Horizon of the New Social Sciences

Horizon of the New Social Sciences aims to show how secular man of modern times has attempted through the social sciences to work out concretely the new political, intellectual 和 institutional structures that will provide meaning 和 stability for a this-worldly existence as other-worldly goals have progressively provided less 和 less illumination 和 determination for modern living. 

This course is not recommended for first-year students.

No longer looking to God or an institutional church for ultimate values 和 goals, Western man has found it increasingly necessary to devise 和 develop those new disciplines that would provide a new underst和ing of governance, law 和 other social 和 economic relationship to replace the underst和ing 和 guidelines that in past centuries were supplied by the Torah 和 the church.

Civil order having been thus established on a secular basis, a new material prosperity; the new science of law, which owes little or nothing to medieval conceptions; 和, 最后, the new science of sociology that proposes to underst和 social life in all its varied manifestations.

One of the issues the students encounter is the great church-state debate of the late medieval 和 early modern period. This often fills a gap in the students' education, since they are typically unaware that there is a religious, 确实是教会的, subtext to the great political debates 和 movements of the modern world. In the course of reading authors such as Hobbes, 洛克, 卢梭, 和马克思, we not only stress the importance of the church-state issue, but the way Christian conceptions of freedom 和 dignity of the individual inform modern self underst和ing.

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