Organizing his work thematically to explore important ideas and trends that have influenced the social sciences since World War II, Daniel Bell charts the rise and fall of major developments in the field and presents a comprehensive survey of the progress of the social sciences over this thirty-five year period. Bell discusses such major advances as the emergence of sotiobiology as an effort to unify social behavior through genetically-based parameters, structuralism, the multiplicity of new paradigms in macroeconomics, and schools of neo-Marxism. Parts I and II of The Social Sciences Since the Second World War originally appeared as yearly installments in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Ideas Today series and are combined for the first time in book form. Dr. Bell has added an introductory essay that reviews the time frame and details his rationale for focusing on specific disciplines. His emphasis throughout is on those synoptic efforts geared at providing a systematic body of theory that set forth some coherent statement about human behavior or social structure. The book concludes with a discussion of the viability of formulating a unified viewof knowledge through the unity of science.

A collection of fourteen essays in which Professor Postan draws together for the first time his contributions to the debate on historical method, and discusses from a variety of different angles, the inter-relation of history and the social sciences. After making, in his first three essays, a direct statement of his point of view, the author deals with two main aspects of the subject: time sequences and theoretical relevance of facts. He then proceeds to exemplify his point of view more particularly with relation to macro-economics and to certain specific issues within economic history as well as to economic history in general. In the final two chapters, one is on Karl Marx, the other on Hugh Gaitskell, he seeks to describe the intellectual climate in which the debate on methodology was held and in which his opinions on the subject were formed. The essays contained in this book will be of interest to all those involved in the social sciences, economics and history, as well as to those specifically concerned with historical methodology.