The large question looming over this series of lectures by Lisa Anderson is the perennial problem of the relationship between social inquiry and political practice. Her engagement with this issue takes the explicit form of parsing the political—and specifically the public policy—aspirations, achievements, and failures of American academic social science from its founding in the late nineteenth century to the present. None of this is new territory, and Anderson's debt to the historical and analytical work of many (for her, mostly contemporary) scholars is both obvious and readily acknowledged (p. x). However, it is not really Anderson's intent to make a contribution to the historical or philosophical literature; rather, this is an argument with a definitively presentist goal, namely, understanding the conditions that define (as the title of her book intimates) what it means to be committed to a public role for scholarship and scholars today.

Anderson takes the promotion of the “public” or “common” good to be the constitutive end of bringing together social science and public policy, and for her, the story of how the academic social sciences have tried to meet this challenge turns on the ways that social scientists relate to “the state,” how they understand their “science,” and how their “liberalism” has informed (sometimes explicitly, but mostly implicitly) their inquiries. These themes ground her narrative reconstruction of four crucial moments in the genesis of our present condition: the late nineteenth-century founding of the social sciences “on behalf of, but outside, the public sector” (p. 41) in the modern research university; the mid-twentieth-century “mobilization” of social science by the state; the “retreat” of the social science community back “into the university and their disciplines” (p. 31) prompted by reactions (beginning in the 1960s) to state and academic complicity; and, finally, the “democratization of social research” that has followed on “the retreat of the state and the marketization of public policy that marked the last several decades of the twentieth century” (p. 76).

Anderson's account of the first three of these developments (in Chapter 2) is rather tenuous, and historians of the social sciences will find some of her central interpretive claims misleading, and others anachronistic. For example, her suggestion that the founders of the social science disciplines had “an abiding affinity with liberalism in their questioning of authority, … celebration of the individual, … [and] skepticism about (not to say hostility toward) the state” (p. 41) simply does not square with the work of historians of the social sciences (most notably John Gunnell and James Farr) showing that these—especially political science—were disciplines explicitly about and specifically intended to engage the public good through “the state.” Moreover, the attribution of “liberal” values to various disciplinary founders would be difficult to sustain on a careful reading of the literature at the turn of the century; even Dorothy Ross—whom Anderson frequently cites as a historical authority—offered a carefully qualified and subtle account of the “liberalism” of early social scientists, and for her, the “republican” character of their ideals was more important in explaining their reformist impulses.

Other historiographical and conceptual quibbles could also be cited, but doing so would miss the point of Anderson's analysis. In a sense, these disputes and their resolution are not essential to Anderson's most provocative and suggestive insights. These are found in Chapters 3 (“A Marketplace of Ideas”) and 4 (“Wars and Webs”), where Anderson sketches a potentially compelling account of how the triumph of “marketization” and the “privatization” of public power and decision making in the post–Cold War period, and more recently, the once obscure but now ubiquitous “twin” of privatization, globalization, has radically altered the terms of consideration for those who still have “a self conscious commitment to a vision of moral responsibility for the common good” (p. 110).

At the root of these changes is the decline of “the state's monopoly on the definition of the public good … in favor of alternative locations of authority and innovation around the world” (p. 104). For the academic social sciences, this has had a number of profound effects. Anderson is keenly aware of and sympathetic to criticisms of academic complicity in the excess of state power, but today she espies an even more problematic development: The supplanting of the state by private entities, and the appropriation of long-cultivated and now publicly influential social scientific claims to authority, which underwrote a “proliferation” of institutions that use the methods and techniques of academic inquiry, but without the norms of shared, skeptical, disinterested, and generalizable knowledge that defines what Anderson (following Robert Merton) calls “the ethos of modern science” (p. 60). In a word, this is social science without any meaningful public accountability.

Similarly, Anderson urges attention to the ways that globalization has exacerbated these challenges to the unique status of the university in liberal societies and the very meaning of knowledge itself. For all of its liberal bias, uncritically embraced institutional props, and pretensions to universal applicability—points of criticism Anderson also readily acknowledges—the ideals and norms of academic social inquiry make it worth defending, albeit critically, especially given the present context. As she frames the issues, academic social inquiry can play an important role at a time when many states and other powerful entities are hostile to liberal skepticism and openness, when many societies will not or cannot secure the institutional props for sustaining unfettered inquiry, and when particularism and localism have become covers for privileging “knowledge” based on “religious revelation, personal intuition, family history, or household networks” (pp. 88–89).

Anderson's concluding remarks are disappointingly thin, reduced as they are to platitudes about the need “for universities to construct and protect arenas for debate, dissent, and dispute” (p. 108), and for social scientists to pay attention to the ends of power (p. 109). Nonetheless, there is no denying that Anderson's reconstruction of the challenges that privatization, marketization, and globalization present to academic social inquiry today will provoke attentive readers to think very carefully about the public place of higher learning—and their own inquiries—tomorrow.