Revival of purity

Proctor yet again, describing the division of political economy into separate disciplines of sociology and economics in the nineteenth century: “Social theory in the eyes of the young sociologists might strive to become scientific, but to do so it must abandon its craft or practical-political origins and restrict itself to problems of pure theory. In the second half of the nineteenth century, one begins to see something new in the social sciences. Social science treatises begin to boast of being pure in the way, two centuries earlier, natural philosophers had praised that which was new .” After listing about ten titles published in various languages between 1863 and 1920, all using the word “pure,” Proctor concludes with a quotation from CP Snow: “We prided ourselves that the science we were doing could not, in any conceivable circumstances, have any practical use.”