Social science was marketed as a way to impose order on a disordered world.

Evidence

As the means of forming a modern character and thereby producing order in a world where everything was ‘in a state of disarray’, the book was written to advocate not just English methods of schooling but the teaching of a new and particular kind of knowledge: social science. Demolins, who was editor in Paris of the journal La science sociale, described social science as ‘at this moment, the single thing not scandalised by a similar disarray’. Social-scientific knowledge, he explained, was something correct and conclusive, and its very method of classification and comparison gave an order to the world. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 357

Categorization

• DEFINE: Captures the early self-understanding of social science as the method of classification and comparison that gives order to the world — useful for how the discipline conceived itself.
• DEEPTHINKING: Not quite top-tier; the self-justifying rhetoric of ‘classification and comparison gives order’ is striking but stated plainly rather than developed.