolkit for looking at, say, the Western world of 1840, but not necessarily the Western world of 2016.