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Jewett's Science, Democracy, and the University will be the more familiar text to knowledgeable historians. It is a synthetic account of some eighty years, broad swaths of the human sciences and the writings of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of subjects, from the Gilded Age and Progressive generations, to Deweyans and like-minded academics who carried Progressive values into the 1920s and 1930s, until wartime and Cold War pressures distorted or extinguished their ethical goal. In line with much previous work in intellectual history, it presents scientific democracy as a discourse or tradition, compiled largely from published texts. As in most of the historiography of American social science, both the scientific and the political aims of human scientists are central to the story and political developments play a key role in moving the narrative forward. But in substantial and subtle ways, Jewett changes the story by focusing on what he calls scientific democracy.

Jewett defines democracy simply as popular sovereignty, a bare-bones definition meant to scoop up all those who believed that the human sciences should engage the public and improve the formulation of the public will, and to exclude those for whom the primary purpose of the human sciences was to produce merely useful knowledge and to empower the experts who produce and manipulate it. By this broad definition, the concern for democracy does not need to involve interest in the mechanisms of governance or a desire to maximize democratic participation or rational deliberation so long as it anchors primarily a democratic project, rather than a merely instrumental and technical one.Footnote ³

At the same time, Jewett thickens his central category by linking it to concern for the people's “moral character, normative commitments, and discursive practices.” His scientific democrats are not oriented to public influence to gain professional authority. Having taken over the republican concern for the virtue of the people and the Protestant clergy's effort to provide ethical guidance, the Gilded Age founders of modern universities and human-science disciplines believed that science would henceforth perform their moral functions. Science fulfilled “the needs of a modern democracy” because it, like democracy, promoted the virtues of “intelligence, industry, order, obedience, community, living for others” (10, 73). In method, too, science's empiricism, open discourse, and humble spirit before the facts exemplified democratic models of conduct. Democracy was at the start and remained an ethical category more than a political one, grounded in the ethical social relations and public elevation that science would advance.

If Jewett is a lumper when it comes to this broad democratic purpose of science, he is a splitter in dealing with social science's epistemological variety. He defines “scientism” as “an epistemological and methodological approach in which investigators aim at value-neutrality by rigidly suppressing their emotions and normative commitments,” a stance that he largely limits to postwar–Cold War social science (3). He treats positivism and pragmatism as families of epistemological thinking and provides insightful accounts of the various ways his subjects understood scientific knowledge and its social implications. The analysis brings new clarity to how his subjects combined a belief in scientific objectivity with political and ethical ideals. Previous historiography has often assumed that by their subjects’ own premises those goals were incompatible and so focused on the political and professional motives that shaped their combination. Jewett persuasively teases out the logics by which scholars could believe themselves committed to both objectivity and ethical ideals.

It was the ethical economists, according to Jewett, with their intensified commitment to the collective good, who set the tone for scientific democracy through the twentieth century. He tells the story of the economists’ Gilded Age quarrel and notes the political pressures that forced them to abandon normative advocacy and instead steer their objective empirical facts and managerial roles in public policy toward helping the public effect ethical goals. Thus, as in the case of William Graham Sumner and other thinkers who limited ethical political action to conforming policy to the laissez-faire laws of nature, “something like today's value-neutral conception of science began to emerge” (81). Given the minimal definition of democracy, however, this shift is portrayed as only a tactical move that maintained the human scientists’ democratic purpose, not a substantive retreat of democratic principle.

The ally and heir of the ethical economists was John Dewey. Rightfully occupying the cover of the book, Dewey stands at the center of the scientific democracy that Jewett says dominates the Progressive-era human sciences and remains a vital ideal in the post-Progressive 1920s and 1930s. Its institutional centers were in public universities more than private, in the Midwest and upper South rather than the East, with notable urban exceptions like Dewey's Columbia University. Given the growing understanding of democracy as “a form of culture” (11), the disciplinary location of scientific democrats shifted away from economics and political science toward anthropology, history, and philosophy, with outposts in sociology, psychology, and biology.

Jewett finds the “idea of a society knit together by voluntary, scientifically informed cooperation” at the center of Progressive-era social science (117). It was the self-interest and competition in capitalism that above all had to be changed, and social institutions and culture, more than the state, that were the fulcrum of change. Even those like the ethical economists who urged state action were suspicious of its power, so that no straight line can be drawn from scientific democracy to the New Deal.

