The social sciences, in broadly their contemporary shapes, emerged after the American and French Revolutions. They offered a variety of ways of dealing with the new postrevolutionary political situation, which enabled, and indeed obliged, human beings to create their own rules for social action and political order. It has been a part of the intellectual tradition of the social sciences from their beginnings to contribute to making the social world predictable in the face of modern uncertainties, or, in the stronger version, to reshape it according to a master plan for improvement.

The general idea of providing and using social knowledge for government and policy purposes was certainly not new. The cameral and policy sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were designed for use by an absolute ruler; the very name “statistics” reflects the fact that it was considered science for governmental purposes. The postrevolutionary situation, however, was crucially different in two respects. On the one hand, a much more radical uncertainty had been created by the commitment, even if often a reluctant one, to self-determination of the people, which appeared to limit the possibility of predictive knowledge. On the other hand, this radical openness had been accompanied by a hope for the self-organization of society and its rational individuals, so that the search for laws governing society and human actions emerged beyond – and to some extent instead of – the desire for the increase of factual knowledge of the social world.