[W]hat, then, are the most important ideas ever put forward in social science? I’m not asking what are the best ideas, so the truth of them is only obliquely relevant: a very important idea may be largely false. (I think it still must contain some germ of truth, or it would have no plausibility.) Think of it this way: if you were teaching a course called “The Great Ideas of the Social Sciences,” what would you want to make sure you included?
• The state as the individual writ large (Plato)
• Man is a political/social animal (Aristotle)
• The city of God versus the city of man (Augustine)
• What is moral for the individual may not be for the ruler (Machiavelli)
• Invisible hand mechanisms (Hume, Smith, Ferguson)
• Class struggle (Marx, various liberal thinkers)
• The subconscious has a logic of its own (Freud)
• Malthusian population theory
• The labor theory of value (Ricardo, Marx)
• Marginalism (Menger, Jevons, Walras)
• Utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill, Mill)
• Contract theory of the state (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau)
• Sapir-Worf hypothesis
• Socialist calculation problem (Mises, Hayek)
• The theory of comparative advantage (Mill, Ricardo)
• Game theory (von Neumann, Morgenstern, Schelling)
• Languages come in families (Jones, Young, Bopp)
• Theories of aggregate demand shortfall (Malthus, Sismondi, Keynes)
• History as an independent mode of thought (Dilthey, Croce, Collingwood, Oakeshott)
• Public choice theory (Buchanan, Tullock)
• Rational choice theory (who?)
• Equilibrium theorizing (who?)