World War I marks a shift, but not as great a shift as in most previous historiography. Having believed during the Progressive era that politics were enacting their own principles, social scientists were now forced to recognize that the people were not with them. They would have to try harder. Much previous historiography has documented that trying harder meant the effort to adopt more rigorous methods modeled on the successful natural sciences. Jewett argues, however, that in content the Progressive ideal remained essentially unchanged and the epistemological divergence did not yet restructure the human sciences. Scientific democrats were able to maintain a powerful voice.

For scientific democrats, trying harder meant efforts to better reach the public and to present the social sciences as the basis for modern culture. Jewett finds this motive at work in interwar curricular and university reforms like the general education courses based in the social sciences. Jewett moves across the human sciences to link interest in the culture of democracy to Boasian anthropologists, historians of progress like James Harvey Robinson, and Deweyan philosophers. Biologists provide his most interesting new voices as they formulate the idea of emergent evolution against the reductionist positions of colleagues and in defense of free will or social cooperation.

By the 1930s, however, scientific democrats and the more objectivist programs in the human sciences were together facing mounting criticism from spokesmen for the humanities, art, and religion for promoting a mechanistic view of persons and inadequate social values. When open conflict erupted at the University of Chicago, the parameters of the debate “dramatically narrowed.” Despite their differences, these critics linked values to a Western tradition grounded in Christianity and declared science unable to speak to normative questions altogether (222). The Deweyan scientific democrats were accused of the same narrow scientism as their objectivist colleagues. In defense, scientific democrats and objectivists closed ranks. Jewett portrays this as a key moment for scientific democracy, the human sciences, and American public culture. Scientific democrats as well as many humanistic critics of science wanted to steer science to ethical goals and shared progressive political values. Instead of joining forces, however, they aligned themselves with colleagues who shared “their views on the superiority of [either] scientific or religious ways of knowing.” They missed a “historic opportunity” to come together to build progressive values and a more nuanced conception of science. “The scientific democrats would never again regain the cultural initiative” (222–3).

Jewett shows that the political context was crucial to that outcome. From the late 1930s onward, the public was faced with “practically unchallengeable” national goals—end the depression, win the war, defend America in the Cold War (225). In that context, debating goals was less important than consensus, and the success of the New Deal made liberal consensus believable. As a result, human scientists forged a “consensus liberalism” around belief in a consensual American culture orientated to cooperation and the public good. Retreating from their earlier goal of socializing American values, they took up the defense of existing American institutions. The political context drove human scientists to a defensive posture in epistemology as well. Facing Cold War pressures, many adopted a conception of science as value-neutral. If democratic values were already immanent in American culture, a value-free science that explained how they functioned necessarily supported the popular will.

Jewett emphasizes as well the cultural situation of the late 1940s and the 1950s. The immense authority of the physical sciences promoted the vision of science as objective, value-free, and detached from culture yet nonetheless, as James Bryant Conant argued, indirectly a benefactor to society. The humanities, arts, and religion—with such influential spokesmen as Reinhold Niebuhr—were believed to be the repository of the values of Western civilization, not social science. Although historians generally see the Cold War era as the peak of social-science influence in the United States, it was dwarfed, Jewett suggests, by the authority of the “two cultures” that C. P. Snow aptly named. Rejected for membership by both, the social sciences moved to solidify a value-free version of objective science and the Deweyan effort of scientific democrats had no purchase.Footnote ⁴

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Jewett thus constructs an artful narrative of the history of the human sciences in the United States. He notes that the central political thrust of American social science since the late nineteenth century has already been characterized in a number of compelling ways: as pragmatic liberalism, as American exceptionalism, as sociocultural reconstruction of the self, as the progressive transformation of liberal capitalism.Footnote ⁵ All of these political projects are well documented, of varying strength over time and across the human-science field, and more useful for some questions than for others. Jewett succeeds in making scientific democracy a category that will have to be taken into account in any comprehensive narrative, for it reminds us that the effort to reach and elevate the democratic public was an aim of American social science for a good part of its history. Quite apart from his general thesis, the scope of Jewett's book and the wide array of material it insightfully explores makes it a major work of intellectual history.

