Having come of age in the same period, more comfortable with picket lines than Laffer curves, I looked forward to a change from the Whiggish rhetoric of the Reagan/Thatcher era toward a freewheeling critique of science and society. Yet this book suffers from a stodginess all its own. Most of the essays, whether dealing with the social dynamics of biology labs or the intellectual origins of physics, seem intent on grappling only with the most hoary, and to my mind the least interesting, questions of Marxist analysis: how can this or that field of study be shown to be an expression of the prevailing modes of exchange and production? How can this or that research situation be cast as a struggle between exploiters and exploited?
Fitting every situation into the Procrustean bed of a standard debating scheme seems at best tedious, at worst, self-deceiving. The editors themselves seem to admit ...
