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The author is an outstanding authority in the social sciences, and in this book he has presented the conclusions reached after many years of study. He introduces his subject as follows: “The purpose of this essay is to discuss the use of the scientific method in understanding human behavior and the application of scientific knowledge to the management of human affairs. Such a discussion is not science either pure or applied; it is a mixture of hypothesis with philosophy and argument. It is not addressed primarily to those who are building the new social sciences. If it helps them directly, so much the better, but my more immediate purpose is to help create the kind of moral and intellectual atmosphere in which they can do their work.”
He postulates that freedom is highly beneficial and assumes that it can be achieved by applying the scientific method to thinking about human affairs. The scientific method consists, at least in part, of extracting general qualities from given situations, describing them abstractly and in making formulations about entities which are ideal or conceptual. By utilizing abstract, generalized and numerically expressed facts about individuals and organizations, progress may be made toward constructing the kind of society desired.
The titles of the chapters, namely, What is Freedom?, What is Science, The Nature of Social Change, Cultural and Social Engineering, The Entities of Social Sciences, Institutions, Education, Philosophic Basis, and The Good Society, give some indication of the spread of the field discussed, in which an attempt is made to establish a foundation for scientific thinking about human behavior by affording operational and “univocal” definitions of terms that can be utilized as entities in more accurate thinking and working in such problems. The “person” is defined operationally as a pattern of habits, as something of predictable behavior integrated by memory and with some capacity for change, while social groups are patterns