Three curriculum materials which draw upon the social disciplines are examined to understand the manner in which individual responsibility and authority are defined. The three include American Political Behavior, Holt Secondary Social Studies Curriculum, and Investigating Man's World. Curriculum content in each is found to contain dispositions which make social relationships seem unamenable to individual control. The discipline-centered curriculum focuses upon a knowledge that moves students away from the particular and local. The "scientific structural" nature of the knowledge serves the latent function of socializing students into a knowledge which discourages connections with everyday realities. This detachment from social relationships can make those relationships less amenable to individual control and gives more power and legitimacy to those experts who interpret reality. The scientific concepts are by their nature secondary abstractions which move people away from face-to-face contacts, value dilemmas, and conflict situations. Further development of social science discipline curriculum must take into consideration these latent value orientations. (Author/DE)