How large social science's democratic project should loom, whether it can serve as a “center of coherence” for that history, is still an open question (8). Scientific democrats, Jewett admits, were a “heterogeneous group,” engaged in an “institutionally fractured and decentralized discourse,” or “a widely shared and highly mutable sensibility” (8, 14). He suggests that we think of scientific democracy as arranged within concentric circles, with the most intense level of engagement, including Dewey, at the center, and that is an apt figure. Dewey and his allies put a lot of meat on the bare-bones conception of democracy. For them it was both normative concept and ideal; it guided social change as means and end; participation, deliberation, and inclusion mattered. In the outer circles the presence of scientific democracy was often “subterranean” or visible only in “subsidiary debates,” because its tenets “seemed uncontroversial and axiomatic to its proponents” (18). But also, I suspect, because the conception of the democratic purpose of science was thin and the level of concern residual. The project of elevating the democratic public culture that Jewett attributes, for example, to both the Progressive-era William Graham Sumner and Frantz Boas is so broad as to lose the cutting edge the Deweyans gave it.

Many critics of scientism, moreover, have not denied that social scientists retained political values and reformist purposes, but have asserted rather that those values and purposes were weakened, distanced, and belied by their more powerful scientific assumptions and ambitions.Footnote ⁶ Progressive-era social scientists make the strongest case for scientific democracy, for they saw their work as leading an aroused public opinion. Still, Jewett argues that the Progressives understood social order and professional intervention to be by-products of a society harmonized by the common values promoted by social science. For many, however, social order and scientific intervention were independent goals that diluted the democratic content of the society they envisioned.

During the interwar decades, many social scientists turned their attention away from popular movements to the cultivation of expertise. Yet even then, even if silent, Jewett claims, “most of his contemporaries understood and agreed with [Dewey]” about science's democratic responsibilities (11). Dewey “set the tone” for the close and respectful relations between experts and the public they sought (172). But that judgment either casts too wide a Deweyan net or divests Dewey and scientific democracy of their ethical substance and critical bite. In Jewett's reading, for example, William F. Ogburn urged that sociology become a value-free science, but retained the scientific democrats’ “cultural project” by hoping that his statistical analyses would turn society's reform energies toward progressive social change. But Ogburn worked to remove democratic values from the language of social science; whatever ethical content his studies contained was surreptitiously conveyed and deliberately unacknowledged. If this qualifies as retaining the scientific democrats’ cultural project, then that project had become attenuated indeed.

With better cause, Jewett argues that Charles Merriam's open commitment to reform and the political process kept him in the fold of scientific democrats. But Merriam never reconciled that commitment with his simultaneous advocacy of social-science expertise and his influential promotion of objective quantitative and behavioral methods in the social sciences. If at the end of his career he registered some dismay at the value-free social science that resulted, he should not have been surprised that most social scientists, including his leading students, concluded that the best way to serve the public good was to develop effective sciences. Jewett provides an original and persuasive analysis of the external political and cultural pressures that led the social sciences into a value-neutral position in the 1940s and 1950s, but he does not take adequate account of the strength of their own scientific commitments and the weakness of their democratic cultural project. Ultimately, we cannot get over the problem of scientism without looking at democratic purposes in interaction with scientific ambitions and weighing them in conjunction with scientific ambitions.

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How to define and weigh the scientific aspirations within the human sciences is central to Joel Isaac's Working Knowledge. Isaac makes his case for a revised narrative of the social sciences by examining the mid-century academic world of Harvard University and by using historical methods developed over the last several decades in the fields of history of science and science studies. In an earlier article he proposed that social-scientific theories be understood not as “a set of doctrines” but as “forms of intellectual activity . . . historically specific and culturally defined forms of practice.”Footnote ⁷ In that light, social-science theories arise not only from other ideas but from specific subcultures, from what he calls in the book the “everyday practices and analytical toolkit” of working scientists (16). The focus on practices can be seen as another turn in the debate among historians of science as to whether the history of science should be explained by factors internal or external to science. By grounding science in its own culture, the study of practices explores the intellectual and social worlds within science itself and avoids reducing science to either dimension. For Isaac as for historians of science, the study of practices means a close examination of a localized scientific culture, composed in this case of academic activities in research and teaching along with the institutional and material conditions through which they occur.

