In the human sciences, debates over research methods often take on a particularly intense quality. Scholars who aim to achieve the methodological precision of their peers in the natural sciences blast their opponents for “lack of rigor.” Meanwhile, social scientists and humanists who favor more interpretive approaches to scholarship attack their adversaries for the ideological sin of “positivism.” In philosophical histories, such as those produced by Charles Taylor, the debate between the “naturalist” and “interpretivist” camps takes on an epochal significance that goes all the way back to the foundations of the “modern self” in the sixteenth century.

In his deeply researched and important book, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn, Joel Isaac aims to bring these methodological debates down from their Olympian heights by contextualizing their origins in what he calls the “Harvard Complex” – a series of interdisciplinary research groups that were devoted to the study of “scientific philosophy” at Harvard University between the 1930s and the 1960s. Part of the post-Kantian turn in epistemology that influenced many fields, including geometry, mathematics, and physics, exponents of scientific philosophy believed that they could help bridge the divide between the natural and human sciences by grounding the creation of knowledge in everyday research practices. During its heyday, the Harvard Complex boasted a who's who of twentieth-century scholars including biochemist L. J. Henderson, sociologist Talcott Parsons, behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner, analytic philosopher W. V. Quine, and historian of science Thomas Kuhn. While the Harvard ties of each of these figures have been noted in other works, one of the book's major contributions lies in the way that it convincingly links them together as part of an intellectual network.

The leading lights of the Harvard Complex achieved extraordinary prominence, but Isaac highlights the fact that they all began in fields that the university had historically marginalized. Up until the 1930s, Harvard had no independent sociology or psychology departments, and few analytic philosophers. Due to their underprofessionalized status, scholars interested in scientific philosophy took advantage of Harvard's “interstitial” forums such the Pareto Circle, the Science of Science Discussion Group, and the Society of Fellows. These meeting spaces gave researchers the opportunity both to boost their academic profile and to trade insights with peers addressing similar questions in neighboring disciplines. The intellectual network fostered by the Harvard Complex helped lead to such field-shaping developments as action theory in sociology, “operationalism” in psychology, and naturalized epistemology in philosophy.

Ultimately, Isaac concludes, the Harvard Complex was the victim of its own success. While the ambitions of scientific philosophy and the novel interdisciplinary encounters of the 1930s spurred innovation, the wartime experiences of academics in the 1940s raised unrealistic expectations. In the postwar period, the interstitial spaces so crucial to the Harvard Complex of the 1930s became professionalized and scholars failed to meet the lofty goals for “grand theory” that they had set out for themselves. The rise and fall of Harvard University's Department of Social Relations was symbolic of this trajectory. One of the most brilliant products of the Harvard Complex, philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn also played an unintentional role in undermining its intellectual underpinnings. Kuhn's famous analysis of “paradigm shifts” – which Isaac impressively frames as the apex of the Harvard Complex's decades-long focus on scientific philosophy – would become a classic among interpretivists, who used it as a stick with which to beat the “positivist” aspirations of their naturalist rivals. For these reasons (along with the intellectual fallout generated by the Vietnam War and the rise of the New Left, not discussed by Isaac), the ideas that drove the Harvard Complex were increasingly seen as hubristic, out of touch, and politically conservative.

By focussing on the actual research practices and academic jockeying of the members of the Harvard Complex, Isaac pushes back against historians who have focussed attention on the supposed “ideological project” of figures like Parsons, Skinner, and Kuhn. While other historians have viewed the Pareto Circle, for instance, as an explicit attempt to refute the Marxian radicalism brewing on campuses in the 1930s, Isaac sees less sinister attempts at building scientific philosophy and increasing the status of marginalized researchers. The ambitions of postwar behaviorists and structural functionalists were not innovations designed to support the Cold War, but instead represented continuations of long-standing traditions in a new historical context. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, far from aiming to protect elite scientists from democratic scrutiny (as suggested by historian Thomas Fuller), represents a culmination of investigations into the nature of scientific knowledge, education, and research practice long evolving in the Harvard Complex.

On the whole, Isaac is convincing. The book is a model of institutional and intellectual history. Each of the chapters comes out of deep research in archival sources and mastery of the secondary literature. Isaac has brought together several streams of thought that have been studied independently and shows how they grew out of neglected institutional networks. For all its many strengths, however, it may not be able to live up to its ambition of cooling the debate between “naturalist” and “interpretivist” camps in contemporary academia. Few readers, on either side of the methodological divide, are likely to alter their stance because of the approaches to scientific philosophy that Isaac discusses in such a learned manner. Moreover, while the book serves as a valuable antidote to the crude reductionism one sometimes associates with social-science histories inspired by the New Left, Isaac might have provided more context on the way political economy helped structure the production of knowledge in the Harvard Complex (he is most successful at doing so in the book's first chapter, which focusses on its prehistory in the nineteenth century).

These are quibbles. Working Knowledge is an ambitious, thoroughly researched, and keenly argued intervention into the history of the human sciences. While Isaac might not achieve his aim of taming the rancor of contemporary academic conflict (who could?), he has succeeded in producing an excellent book.