Enlightenment social theory is important to science, technology, and ethics because it represents one of the first venues in which human activities were widely studied from a scientific perspective, and in which utilitarian and naturalistic ethical systems were offered to replace the religiously-based deontological, or duty-oriented, ethical systems which had dominated premodern society.

One of the most frequently stated goals of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was the creation of a science of human nature and society incorporating deterministic laws of behavior to match the spectacular successes of the physical sciences. David Hume (1711–1766), for example, announced his intention to become "the Newton of the Moral sciences." But eighteenth-century social theorists did not agree on which model from the physical sciences social theories should emulate.

Generally speaking, one can identify three classes of natural scientific models for the social sciences. The first stressed the...