We Built Reality

[Jason Blakely] achieves something quite remarkable in this little book. He convincingly makes an ambitious argument which has significant implications for how we consider the role of expertise, narrative, and ideology across our societies ... I would encourage everyone interested in social policy particularly or social science generally to read this book. It will provoke fruitful thinking and open up new perspectives. * Kevin Hargaden, Doctrine and Life *
We Built Reality reads smoothly and quickly, in part, because rather than retreating into dry neutrality Blakely takes up the storyteller's mantle and offers us a curated cultural map of the created crises of our present age. * Patrick Gilger, S.J., American Magazine *
In We Built Reality, Blakely distills and applies his prior, more theoretical work into a powerful indictment of those social scientists who claim to be more "objective" and "reality-based" than work like Rosa's value-laden account of resonance. * Frank Pasquale, Brooklyn Law School, author of The Black Box Society *
Blakely's lively and impassioned prose is a revelation, popularizing critical social science. He compiles the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which we are persuaded to see ourselves, and society as a whole, as mechanical objects in need of expert guidance and manipulation, rather than as reflective agents narrating a past and imagining a better future... [his book] should be at the foundation of a new, more generous, view of our nature, destiny, and purpose. * Frank Pasquale, Church Life Journal *
Blakely's is an acute and ominous analysis of the ways in which the understandable prestige of the hard sciences in modern culture has, alas, been accompanied by an unwholesome parasitism, by which the authority of scientific method has been conscripted into the service of insidious forms of fraudulent and often destructive 'expertise. * David Bentley Hart, author of The Experience of God and The New Testament *
This book is an essential contribution and absolutely must be read widely. It explains what's wrong with attempts to explain human action and culture with reductive theories modelled after mechanistic natural science. It is not just that these explanations don't work; it is also that simplistic versions of these theories are accepted as valid self-descriptions by many. The resulting changes in self-understanding can do a lot of damage. Witness the role of the notion of 'economic man' in the financial disaster of 2008. But Blakely gives many other examples. * Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, McGill University *
We Built Reality is worth considering for its illumination of the ways in which so much ground-breaking social science ultimately leads not to a broader understanding but a narrower reimagining of humanity. * Religion & Liberty *