Richard Weaver (author of the canonical 1949 text, Ideas Have Consequences) writing about social science in 1956:
Those Congressmen who are reported to have confused social science with socialism may not have been so dumb after all. They had the right intuitive perception, even if they got the academic distinctions a little confused. A thing is defined partly by its tendency, and the tendency of scientistic social science, from Comte down to our own day, has been toward political and economic collectivism. . .
[Social science] is usually a concoction of dubious abstractions about human nature and wishful thinking about the structure of reality, with a dash of political ideology from the left. . . The more social scientists proclaim their imminent control of affairs, the more the world bucks, heaves and reels. That is because, the more one assures himself that he has a complete rational control of his environment, the more he diminishes his actual capacity for dealing with it.