In thinking about ideas in the human sciences as the outcome of practices, Isaac is not only importing the historiographical turn to culture of a neighboring field, but extending the insights of the people he is writing about. The neglected strand of thinking in the human sciences that he wants to restore to view is what he calls “scientific philosophy,” a style of thinking about scientific knowledge which he traces to an alternative post-Kantian tradition of epistemology. Isaac's scientific philosophers, like their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century predecessors, turned away from Kant's transcendental realm to think about scientific knowledge in the light of science's own research activities and findings. In the process, they began to think of science in terms of “pragmatic instruments” and “man-made symbolic conventions” (22, 66). Isaac's own definition of scientific theories as “forms of intellectual activity . . . historically specific and culturally defined forms of practice” is, like Kuhn's idea of paradigm, related to the same broad epistemological stream.

Isaac believes the style of thinking about scientific knowledge in terms of its own practices was widespread among human scientists in the United States during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, but reached its fullest development at mid-century Harvard. Why there and then? Harvard's deep roots in Boston society and culture produced a mixed record as pioneer and latecomer to the elements of a modern research university. During the interwar decades the people who mattered at Harvard were skeptical of specialization in general, of the social sciences in particular, and especially of sociology, anthropology, social psychology, management science, analytic philosophy, and the field of history, sociology, and philosophy of science. These studies were newer to Harvard, relegated to subordinate positions in already established departments, and mostly to “an intramural grey zone of marginal professional schools, special seminars, interfaculty discussion groups, and non-professionalized societies and teaching programs” (6). In these “interstitial,” under-institutionalized academic spaces, where their legitimacy as scientific disciplines was precarious, they needed “to justify their claim to have created scientific knowledge of human phenomena” (25).

The first expositor and most influential proponent of scientific philosophy was Lawrence J. Henderson, “the arch exponent at Harvard of what made science science” (64). A biochemist who began by generalizing the model of a physicochemical system across several fields of biology, Henderson moved into studies of human fatigue, a location in the Harvard Business School, and the territory of Harvard's beleaguered discipline of sociology. Henderson, like the other Harvard scholars who followed him, was familiar with the work of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré that pointed toward a constructivist understanding of science, but he had besides the need to reformulate his conception of science as he moved from field to field. Sociology lacked, he concluded, what sciences had, “a clear, simple, convenient, highly generalized conceptual scheme”—an abstract analytic framework through which the scientist “half-unconscious[ly], habitual[ly]” explored his domain. Henderson found in the work of the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto the conceptual scheme sociology needed: the model of an equilibrium system “previously found necessary for dynamical, thermodynamical, physiological, and economic systems” (67–8).

To this view of scientific knowledge as based in intuitively employed conceptual schemes, notably the scheme of an equilibrium system, Henderson added the case method of reasoning. His model was the medical case history and the case method of teaching pioneered at Harvard Law School and enthusiastically taken up in the Business School, a method that presumably led the student to reproduce the reasoning employed in both research and practice. Henderson's case method and his notions of conceptual schemes and systems were worked into his basic course in sociology and structured Harvard's new general education course in the history of science. Teaching in these courses, attending Henderson's seminar on “Pareto and Methods of Scientific Investigation,” and contact with the Society of Fellows he helped to found created a network of Harvard scholars for whom the focus on cases and the intuitive employment of conceptual constructs became central to their thinking about scientific knowledge.

Members of the network linked research, teaching, and epistemology in a number of different ways. Operationism was one species of scientific philosophy that flourished at Harvard, although it had begun elsewhere. The chief Harvard source was physicist Percy Bridgman and his 1927 The Logic of Modern Physics. Following what he took to be Einstein's and his own measurement practices, he argued that scientific concepts in the natural sciences were synonymous with the laboratory operations by which they were identified. The idea was welcomed by the experimental and behaviorist psychologists who felt marginalized at Harvard, E. G. Boring, S. S. Stevens, and B. F. Skinner.

