The Interregnum

Abstract

Robert Brown has recently argued that Mill

was the first person to bring the Enlightenment conception of the social sciences to a point sufficient for us fully to understand and appraise it. Subsequent elaboration has added nothing essential to his argument and removed nothing that makes a substantial difference. No one who either favours or opposes the basic claim — the claim that there are social laws just as there are physical laws, and that therefore the structure, procedure, and aims of the social sciences must resemble that of the physical sciences — is likely to have his opinion altered by considering conceptual developments after Mill. All the conceptual information necessary for concluding for, or against, the view which he advocates can be found in his writings (Brown, 1984, p. 5).

On a strict construction, emphasizing the phrase ‘physical laws’, this is perhaps true. Yet when Laplace characterized the method of the physical sciences as le Calcul, he stressed something different from law — and, as we have seen, Mill was far from having the last word on quantitative social science, precisely because the nomic conception of science fit so poorly with the developing statistical study of society. But one can give another sense to Brown’s claim: a historical rupture followed Mill, and this made him the last great defender of this tradition.