That age of moral and political consensus in social science is dead and gone. Today there is a profound crisis of purpose in social science and related disciplines. The onset of the economic recession of the late 1970s, and the emergence in many Western societies of a self-consciously reactionary right, has had a disorienting and disorganizing effect on the sense of purpose of academic social scientists. There is no longer a clear idea of the rationale for the work that is done, over and above its utility in the pursuit of individual careers.
There are ways out of this impasse, ways that involve a scrutiny and retrieval of some elements of the social science of the period 1930-1950. It is not that the social, political and economic realities of the 1980s can be reduced to those of the 1930s and 1940s, which was not an exemplary era, for example, for ...
