ABSTRACT
Mary O. Furner's Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science 1 treats, from an historical standpoint, a number of interrelated fields — the history of ideas, the growth of higher education, the changing relationship between scholarship and society, and the professionalization of the social sciences — a group of modern disciplines in which American theories and their applications have come to dominate Western thought. The emergence of economics, sociology and politics as distinct academic disciplines, each with its own identifiable personnel, university departments and degrees, learned society, and scholarly periodicals, is an important episode in American intellectual and cultural history, one that cannot be fully comprehended without reference to contemporary economic and social conditions. As an historian, the author naturally appreciates this fact; but as she is not an economist, her book suffers from certain limitations since economics figures more prominently than the other social sciences. 2
