ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the following myths purveyed by the social sciences: that these sciences are young; that the various disciplines represent a rational and systematic division of scientific labor; that the national society can be considered as a community or system in homeostatic equilibrium. The crudity of classical economics was essential to its task, namely that of characterizing the operations of an institutional system based upon partial or degraded human relationships. Classical economics provides a convenient illustration: it postulates a population of "economic men", isolated individuals, motivated solely by rational economic self-interest, and completely knowledgeable about the market. Continuing in the same vein, one might describe the social sciences as behaving like adolescents in their subjugation to fad and fashion—their shift from one methodological orientation or research technique to another, because of extrinsic considerations. Sociology, anthropology, and their siblings are not the outgrowths of a systematic division of social-scientific labor, but are instead the arbitrary consequences of particular social processes.
