Working Knowledge

Joel Isaac’s Working Knowledge is intellectual history at its best. Isaac’s subject is the development of several of the human sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, history of science) at Harvard University between 1920 and 1960. But as Isaac makes clear, this is more than a story of disciplinary expansion; as the social sciences took root at America’s most prestigious university, so did a distinctive view of the epistemological underpinnings of social-scientific inquiry. Given both the centrality of Harvard in the twentieth-century academic world and the importance of many of the figures at the center of this shift—James Bryant Conant, Thomas Kuhn, Talcott Parsons, W. V. Quine, and B. F. Skinner, among others—Working Knowledge is a local study of broad implication and interest. -- Robert Westbrook * Bookforum *
Unlike physics, chemistry and biology, which took on their modern forms in the nineteenth century, the social sciences coalesced only during the twentieth. The tale of their consolidation, rise and subsequent slide is often narrated as a clash of ideologies: scientific versus humanistic. In Working Knowledge, historian Joel Isaac reveals how institutional circumstances shaped the field. He does so by putting its pioneers, including sociologist Robert K. Merton, psychologist B. F. Skinner and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn back into the contexts in which they learned their crafts. He explores Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where each spent formative periods. Isaac documents brilliantly how they made their ways on the margins of departments. Elders of the university aimed to restrict specialization, so rising fields such as psychology and sociology were pursued in informal, interdisciplinary groups. Isaac’s elegant study shows how debates over method spring from efforts to embed new types of inquiry in the classroom. -- David Kaiser * Nature *
A masterful account of how the human sciences flourished at Harvard and providing an explanation as to why, Working Knowledge not only looks back at the past but provides a blueprint forward of how we can add to the knowledge to the human sciences. -- Lee Trepanier * VoegelinView *
Isaac presents a far-ranging, groundbreaking, cogent, and intellectually stimulating account of the making of the ‘human sciences’ during the middle years of the 20th century. The work exemplifies the best traditions of the history, philosophy, and social studies of the social sciences and humanities. -- M. Oromaner * Choice *
A major breakthrough in American intellectual history, Working Knowledge illustrates the great value of the study of past debates to the future of the human sciences. A brilliant historian of twentieth-century American philosophy, Joel Isaac has written a literate and erudite work that is sure to be a classic. Those who read it will find their understanding of American intellectual life transformed. -- Samuel Moyn, Columbia University
Joel Isaac deftly balances contextualist intellectual history with science studies and the sociology of knowledge in this bracing account of the human sciences. Examining crucial incubators (the Pareto Circle, the Society of Fellows), tools (the case method, operationalism, behaviorism, logical empiricism), and pioneers (Talcott Parsons, B. F. Skinner, W. V. O. Quine, T. S. Kuhn, among many others), Isaac masterfully illuminates the practices engineered in Harvard’s ‘interstitial academy.’ All historians and social scientists—even those allergic to positivism—will find in Working Knowledge a feast for the mind. -- James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
This is the forgotten story of how collaborative projects for teaching and research changed the face of American social sciences forever. Isaac’s novel and brilliantly argued account of how Kuhn’s radical Structure of Scientific Revolutions matured in this matrix will be news to almost every reader. -- Ian Hacking, University of Toronto