What are the most important ideas ever put forward in social science?
I’m not asking what are the best ideas, so the truth of them is only obliquely relevant: a very important idea may be largely false. (I think it still must contain some germ of truth, or it would have no plausibility.) Think of it this way: if you were teaching a course called “The Great Ideas of the Social Sciences,” what would you want to make sure you included?
- The state as the individual writ large (Plato)
- Man is a political/social animal (Aristotle)
- The city of God versus the city of man (Augustine)
- What is moral for the individual may not be for the ruler (Machiavelli)
- Invisible hand mechanisms (Hume, Smith, Ferguson)
- Class struggle (Marx, various liberal thinkers)
- The subconscious has a logic of its own (Freud)
- Malthusian population theory
- The labor theory of value (Ricardo, Marx)
- Marginalism (Menger, Jevons, Walras)
- Utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill, Mill)
- Contract theory of the state (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau)
- Sapir-Worf hypothesis
- Socialist calculation problem (Mises, Hayek)
- The theory of comparative advantage (Mill, Ricardo)
- Game theory (von Neumann, Morgenstern, Schelling)
- Languages come in families (Jones, Young, Bopp)
- Theories of aggregate demand shortfall (Malthus, Sismondi, Keynes)
- History as an independent mode of thought (Dilthey, Croce, Collingwood, Oakeshott)
- Public choice theory (Buchanan, Tullock)
- Rational choice theory (who?)
- Equilibrium theorizing (who?)