But within post-1945 Anglo-American academic culture, more than in continental Europe, the ambition to emulate the methods of the physical sciences in the study of human beings persisted. Economics, for example, grew ever more pseudoscientific in the course of the 20th century. Before World War II, economics — the field which had replaced the older “political economy” — was contested between neoclassical economics, which sought to model the economy with the methods of physics, and the much more sensible and empirically-oriented school of institutional economics. Another name for institutional economics was the Historical School. After 1945, the institutional economics associated in the U.S. with John Kenneth Galbraith was purged from American economics faculties, in favor of the “freshwater” (Chicago) and “saltwater” (MIT) versions of mathematical economics, which focused on trying to model the economy using equations as though it were a fluid or a gas. While “physics envy” has been most pronounced and destructive in economics, pseudoscience has infected other disciplines that study human behavior as well. The very term “political science” betrays an ambition to create a study of politics and government and world politics that will be a genuine science like physics, chemistry or biology. In the late 20th century, an approach called “Rational Choice” spread through American political science departments like oak blight through a forest. The method (or, to use the ugly word preferred by pseudoscientists, the “methodology”) of Rat Choice, as this school is known to its detractors, was borrowed from pseudoscientific neoclassical economics. Culture and institutions were downplayed, in favor of attempts to explain political outcomes in terms of the strategic self-interest of rational individuals. - http://thesmartset.com/lets-abolish-social-science/