"The history of social science [post-Enlightenment] could actually be written in terms of the history of the search for these two kinds of laws [laws of stability or laws of motion]. Here a thumbnail sketch must suffice.
Ever since the natural sciences came forward with laws ruling the physical universe [Newton et al], thinkers on human society have set out to discover general laws that govern the social world. What economists, for once under the influence of Freud, have lately taken to calling the "physics envy" of their discipline has long been a characteristic of all the social sciences. The aspiration found the early expression in the assertion that the concept of "interest" provides a unified key to understanding and prediction of human and social behavior. This conviction was already widespread in the 17th century and carried over into the 18th, as Helvetius wrote triumphantly, "As the physical world is ruled by the laws of motion so is the moral universe ruled by the laws of interest."
The interest paradigm found its most elaborate and fruitful application in the building up of the new science of economics. Here it was used both for elucidating timeless principles underlying the basic economic processes of exchange, production, consumption, and distribution and for understanding the specific economic and social changes that were visibly at work during the second half of the 18th century.
It was Karl Marx's proudest claim...that he had "come upon the traces" of what he would call precisely "the economic law of motion of modern society."
Any proposition to the effect that human societies pass necessarily through a finite and identical number of ascending stages [laws of motion] is a close relative, on the progressive side, of what has been described as the reactionary futility thesis [laws of stability that cannot be altered by reforms].
Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991)
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