¹ Isaac, Joel, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, MA, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jewett, Andrew, Science, Democracy, and the American University from the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dewey, John, “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy” (1909), in John Dewey, The Middle Works, ed. Boydston, Jo Ann, 15 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 4: 14Google Scholar.

² Furner, Mary, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science 1865–1905 (Lexington, 1975)Google Scholar; and the counterargument of Haskell, Thomas L., The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana, IL, 1977)Google Scholar, inaugurated this critical moment, which extended well into the 1990s. See Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar, and notes 3 and 4 below.

³ Jewett forms his broad category of democracy in part against the most tendentious accounts of the technocratic bent of the social sciences in the service of the managerial state, especially the “slightly softer version” of Jordan, John M., Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939 (Chapel Hill, 1994)Google Scholar (Jewett, 3–4 n. 3). Unlike Jewett's focus on the broader field of human sciences, however, Jordan's focus is on the disciplines of economics, sociology, and political science. The technocratic, engineering mentality of these disciplines was visible from the 1880s, he argues, and dominant by the 1920s.

⁴ Jewett's narrative directly counters Purcell, Edward A. Jr's classic The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, 1973)Google Scholar. According to Purcell, the commitment of the social sciences to naturalism and objective scientific methods began in the 1910s and gained force during the 1920s and 1930s. He casts Dewey as a genuine democrat but places greater weight on the aid and comfort his broad support of science gave to the objectivists. The Cold War consensus liberalism that declared democracy to be immanent in American culture is presented as a result of the confusion between is and ought present in Dewey's mid-1930s uniting of democratic and scientific values, not its betrayal.

⁵ Jewett cites (at 5 n. 4) Kloppenberg, James T., Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Ross, The Origins of American Social Science; Sklansky, Jeffrey, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, 2002)Google Scholar; and Brick, Howard, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁶ Purcell, Crisis of Democratic Theory, for example, argued, “Most scientific naturalists continued to believe in the desirability of democracy, and some tried to reformulate its theory,” but the thrust of their work was to “expose major weaknesses in traditional democratic theory . . . and often reject its major premises” (11). See also Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 159–71, 303–19, 290–407.

⁷ Isaac, Joel, “Tangled Loops: Theory, History, and the Human Sciences in Modern America,” Modern Intellectual History, 6/2 (2009), 397–424, esp. 399Google Scholar.

⁸ Charles Camic originally pointed historians to the influence of Henderson on Parsons's idea of systematic theory and to the importance of sociology's marginal status at Harvard. See Camic, Charles, ed., Talcott Parsons: The Early Essays (Chicago, 1991)Google Scholar, esp. Camic's Introduction, ix–lxix.

⁹ Isaac thus incorporates some of Steve Fuller's analysis of the political space occupied by Kuhn's work, but without the political implications that dominate Fuller's text. See Fuller, Steve, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (Chicago, 2000)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ John Dewey, “Psychology and Social Practice” (1899), in John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1: 150.

¹¹ Geertz, Clifford, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 193–233Google Scholar, 222.

¹² Kohler, Robert E. and Olesko, Kathryn M., eds., Clio Meets Science: The Challenge of History, Osiris, Second Series, 27 (Chicago, 2012)Google Scholar.

¹³ Isaac argues that historians’ critique of scientism tacitly buys into a philosophical narrative of the wrong turn taken by epistemology at the start of modernity, citing particularly Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989)Google Scholar. However, it is not necessary to accept the wholesale misdirection of modern science or modernity in order to critique the misapplication of objectivist methods to human affairs. I briefly discuss the possibility of a mediating Weberian solution to the split in The Origins of American Social Science, 473.

¹⁴ Backhouse, Roger E. and Fontaine, Philippe, eds., The History of the Social Sciences since 1945 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a multi-authored work partly written by the two editors and covering psychology, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and human geography.