Assesses the intellectual revolution in the social sciences. This collection of 20 essays stems from a 1997 conference that celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Social Science. It is suitable for those interested in how changing trends in scholarship shape the understanding of our social worlds.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii INTRODUCTION: Clifford Geertz School Building: A Retrospective Preface PART ONE: Blurred Genres: Reflections on Disciplinary Practices 13 CHAPTER 1: Quentin Skinner Political Theory after the Enlightenment Project 15 CHAPTER 2: Wolf Lepenies Twenty-five Years of Social Science and Social Change: A Personal Memoir 25 CHAPTER 3: Gavin Wright Economic History as a Cure for Economics 41 CHAPTER 4: Judith Butler Can the "Other" of Philosophy Speak? 52 CHAPTER 5: Renato Rosaldo Reflections on Interdisciplinarity 67 PART TWO: The State of the Art: New Methods and New Questions 83 CHAPTER 6: Joan W. Scott After History? 85 CHAPTER 7: Anna Tsing The Global Situation 104 CHAPTER 8: Charles Taylor Modernity and Identity 139 CHAPTER 9: Kaushik Basu The Role of Norms and Law in Economics: An Essay on Political Economy 154 CHAPTER 10: Peter Galison Material Culture, Theoretical Culture, and Delocalization 179 CHAPTER 11: Andrew Pickering Science as Alchemy 194 PART THREE: Thick Description: Field Overviews and Institutional History 207 CHAPTER 12: William H. Sewell, Jr. Whatever Happened to the "Social" in Social History? 209 CHAPTER 13: Nicholas B. Dirks Postcolonialism and Its Discontents: History, Anthropology, and Postcolonial Critique 227 CHAPTER 14: David E. Apter Structure, Contingency, and Choice: A Comparison of Trends and Tendencies in Political Science 252 CHAPTER 15: Mary Poovey Interdisciplinarity at New York University 288 PART FOUR: The World in Pieces: Political Philosophy and World Governance 313 CHAPTER 16: Jean Bethke Elshtain Political Theory and Moral Responsibility 315 CHAPTER 17: Jane Mansbridge A "Moral Core" Solution to the Prisoners' Dilemma 330 CHAPTER 18: Michael Rustin Reinterpreting Risk 348 CHAPTER 19: Istvan Rev Retrotopia: Critical Reason Turns Primitive 364 CHAPTER 20: Michael Walzer International Society: What Is the Best that We Can Do? 388 AUTHOR NOTES 403

"Schools of Thought is a tremendous contribution to scholarship in the broadest sense, or perhaps one should say, meta-scholarship. It is also loaded with rich, stimulating, and provocative essays by a roster of brilliant scholars. I can't think of anything quite like this book. It captures, in a many-faceted way, what has truly been a revolution in the social sciences in the past twenty-five years. It will be extremely widely read across the social sciences, and across many of the humanities as well."—Sherry B. Ortner, Columbia University

"Schools of Thought is a tremendous contribution to scholarship in the broadest sense, or perhaps one should say, meta-scholarship. It is also loaded with rich, stimulating, and provocative essays by a roster of brilliant scholars. I can't think of anything quite like this book. It captures, in a many-faceted way, what has truly been a revolution in the social sciences in the past twenty-five years. It will be extremely widely read across the social sciences, and across many of the humanities as well."—Sherry B. Ortner, Columbia University

Schools of Thought is a tremendous contribution to scholarship in the broadest sense, or perhaps one should say, meta-scholarship. It is also loaded with rich, stimulating, and provocative essays by a roster of brilliant scholars. I can't think of anything quite like this book. It captures, in a many-faceted way, what has truly been a revolution in the social sciences in the past twenty-five years. It will be extremely widely read across the social sciences, and across many of the humanities as well. -- Sherry B. Ortner, Columbia University