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This paper examines the relationship between the development of industrial capitalism and the development of modern social science in the United States through the writings of two of the best–known writers on social science in the late nineteenth century: Henry George, the apostle of the rights of labor and author of the classic critique of private ownership of land, Progress and Poverty; and William Graham Sumner, the arch defender of the rights of capital and author of a pioneering treatise on Folkways. The paper traces and analyzes their mutual movement away from classical political economy and toward a new social psychology in response to rising economic inequality. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has frequently emphasized modern states' use of social science to impose universalized conceptions of rationality and order upon diverse, highly localized settings. The New Deal era experiences of William M. Leiserson and David J. Saposs, however, provide an analytical alternative. As students of the pioneering labor economist John R. Commons, Leiserson and Saposs sought to create mechanisms for state oversight of industrial labor relations that recognized local practices and arrangements. Although their approach failed to take hold within the National Labor Relations Board, localized institutional and political contingencies, and not a hegemonic modernism, account best for their frustrated aspirations in the late 1930s. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]