Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)
[xv] Anyone who insists on the historical importance of human actions, and who sees history not as an abstract social "process" but as the product of concrete struggles for power, finds himself at odds with the main tradition of the social sciences, which affirms the contrary principle that society runs according to laws of its own. The claim to have discovered these laws is the overriding mystification of social science, which bears the same relation to later stages of the industrial revolution that the science of political economy bore to the earlier stages. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the classical economists interpreted industrial capitalism but also provided it with an elaborate apology, which disguised the social relations peculiar to capitalism as universal principles of economics. Whereas these social relations represented the end product of a particular line of historical development in western Europe, political economy mistook them for natural laws, disguised exploitation as the natural order of things, and thus gave class rule an aura of inevitability. BothIt's hard not to be suspicious of sentences that start with,
[xvi]
in capitalist practice and in the theory in which it was mirrored, the relations between men now assumed "the fantastic shape," as Marx put it, "of relations between things."
In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the expansion of the managerial function and the growth of bureaucracy brought into being a new branch of knowledge, social science, which attempted to explain the increasingly dense, opaque network of interpersonal relations so characteristic of advanced societies. Although the social sciences' attack on the commonplace illusion of individual autonomy represented an intellectual advance, their insistence that man is wholly the product of society vitiated this advance and led to new forms of confusion. According to social science,
"According to [ENTIRE BRANCH OF KNOWLEDGE]",
but sure...
