Yes and no... I think you're treading on shaky ground here. It is, of course, true that the hard sciences use linguistic terms and possibly even metaphors derived from the Western legal systems of old - any anthropologist will tell you that; every society establishes The Law before it creates its own notions of natural laws. However, the structures in which these metaphors are deployed is significantly different from legal structures.
What occurs when science matures is an epistemological break (appealing to Bachelard's use of that term before Althusser bastardised it, like everything else he touched). To put it rather crudely: a legal system operates qualitatively and remains open to hermeneutic interpretations and arbitrary modifications. Science, when it reaches a certain point, requires its theories to operate in a predominantly quantitative manner - its laws become more rigid, more fixed. Put simply: I can argue over legal distinctions with a judge with a significant amount of wriggle room - try doing that regarding the second law of thermodynamics with a physicist or an engineer and see how far you get.
Hard sciences have an entirely different framework and structure than the social sciences. These frameworks have been built up by painstaking experimentation and mathematical argument. The social sciences have not - in fact they tend not to allow for either of these. This is why Mirowski rightly objects to the arbitrary importation of physics metaphors into a discipline like economics.
>
> "It is a reasoning that seems to project onto society the idea that
> this society obeys laws similar to those of (19th century) energy
> physics and, more recently, the internal workings of a computer. If
> these problems are real then how do we avoid engaging in this kind of
> reasoning? "
>
> The hard science notion that energy follows laws is a metaphor
> borrowed from law, which is something of a "soft" science.
>
Dealt with above - but just to point out: the Law is not a soft science. The Law - whether in its totemic or its Western Liberal guise - is far more primitive than anything we refer to as "science" be it hard or soft. The Law is a fundamental given that seems to arise with language acquisition - it literally structures the way humans perceive their world (the best book on this is, in my opinion, "Purity and Danger" by Mary Douglas - although the classic work was done by Levi-Strauss).
>
> ^^^^
> CB: As to Marxists treating economics as a hard science, Marx does
> famously claim (see passage quoted infra) that economics ( political
> economy) can be rendered as precisely as natural science. However,
> Marx does not consider the laws of political economy to be the actual
> laws of physics, but a different set of "hard" laws. In the language
> of epistemology, Marx does not hold the position that political
> economy can be _reduced_ to physics. I believe a social physicist
> would say poltical economy can be reduced to physics. Also, Marx of
> course claims there are different group of "laws" in political economy
> than the ones modern day economists advocate. I believe you indicate
> Mirowski criticizes the modern economists as social physcists.
>
I assume that you are not familiar with Mirowski's work. He argues that economists unconsciously deploy physics metaphors and do so by tearing them out of context. Marx's value theories - just like Smith's and Ricardo's - do this as well. Even Marx's philosophy reeks of this stuff - see his comments on the conversion of quantity into quality; these sorts of statements are purely tautological - they assume that everything can be quantified, yet provide no such examples. A similar move is undertaken by neo-classical economics when they claim to be able to quantify human desire (theory of marginal utility) - both attempts are farcical and ridiculous.
>
> Also , Engels claims (below quoted) that the difference between what
> today is termed natural and social sciences is that the former has no
> agents with conscious aims, but the latter does. .
>
>
That's a proper can of worms he's cracking open there. We're into the murky
terrain of free-will here. Do humans have free will or can their behaviors
be measured through scientific... blablabla.
Incidentally, Engels is just plain wrong about this. The natural sciences are undertaken by conscious agents. As we all know from the theory of relativity these conscious agents' positions in space and time must be taken into account for natural laws to be properly discernable. People in Engels' time - arguably from a quasi-religious impulse - believed, wrongly, that there was some "other place" where absolute and objective laws existed independent of man; this no longer seems to be the case - God's been dead for a while now!