This course seeks to explore the relationship between the emergence of 'modernity' and the invention of 'social science.' In the course of analyzing the ‘transition from tradition to modernity,' Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Max Weber, W.E.B. Du Bois and Sigmund Freud, perhaps more than any other single set of thinkers, were responsible for instituting the modern academic disciplines of Economics, Feminism, Politics, Radical Criticism, Sociology, Black Studies and Psychoanalysis, respectively. The disciplines these thinkers established along with the different narratives that we now associate with each of them were not just a mirror-like, ‘objective’ reflection of modernity; instead they were constitutive of it and as such contributed greatly to giving contoured shape and recognizable form to our own daily practices and forms of life. In addition to analyzing the nature of modern life and defining the intellectual core of each academic discipline, the writings of these six thinkers have inspired some of the most insightful scholars who have sought to understand the current moment: ’‘post-modernity." Comparing and contrasting the writings of these modern and post-modern thinkers might alert us to the centuries-long intellectual and ethico-political conversations among successive generations of scholars that have enriched and renewed the social sciences and provided all of us a way of making sense of the world and our place in it. **Students must register for both the lecture and discussion section of this course.** [This ULEC is in category 2, Introductions to Social Research.]