Social Knowledge

"How is scientific knowledge of social life possible? If there are social sciences, must they employ methods different from those of the natural sciences? In Social Knowledge, Paul Mattick argues that the well-known difficulties of the social sciences--in particular the predictive and explanatory failures of economics--are due not to an inherent resistance of social life to scientific explanation, but to the failure of social scientists to include their own categories of social explanation among the objects of scientific study. Looking at Marx as an anthropological theorist, Mattick compares…