Moralizing Economics, Making the Social Scientific: From Political Economy to Social Economy in the Early NAPSS
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As sociology and social history increasingly become reflexive, there has been growing interest in interrogating and debating their basic categories of analysis. This article contributes to this debate through a close empirical study of discourses of “the social” in the early transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, particularly the association’s social economy section. “The social” was formed into a scientific category within social economy through its confrontation with the “dismal science” of political economy. Social economists insisted that all social relations were moral relations and had to be conceived and understood as such. The social only became fully scientific when it made the shift from being perceived as an empirical object of investigation to becoming a foundational explanatory category. This early contest to infuse the social with moral significance was far from being settled during the nineteenth century; rather, the question of the character of the relationship between the social and the moral has remained central to a social scientific debate that has only intensified in recent years.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".