The Dubious Guarantees of Social Science

Abstract

This is a critical response to Immanuel Wallerstein's `Social Science and Contemporary Society: The Vanishing Guarantees of Rationality' in this journal, March 1996, and his claim that social scientists, as the new `intellectual class', have the task of dissociating themselves from Liberal Instrumental Rationality in order to help `turn the world around'. First, the article questions whether Wallerstein is truly abandoning the `Enlightenment project' or actually completing Comte's hope for a clerisy of universitaires. Second, it queries his conception of `totalizing transformation', arguing that he sustains his grand narrative by under-playing the social elaboration introduced by 19th-century social movements in order to overplay the potential for late 20th-century ones. Finally, it takes issue both with the role assigned to social scientists and to Wallerstein's notion of a guided process of total social transformation, which this article holds to be an impossibility given the ontological status of society as an open system. A more modest role of `critical dialogue' with other corporate agents is advocated.