This volume consists of a lively collection of polemical essays devoted to criticizing the impact of scientific thinking on Western society, particularly through the medium of the social sciences, and to valorizing what Jason Blakely argues is a more humanistic perspective and method of inquiry. The provocative title often seems, however, to belie the actual content. The argument appears to be less that the social sciences have “infiltrated” and “created” social reality than that they have succumbed to and reinforced what Blakely claims is the “hidden underbelly of a culture of scientism” that dominates contemporary society and threatens “humanism” (p. xxviii). He is not, however, very specific about what he means by “scientism” and “humanism” and exactly how they are opposed. If “scientism” is intended to refer to a belief in the value and power of science, then it was historically closely related to the advent of humanism in Western culture. The audience for the book also seems somewhat unclear. It appears to be directed toward a quite general readership, because on the whole, the content adds little either to the academic criticisms that have already been leveled against attempts of social scientists to adopt scientific methods or to the defense of various versions of a more “hermeneutic or interpretive” form of inquiry, including that which he, and his collaborator Mark Bevir, have already extensively advocated.

In a strange way, Blakely seems to attribute to the social sciences a degree of success that they have actually failed to achieve. The avowed purpose of these meta-practices, from the point of their nineteenth-century inception, was to transform their subject matter, often by claiming the epistemic and social authority of science. The social sciences originated from moral philosophy and social reform movements, which were institutionally expressed in the formation of the American Social Science Association (1865). When the particular social sciences left this umbrella organization and created distinct professional associations located in the academy, it was in part because of a growing diversity in purpose, but also because they recognized that the authority of religion, which had originally often informed social science, was waning and that natural science, located in emerging research universities, was gaining ground as a form of social authority. It was actually economists who precipitated this move and who were the most politically radical, but the later embrace of marginal utility economic theory allowed conservative ideology to dominate the field. This was one of the factors that precipitated the 1903 formation of the American Political Science Association and its decision to pursue a more Progressive agenda. Thereafter, whatever the ideological perspective, the fundamental purpose of political science has been to affect the practice of politics, but that purpose and its promise have largely remained latent and unrequited.

Blakely is particularly concerned about the proliferation of economic reasoning, but we might ask whether economists have infiltrated society and fields such as political science or whether there are many who, for various reasons, have quite purposively subscribed to economic reasoning. Since at least the early twentieth century, many political scientists have sought to emulate what they believed were the more scientific approaches of economics and psychology. He claims that the limits of scientism were evident not only in the recent failure of many analysts to predict the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election but also more generally in the long-standing detrimental social consequences of similar mistakes typical of the form of reasoning characteristic of many professional economists. He argues that this has transformed democratic society into little more than a “free-market polis.”

Apart from his extended argument about the pervasiveness of economic models, Blakely actually offers no detailed example of how social scientists have penetrated and transformed their subject matter. In the social sciences, the perennial debate between what is now often loosely termed scientific and interpretive or quantitative and qualitative approaches has persisted since at least the early twentieth century, but it was perhaps most fully manifested during the 1960s and 1970s and again in the early years of the twenty-first century. These methodological controversies have, however, in the last few years, been superseded by the resurgence of attempts to make “social science matter” politically by, as in the case of this journal, more directly engaging concrete political and social issues. All social science is interpretive in that it addresses various autonomous forms of social life, and Blakely’s point seems to be that certain forms of interpretation are epistemologically superior and offer a more democratic way of understanding and intervening in social reality than those that claim to follow a scientific approach. There are many social and political theorists who advocate some interpretive form of social inquiry, but Blakely, at least in this book, is quite vague about exactly what this would entail. Versions of interpretive theory, such as that of Charles Taylor, have been devoted to critical accounts of social life and to achieving social transformation. But his argument, which Blakely seems to support, actually presents a somewhat elitist image of the nature and purpose of interpretation and of who is qualified to pursue it. Varieties of interpretive theory do not exhibit any uniform ideology.

It is one thing to attack the often pseudoscientific pretensions of social science, but it is quite another thing, particularly at this point in American political history, to depict work in biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and various other areas as producing dangerous visions of technocracy and “Homo machina.” There are many reasons for critically engaging these fields but perhaps not while, on the one hand, holding up as a model Heidegger’s critique of modernity and, on the other hand, embracing the conservative philosopher John Searle’s argument about the erosion of society by relativistic beliefs that undercut the authority of natural science as the arbiter of truth and reality. Blakely takes issue, for example, with the biologist Richard Dawkins for claiming that religion is a dangerous social “meme.” Differences of opinion about religion, however, have little to do with the credibility of Dawkins’s scientific argument about how the evolution of the “selfish-gene” has paradoxically given rise to the existence and dominance of social memes that, like genes, replicate themselves and may eventually not only alter the human phenotype but recursively, for better or worse, also affect the genotype.

Although Blakely offers brief caveats claiming that he is not inimical to authentic science, either social or natural, the later chapters seem increasingly to take on a quite anti-modernist character; they suggest that his basic concern is not simply with misconceived social scientific claims to scientific authority but with scientific authority itself and what he argues are the Frankensteinian motives it has supported and the “scientific violence” that it has spawned nationally and internationally.