A GOOD CONSTITUTION: SOCIAL SCIENCE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GOETTINGEN

摘要

A Good Constitution: Social Science in Eighteenth-Century Gottingen focuses on the role played by concept of social science in the social and political thought of the Enlightenment. Most of the recent historical work which treats this theme, including books by Peter Gay, Georges Gusdorf, and Keith Baker, deals with the relationship between the development of the sciences humaines in eighteenth-century France and the prolonged institutional and political crisis of the Bourbon monarchy. Virtually nothing has been done to extend the investigation of this subject to include the history of Central Europe in the same period. This dissertation examines the links that united the social science tradition that developed at the Georgia Augusta University, Gottingen with the thought of the philosophes and analyzes the constitutionalist critique of contemporary German institutions that emerged from the work of the Gottingen school. The key figures in this intellectual movement were the physician Albrecht von Haller, statistician Gottfried Achenwall, geographer A. F. Busching, jurist J. G. Putter, historian A. L. Schlozer, and cameralist J. G. H. von Justi. Although the Gottingen professors pursued different disciplines, they also collaborated to create "a natural history of humanity" which united the methods of Newtonian science with a unique emphasis on the systematic diversity of social order resulting from the interaction of men and nature. The purpose of this interdisciplinary science of society was strictly utilitarian: to illuminate the development of civil society, the relationship between law and historical experience, and thus to point the way to a comprehensive program of social and political reform in the Holy Roman Empire. The professors' political sympathies were anti-absolutist. They argued that both social order and common law existed independently of the power of the state and that the proper role of government was to preserve the constitution of the nation and the liberties of the discrete communities within it. In making this argument, they translated the traditional case for the limitation of princely power within the Holy Roman Empire into the modern language of social science.