Moralizing Economics, Making the Social Scientific: From Political Economy to Social Economy in the Early NAPSS

Abstract

As sociology and social history increasingly become reflexive, there has been growing interest in interrogating and debating their basic categories of analysis. This article contributes to this debate through a close empirical study of discourses of “the social” in the early transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, particularly the association’s social economy section. “The social” was formed into a scientific category within social economy through its confrontation with the “dismal science” of political economy. Social economists insisted that all social relations were moral relations and had to be conceived and understood as such. The social only became fully scientific when it made the shift from being perceived as an empirical object of investigation to becoming a foundational explanatory category. This early contest to infuse the social with moral significance was far from being settled during the nineteenth century; rather, the question of the character of the relationship between the social and the moral has remained central to a social scientific debate that has only intensified in recent years.