ABSTRACT
We began with the intention of jogging collective memory. Partly to this end, a case history of the international social scientific venture based at and clustered around Unesco was presented in an analytical way to highlight its successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses. The motivations and behavior of important individual and collective participants over forty years was sketched. Attention has been given throughout to the influence of ideology as well as to the consequences of the institutional setting in which the venture was embedded. In this concluding section we propose to address two broad questions. First, who still cares about international social science? Second, how can such a venture, now that it seems to have been derailed, be brought back on its tracks?
