Kenneth Boulding is a highly respected economist, educator, author, and pacifist. In an essay in Frontiers in Social Thought: Essays in Honor of Kenneth E. Boulding (1976), Cynthia Earl Kerman described Boulding as "a person who grew up in the poverty-stricken 'inner city' of Liverpool, broke through the class system to achieve an excellent education, had both scientific and literary leanings, became a well-known American economist, then snapped the bonds of economics to extend his thinking into wide-ranging fields—a person who is a religious mystic and a poet as well as a social scientist."

A major recurring theme in Boulding's work is the need—and the quest—for an integrated social science, even a unified science. He does not see the disciplines of human knowledge as...