When Willard Quine joined Harvard's distinguished philosophy department in 1933, he found his interest in mathematical logic and in Rudolf Carnap's logical empiricism largely ignored and found congenial company among the operationist psychologists and the Henderson-influenced Society of Fellows. Isaac argues that it was the Harvard experience that led Quine, unlike Carnap, to begin philosophical inquiry with the understanding of human knowledge provided by the empirical sciences rather than with the logic of science, and thus to see logic and linguistics as “part of the ongoing enterprise of knowledge-making in the empirical sciences” (157).

For Talcott Parsons the hallmark of science was possession of an abstract, systematic general theory. A participant in Henderson's network, he turned science's intuitive conceptual scheme into formal theory and the “disposition toward finding a general theory at work in individual cases” (161).Footnote ⁸ With other young participants who thought comprehensively about the new social sciences and chafed at their status, Parsons pushed first for a stronger joint teaching presence on the platform of “a common language for the area of social science” (165). Then wartime mobilization of the academy led social scientists to lament their lack of a theoretical framework to guide research and finally led Harvard administrators to recognize the potential usefulness of the social sciences. The outcome was the Department of Social Relations that for a time brought together sociology, anthropology, and social psychology ostensibly under the umbrella of Parsons's general theory of social action. Ultimately, as Isaac puts it, “the loose weave of the Harvard complex could not, in the end, service [the department’s] interdisciplinary ambitions” (190).

The climax of Isaac's argument, and the point at which he aims from the first page, is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. According to Isaac, Kuhn “embodied the interstitial mind in its purest form” (192). The cast of this Harvard mind, however, was reshaped during the 1930s and 1940s by the debate between externalists and internalists over the social relations of science. The debate and its political content, Isaac shows, was central to defining the “ideological position” of the history of science at Harvard and elsewhere (194). If the British Marxist J. D. Bernal and American allies on the left had sought to link science to a Marxist reading of history and turn it to the service of a social-democratic state, “the ideological imperative of anti-totalitarianism had severed [those links], at least in the United States” (200). Harvard scholars in the history of science like George Sarton and Robert Merton were important in breaking those ties, instead linking modern science to liberal society and its democratic values.

In that political context, Harvard welcomed external studies of the history of science. President James Bryant Conant, a champion of the general educational value of the history of science, saw it as a way to encourage public and governmental support of big science. Like Merton, he argued that democratic values supported science and, in turn, that science conferred benefits on society, but that science operated in a realm separate from society and by its own internal norms. Kuhn, Conant's protégé, “reworked this approach” (210).Footnote ⁹

Isaac carefully traces the genesis of Kuhn's idea of paradigm and finds that from the mid-1950s until the next-to-last iteration, Kuhn explained the scientific agreement that prevailed in “normal” science as a consensus of belief, a professional faith or ideology. Only at the end did he reject that possibility and insert instead the idea of paradigm as a model experimental practice that was learned in the process of scientific training. Science was to be understood “as a practical art embodied in concrete activities of learning and research” (3). Kuhn used Wittgenstein to support his point, but Isaac says he could have referred just as easily to Henderson or Conant on the way case-based pedagogy reproduced the pattern of scientific reasoning developed in research practice, for he made no historical study of how science was taught, relying simply on his Harvard experience. “What we see in Structure is yet another combination of pedagogy, research, and epistemology in the Harvard complex” (226). When Structure was published, however, it was received in a postpositivist context very different from that of its origins. Kuhn's critique of the positivist understanding of scientific theory was linked to Wittgenstein's heroic overcoming of positivism, and the long Harvard conversation about the constructivist character of scientific knowledge among what Isaac calls its “science-leaning” practitioners was forgotten.

* * *

Isaac's recovery of the Harvard complex and its Kuhnian outcome is a tour de force, one that clarifies recent as well as earlier twentieth-century intellectual history. The book demonstrates the power of placing epistemology at the center of discussion, giving us a sharper view of the diverse possibilities available to interwar human sciences and the major Harvard thinkers who explored them, as well as clarifying Kuhn's own conflicted position.

It is also a brief for historians’ focus on the practices embedded in local academic cultures. So powerful and self-referential an institution as Harvard, of course, can best make the local case. Historians of the human sciences have in fact paid considerable attention to the important local worlds of the University of Chicago and Columbia University, particularly to how at various times they shaped disciplinary patterns. Nor have historians been altogether oblivious to the interactions between research activities, theory building, and teaching, but Isaac shows there is much more to be found.

