The social sciences in the looking glass: studies in the production of knowledge

Introduction: Toward a Social Science of the Social Sciences

Part One. Disciplines in the Making
1. Concept-Quake: From the History of Science to the Historical Sociology of Social Science
2. Spaces of Real Possibilities: Counterfactuals and the Impact of Donors on the Social Sciences
3. The Social Life of Concepts: or, How to Study the Idea of Creativity?
4. Epistemological Crises in Legal Theory: The (Ir)Rationality of Balancing
5. The Reinvention of Sociology: Into the Trenches of Fieldwork at the Time of the Algerian Liberation War

Part Two. From the National to the Global
6. How Sociology Shaped Postwar Poland and How Stalinization Shaped Sociology
7. The Public Anthropology of Violence in India
8. Challenging Objectivity in Japan’s Long 1968
9. How Political Commitment Delineates Social Scientific Knowledge
10. Making Sense of Globalizing Social Science

Part Three. Exploring Borders and Boundaries
11. Critical Humanities and the Unsettling of the Sociological Field: Is There a French Exception?
12. Recovering Subalternity in the Humanities and Social Sciences
13. Thinking about Cognitive Scientists Thinking about Religion
14. Cooperative Primates and Competitive Primatologists: Prosociality and Polemics in a Nonhuman Social Science
15. The Rise and Rise of Posthumanism: Will It Spell the End of the Human Sciences?

In recent years, social scientists have turned their critical lens on the historical roots and contours of their disciplines, including their politics and practices, epistemologies and methods, institutionalization and professionalization, national development and colonial expansion, globalization and local contestations, and public presence and role in society. The Social Sciences in the Looking Glass offers current social scientific perspectives on this reflexive moment. Examining sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political science, legal theory, and religious studies, the volume’s contributors outline the present transformations of the social sciences, explore their connections with critical humanities, analyze the challenges of alternate paradigms, and interrogate recent endeavors to move beyond the human. Throughout, the authors, who belong to half a dozen disciplines, trace how the social sciences are thoroughly entangled in the social facts they analyze and are key to helping us understand the conditions of our world.


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