ABSTRACT
A few whiffs of historical knowledge would reveal all the hilarious absurdities of such myths and send their purveyors scurrying for the cover of something more respectable. It is the more respectable, the seemingly more rational myths we must fear. These are the rationalistic, scientistic myths of modernism, and it is these that have combined with some of the most ancient myths to form the economic and political myths that call the great myths of the modernist welfare state. The most powerful myths sweeping the modernist world have all been wrapped in the mande of the social sciences. The first social-science theories wrapped in the mantle of these awe-inspiring forms of the natural sciences were known as mechanistic theories. They were predominantly subject to the same kind of certain testing by observation as most theories are in the natural sciences. They were thus easy to prove wrong by direct observation and they were by the thousands over several centuries.