Teaching is probably the most neglected of these topics, a comment no doubt on its status at the research universities that historians generally deal with. Yet the importance of pedagogy to second-order thinking about the human sciences must ring true to any academic who has worked to convey the fundamentals of her field to students. Moreover, it is college and university education that puts social-science languages, and the norms those languages carry, into public circulation. That Jewett also discusses teaching in connection with the public-oriented activities of his scientific democrats during the 1920s and 1930s suggests that this area of practice may be better integrated into future historical accounts.

Refining consideration of the local context can also lead to better generalizing. If, as Isaac says, scientific philosophy was widespread in the human sciences, his analysis points the way to where else we might find it. We need not look for late-forming disciplines in “interstitial academies” to encounter human scientists in need of scientific legitimation. Virtually all the human sciences went through periods of uncertain institutionalization in the new universities and sought to explain and justify their teaching and research practices as appropriate to science. Historians might look again, for example, at what the classic 1883 volume Methods of Teaching History says about epistemological understandings, and historians of sociology will find a rich vein in the way William I. Thomas self-consciously combined research and teaching tools in developing a scientific method appropriate to his field.

Although Isaac sees the “subculture” of the local university as the most relevant domain for the human sciences, human scientists also lived and worked in wider units of culture. Disciplinary practices influenced even Harvard actors, as Isaac occasionally shows, and professional norms are at work in Jewett's narrative, though not always acknowledged. The disciplinary profession, with its standards of training, substantial control over careers, and approved techniques of social intervention, can itself be usefully understood as a subculture. As universities increasingly acceded to disciplinary norms, it became for many social scientists the more important one in determining research and teaching practices.

Both local university and discipline were in turn embedded in the public culture of the nation and here Jewett's broad political and cultural focus is most effective. He shows that by authorizing some conceptions of science over others and conferring political meanings on scientific practices and findings, public culture remained a powerful reference point even as academic disciplines increasingly professionalized. Public culture enters Isaac's Harvard world largely at one key moment, when the political culture of the 1940s and 1950s influences the new field of the history of science and the liberal parameters of Kuhn's work. Political meanings must have shaped the Harvard culture at several levels, however. Against the political reading of Henderson's Pareto Circle—Pareto was a conservative economist and has been presented as Harvard's conservative answer to the New Deal—Isaac rightly points out that the circle studied his conception of scientific knowledge, not his politics. But if it had been a Marxist writer who offered a sophisticated epistemology, could it have served the function of legitimation that these interstitial Harvard figures sought? The response to Bernal would suggest not. The patrician Boston culture that did so much to determine the institutional shape of Harvard also set limits on the political meanings that could take hold there.

If the focus on practice tends toward the local, then, it can open out to the larger professional and political worlds. If Isaac does not fully explore these possibilities, it is because he wants above all to deflect attention away from intellectual historians’ general level of epistemological analysis. His chief target is the inflated role often granted to epistemological rubrics like “positivism,” “objectivism,” “relativism,” “naturalism,” “historicism,” “scientism” in the formation of the human sciences. Such terms, he argues, have been treated as “stand-alone” ideologies, “catchall labels” that fail to capture “the diverse practices and commitments” of human scientists. Isaac does not deny that these categories have meaning; he wants “to add weight and complexity” to them, and in regard to his chosen target, “positivism,” he succeeds (7).

Isaac calls these stand-alone categories “ideologies” and it is the treatment of complex epistemological positions as ideologies that he opposes. Isaac says he found few such “purely ‘ideological’” epistemological positions at work in the Harvard complex (227). If that is the case, it would behoove us to explore if and how ideology worked in tandem with more refined epistemological judgments. Here Science, Democracy, and the American University offers striking evidence. Jewett argues that into the 1940s “the term science referred to a full-fledged way of life, not simply the body of knowledge or the set of investigative techniques that way of life had produced” (22). For scientific democrats it was a way of life grounded in an ethical commitment to science as the basis of modern democratic culture. At a key moment in his narrative, as we have seen, scientific democrats chose to abandon those who shared their political goals and to stand instead with those who, like themselves, believed in the superiority of science to religious ways of knowing. That choice was not simply an epistemological judgment, but the choice of “a full-fledged way of life.” As Jewett notes, the Deweyans had consistently overlooked epistemological differences with objectively inclined colleagues because they shared with them a similar view of Western history in which science was responsible for everything good and modern. Henderson, Harvard's arch-champion of science, pointed to the same faith when he contrasted the exact sciences to the disciplines of human relations, which were “afflicted by ‘myths’ and ‘superstition’” (59).

