Science and Ideology in the Policy Sciences

The purpose of this book is to examine how ideology operates—in the sense of influencing the conduct of inquiry—in the policy sciences, defined as economics, political science, and sociology. In it, Diesing critically explores all the major schools of policy-related social thought from 1930 to 1975. Richard Hartwig, in his new introduction, notes, “In 1982, Diesing published a remarkable book entitled Science and Ideology in the Policy Sciences. [It] was the best book I had read in a decade, and it related directly to all the policy sciences…. I consider this to be the most brilliant of Diesing’s books. Like all of Diesing’s works, it remains highly relevant today.”