ABSTRACT
This chapter explains what are probably the greatest dangers facing practitioners trying to use the social sciences. It discusses one perspective, likely to be useful to practitioners, but hardly known at all to them. The chapter concerns one of traditional fields of social thought, which is of great, current relevance to practitioners, but which has gone almost entirely out of fashion. Confronted with social science as it is today, with its complexity of theories and techniques, practitioners face a situation similar to that of Africans or Polynesians confronting Western science, technology, and law. It may be desirable to start out with some general reasons as to why and how social science may sometimes be useless or harmful to practitioners. Historically, political philosophy was one of the earliest branches of the social sciences. The current employment of the notion "culture" in social work—and elsewhere—supplies a good example of exaggeration of what is in itself a valuable intellectual approach.
