Science and Social Reform in the Age of Reason

The idea of progress, the creation of the social sciences, and the cause of social reform became entangled with the power of reason-based natural science to reveal reality. This was coordinate with the spread of Newtonianism, an eclectic fusion of the physics of Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz. Although that physics was deterministic, the creators of the social sciences—sociology, economics, political science, and psychology—supported platforms of reason-based reforms of society, challenging authority and tradition-based social institutions that empowered the Church, monarchy, and aristocracy. A number of dramatic events reinforced the idea that scientific reasoning revealed truths about reality, which seemed to confirm the connection between Newtonian physics and reality. Meanwhile, opposition to the hegemony of reason in human affairs emerged in the form of a nascent Romantic movement whose champions, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, held that feeling and will, rather than reason, were central to human affairs.