Jewett should also have noted that both Deweyans and the objectivists shared the belief that it was the ability of scientific knowledge to produce practical effects, to fund effective interventions in the world, that made it so important to the human sciences. When the social sciences are further developed, Dewey promised the psychologists in 1899, “we can anticipate no other outcome than increasing control in the ethical sphere” comparable to “the revolution that has taken place in the control of physical nature.”Footnote ¹⁰ For both Deweyans and objectivists, if in different ways, the “increasing control” of modern civilization that science promised was central to the project in which they were engaged.

As we know, belief in the superiority of scientific ways of knowing was part of a narrative of modernity rooted in the Enlightenment. The way of life it valorized served to stabilize the course of the rapidly changing industrial society and authorize scientific guidance. The epistemological judgments it sanctioned reciprocally legitimated and were legitimated by the narrative in which they were embedded. Together they constituted an ideology in precisely the sense Clifford Geertz defined: “a map of problematic social reality and matrix for the creation of collective conscience.”Footnote ¹¹ Isaac takes a deliberately “deflationary” approach to this ideology of modernity, he says, in order to highlight that his subjects’ understanding of scientific knowledge was not simply handed down by ideology but was formed in the course, and as part, of scientific practices (27). It is these everyday practices that explain, he believes, “the kind of intellectual and professional lives [his subjects] wished to live” (228). But the ideological beliefs on which Jewett's narrative turns were also fundamental to and entwined with the kind of research and teaching lives that the Harvard human scientists chose to live. If fully considered, ideology adds an important level of meaning to epistemological judgments, rather than subtracting from them.

If one reason for Isaac's dislike of the ideological dimension of epistemology is its tendency to substitute for nuanced epistemological analysis, another is the tendency to define ideologies as the expression of self-interested or class-based motives. As Geertz argued, however, if ideologies include such interests, they need not be exhausted by them. Both Isaac and Jewett use the term “ideology” freely in this narrower sense—in relation to the specifically professional and political programs that shape their subjects’ thinking. Indeed, for Isaac such socially based commitments are crucial. The desire of his marginal disciplines to get “on the administrative chart of Harvard University” (158) is the principal social motive at work in his story. He treats these efforts to achieve institutional or disciplinary standing matter-of-factly, however, and draws no general conclusions from them. That Kuhn casts his analysis of scientific knowledge within the centrist political space cleared by Conant and his Harvard colleagues is simply one facet of the social world within which Kuhn came to his idea of paradigm, not an occasion for comment. By normalizing such ideological effects, Isaac tacitly minimizes whatever self-interested motives or political consequences they involve.

He also objects to a blanket imputation of socially determined motives of the sort posited by Pierre Bourdieu. The institutional and professional ambitions of the Harvard scholars, he argues, were not a concerted plan but contingent, often half-conscious, responses to particular situations. That may on one level be the case, but the central place of such motives in his narrative calls for another level of explanation. Between local contingency and a blanket assumption of the search for social or cultural capital there lies a rich array of historical formations that shape actions.

Isaac's effort to distance epistemology from ideology is closely bound up with his emphasis on contingency. “Stand-alone” epistemologies are “brute” categories that deny the contingencies of history (238). The focus instead on local practices and narrow ideological domains gives fuller play to contingency. The strength of that strategy is clearly visible in his fine-grained analyses, but something does get left behind. Contingency is, after all, a matter of scale. Historical formations are themselves contingent, particular configurations of economic and social institutions, political cultures, cultural codes, discourses, and ideologies that develop and remain active within longer swaths of historical place and time. In local or microhistory, the preferred scale of studies of scientific practice, contingency is more visible, but historical structures are less visible. It is noteworthy that after several decades of emphasis on local scientific practices, historians of science are now discussing the difficulty of finding any larger patterns across the domain of science.Footnote ¹²

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Isaac and Jewett have good historical and historiographical reasons to fashion their narratives as they do, but like all significant works of history, these authors have contemporary reasons as well. Thinking of the past in terms of such historical structures as philosophical or political “-isms,” even for the purpose of critique, now appears to offer little foothold for present action. Perhaps, too, the structural understanding of history seems misconceived in the present context of unexpected cataclysmic events, shifting economic and social conditions, and a fluid sea of culture, while new areas of personal freedom alert us to the ways change can be effected by and through the world of the everyday.

