Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn ... erson, B.F. Skinner, W.V.O. Quine, T. Parsons and T. Kuhn; among the main.
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Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn Joel Isaac, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2012, £36.95, 314pp. There are a number of ways to write the history of science, or the history of the human and social sciences. In Working Knowledge, Joel Isaac mainly focuses on the organizational or institutional level. He presents a detailed historical overview of the institutional milieu at Harvard University, in which, during the middle decades of the 20th century, a number of scientific pioneers could develop their frameworks. Among the main actors in this book are L.J. Henderson, B.F. Skinner, W.V.O. Quine, T. Parsons and T. Kuhn; among the main contextual factors are interdisciplinary collaborative projects for research and teaching – or what Isaac calls the malleable forms of an ‘interstitial academy’. For Isaac, many of the intellectual concerns which could take shape in the interstitial context of the mid-20th-century ‘Harvard complex’ were linked with discipline-building processes and the formation of discrete departments (eg sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy). The first chapter provides a brief overview of the transformations which took place in the American university system and Harvard University in particular in the period of the Great Depression, World War II and the Cold War. With rather broad strokes, it sketches the intellectual culture in which the human and social sciences could develop in ways mediated by institutional reform. The book’s second chapter, which I personally found the most interesting, is largely devoted to a discussion of the cult surrounding Vilfredo Pareto’s Trattato di Sociologia Generale. Under the leadership of the biochemist L.J. Henderson, a kind of Pareto enthusiasm spread at Harvard in the 1930s. According to Isaac, leading members of the Pareto circle (among whom P. Sorokin, F. Roethlisberger, C. Kluckhohn, E. Mayo, T. Parsons, as well as R.K. Merton, K. Davis and G.C. Homans) were at that time associated with marginal, inchoate and interstitial enterprises at Harvard. But many of them were The Sociological Review, Vol. 61, 402–410 (2013) DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12025 © 2013 The Authors. The Sociological Review © 2013 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, 02148, USA.
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also, for this very reason, eager to employ Pareto’s systems schemas in such a way as to justify their claim to have created scientific knowledge of human or social phenomena. In particular, Pareto’s concept of the organized system, which tended towards equilibrium, was advanced as the most general and effective of all empirical conceptual schemes – and of use in several disciplinary contexts. Chapters 3 and 4 survey developments in psychology and philosophy respectively. Chapter 3 looks at the ‘psychological complex’ at Harvard and its many debates and conflicts (involving G.Allport, B.F. Skinner, S.S. Stevens, and so on). Chapter 4 discusses how analytical philosophy could prosper at Harvard, and how neophyte analytical philosophers like W.V.O. Quine could earn institutional recognition. The final two chapters emphasize developments in the decades after World War II. Chapter 5 is for the most part devoted to a discussion of the birth of sociology as a discrete department out of an interstitial Department of Social Relations (itself established in 1946 under the chairmanship of T. Parsons). Harvard’s DSR combined the disciplines of sociology, social psychology, clinical psychology, and cultural anthropology with the aim of creating what its leaders termed ‘basic social science’. As Isaac explains, however, the programmatic ambitions of the DSR masked its ad hoc, almost entirely circumstantial origins; it represented the promotion of an informal interstitial network to departmental status. While attempts to enhance collaboration among the different disciplines led in 1951 to the production of the so-called ‘yellow book’ – Toward a General Theory of Action (edited by T. Parsons and E. Shils) – it soon also became clear that the core senior faculty in the DSR could not agree on how to practise basic social science, either theoretically or experimentally. For Isaac, the Department failed to crystallize as a discipline and became instead a kind of interstitial academy in its own right. It limped towards dissolution at the beginning of the 1970s; by that time, Parsons’ systems-based view of the social realm had also become less attractive to a ‘critical’ post1960s generation of social scientists. In Chapter 6, Isaac turns to the genesis of the history and philosophy of science and to T. Kuhn’s early career. For Isaac, the interstitial academy provided Kuhn shelter from disciplinary monotheism. The Harvard enclave, in which ‘theory’ or ‘basic science’ could be pursued, allowed Kuhn to develop a multidisciplinary theory of science. Although Kuhn wrote and published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions at the moment that he moved to Berkeley, his theory of science was, for Isaac (and in line with what Kuhn states in the first few pages of the preface to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), the ‘ultimate product’ of the Harvard complex. His view on the social conditions of normal science reflected the conditions in the interstitial academy during his own ‘formative years’. Overall, Working Knowledge is a well-researched monograph. It is, on the one hand, based on a broad selection of the relevant primary and secondary literature, and, on the other, on substantive archival work in Harvard’s librar© 2013 The Authors. The Sociological Review © 2013 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
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ies. But some of the limitations of this study are also connected with this approach. In a self-respecting institution, such as Harvard, many organizational documents are well-archived. Of Harvard’s prominent scientists, much unpublished material is also made available in libraries and archives. Reliance on these sources brings about a certain bias. Not only can one see Merton’s Matthew effect at work here: of universities and scientists deemed important much material is kept and archived (because of their reputation), while historical research on the available archival sources further strengthens the reputation of these institutions and figures. Moreover, the ‘interstitial context’ of mid-20th century Harvard is often reduced to very few leading actors. In addition, Isaac blends out other forms of collaboration and competition in the scientific community. His focus is on the local context of Harvard; because of Harvard’s social prestige, his monograph certainly offers more than local history. But science is also made at the national and the global level. In the final chapter, for example, much attention is put on Kuhn’s (post-Harvard) work. Much less is said about Harvard’s historian of science George Sarton. Intellectually, Sarton for sure was a figure of less stature. But he was, for example, the founder and editor of the journals Isis and Osiris and the co-founder of the History of Science Society. Scientific journals and scientific conferences also allow for collaboration and competition, for the exchange of ideas and practices. The lobbying work of professional associations may also give way to the diffusion of specific organizational formats. Because of the rapid development of such platforms during the mid-20th century, local contexts became more clearly embedded in, and influenced by, national and global fields. I have no objections to a focus on the local, institutional level as such. Limitations are necessary. But a study of the ‘making of’ the human and social sciences should employ a theoretical scheme that could allow us to take different levels into account. Ghent University
Raf Vanderstraeten
Rethinking Rational Choice Theory: A Companion on Rational and Moral Action Jan de Jonge, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012, $110, 355pp. ISBN: 978-0230-27715-1 (hbk). Rational Choice Theory (RCT) has long been the dominant paradigm in microeconomics. In recent decades, however, it has become widely used in other disciplines such as political science, criminology, ethics, sociology, and anthropology. Among these new areas, RCT has been more successful in political science. There, along with feminism, it was initially received as an approach ‘with the potential to revolutionize’ it (Driscoll and Krook, 2012: 195). The origins of RCT, its assumptions, and its variants have been the focus of scholarly research for a while now. The most common charge against it has 404
© 2013 The Authors. The Sociological Review © 2013 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review
