One of the seductions of "social science" has been the assumption that human life and society is as regulated and controlled as the non-human natural world. Even as we work out the "rules" that control the movement of the planets, or the mating behaviour of the fallow deer, the hope has been that similar rules-based behaviour could be discovered in the human species.
Upon discovery, these rules and relationships would enable us to make a quantum leap not just in our understanding of human history and current society, but (more importantly) would facilitate our shaping and manipulating and controlling it. Once we knew the rules about the mating habits of fallow deer, we could set things up to ensure greater fecundity--that sort of thing. The achievement of universal peace, happiness, and prosperity--that is, nirvana or salvation--lay just around the corner. Right on, you social scientists!
Now we move from the make-believe world to the real one. Here is Francis Fukuyama, commenting on Samuel Huntingdon's, Political Order in Changing Societies (Huntingdon, by the way, was a card-carrying member of social-science orthodoxy.)
"The aspiration of social science to replicate the predictability and formality of certain natural sciences is, in the end, a hopeless endeavor. Human societies, as Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and others understood, are far too complex to model at an aggregate level. Contemporary macroeconomics, despite dealing with social phenomena that are inherently quantified, is today in crisis due to its utter failure to anticipate the recent financial crisis.
"The part of social change that is the hardest to understand in a positivistic way is the moral dimension—that is, the ideas that people carry around in their heads regarding legitimacy, justice, dignity and community. The current Arab uprising was triggered by the self-immolation of an overeducated 26-year-old Tunisian vegetable seller whose cart was repeatedly confiscated by the authorities. After Mohamed Bouazizi was slapped by a policewoman when he tried to complain, he reached the end of his tether. Bouazizi’s public suicide turned into a social movement because contemporary communications technologies facilitated the growth of a new social space where middle-class people could recognize and organize around their common interests. We will probably never understand, even in retrospect, why the dry tinder of outraged dignity suddenly ignited in this fashion in December 2010 as opposed to 2009, or ten years before that, and why the conflagration spread to some Arab countries but not to others."
This does not mean that scholars like Huntingdon have nothing to teach us. What is does mean is that what they teach is of very limited utility in programming other states and nations. We believe that this is a very, very good thing. The more we understand that human affairs are inordinately complex and unpredictable, due to the fearfully complex nature of man himself, the less likely we will be presumptuously to interfere, as nations, in the affairs of others.
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