About the Book

'This is a brave and interesting little book. It may turn out to be a very important one. For it is far and away the liveliest and most cogent of the responses yet made to that staid official judgement of some years ago, that political philosophy must now be presumed dead'- TLS (of the first edition)
The problems dealt with in The Idea of a Social Science are philosophical. It is an attempt to locate the social studies, considered as a single group, on the intellectual map, with special attention to the relations of the group to philosophy on the one hand and the natural sciences on the other.
The author holds that the relation between the social studies and philosophy is commonly misunderstood because of certain fashionable misconceptions about the nature of philosophy, and because of an incorrect assessment of the significance of some of Wittgenstein's contributions. He discusses the influence of the natural sciences on our conception of the social studies and examines some of the most influential ideas of J.S. Mill, Pareto and Max Weber.
Professor Winch has written a new preface to this new edition, in which he surveys the responses it has received in the thirty years since it was first published.