Beyond such general considerations, the matter of “urgent interest” for both Isaac and Jewett is the present impass in the human sciences. For Isaac, the “crisis” is the polarized split between separate “positivist” and “interpretivist” epistemological positions (7). Historians’ critique of scientism, he argues, takes the interpretivist side and hence cannot adequately portray the quarrel.Footnote ¹³ Every historical perspective, however, opens some things to view better than others, including Isaac's mediating vision. The usefulness of Isaac's formulation to the present moment is nonetheless clear. He denies offering scientific philosophy or its epistemological orientation toward practices as a via media that can overcome the split. Instead, he offers it as evidence that, if the past was not as polarized as we think, the present bitter ideological division can be moderated. He joins “the search for strategic alliances across the ideological divide [already] underway,” awaiting “a vision of the tradition in which the affinities between a Carnap and a Kuhn might appear natural rather than exceptional” (12). Isaac signs on to a narrative-in-the-making that will allow respectful communication and cooperative enterprise across the scientific and humanistic space of the human sciences.

Jewett's narrative-in-the-making would, like Dewey, redefine science to include interpretive modes of scholarship and thereby confirm the legitimacy of scientific practices over the joint space of the natural and human sciences. Without a reconstructed conception of science, without the ability to bring to bear the resources and authority of science, the “progressive scholars and activists” who today face “a massive resurgence of theistic modes of conservatism” are left “interpretively impoverished.” At the same time, the human sciences themselves have abandoned their role as “sources of social criticism.” Jewett's concern is in the last analysis ethical and political. What matters is how science is used. Science must be embedded in “adequate frameworks of social value” (367–8). He wants to restore to the human sciences Dewey's mission of a human science dedicated to public empowerment for the public good.

Both prospective narratives would thus refashion the social sciences in ways congenial to the broader field of the human sciences, where “frameworks of social value” and communication across epistemological divides are more welcome. Isaac designates his subject the human sciences without comment, and Jewett merely notes that the term enables him to range more widely into philosophy and biology. But that choice lies at the heart of their historiographical strategies and the paths they envision for the future.

How great a transformation would be required to turn their aspiration into reality is nicely captured in a recent history of the social sciences in the United States and Western Europe from 1950 to 2000 by Roger E. Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine, two historically oriented economists. Since the 1970s the social-science disciplines have indeed become sharply divided, and within themselves fragmented, between behaviorist and interpretive varieties, economics alone having successfully pushed its minority views to the margins. What is equally striking is the extent to which the social sciences have become thoroughly interwoven into the management of society and oriented at many levels of research and teaching toward techniques of practical intervention in the world. The models and tools used in such practical activities have often shaped the theories and methods central to academic practice. While economics and psychology are now the preeminent engineering sciences, engineering approaches have deeply influenced all the social-science disciplines and their numerous problem-oriented, interdisciplinary ventures.Footnote ¹⁴

At the same time, expertise has itself become less a threat of overweening authority than a victim of democratic infiltration. The diverse band of experts the social sciences now produce appear on all sides of every issue and are thoroughly entangled in the democratic political process. If scientists and social scientists today lack authority, a good part of the responsibility lies with their inevitable involvement in the institutions, processes, and ideological valences of the society they help to manage.

All this suggests that how the playing field is defined is a matter of great importance, both in how we see the past and in how we project the future. Absorption of the social sciences into the broader range of human sciences dramatically shifts their center of gravity and will require radical rethinking. The critical social theory and respectful communication across epistemological divides of the sort that Isaac and Jewett desire and demonstrate will certainly be necessary. Their books offer the beginnings of a past usable for that task.