| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Bruce Mazlish. The Uncertain Sciences. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 328. $35.00.

At numerous places in this work, Bruce Mazlish insists that it is not a history of the human sciences, nor is it a rigorous philosophical analysis of the character of the human sciences. Instead, it is an extended and historically grounded meditation on the present condition and future prospects for scientific knowledge of humans and their societies by a distinguished senior intellectual historian. The book is intended for the general public, so it eschews details at virtually every opportunity in favor of a grand synthetic view. Mazlish is generally enthusiastic about the results accumulated to date by the human sciences. Furthermore, he is guardedly optimistic regarding the future of the human sciences; but his optimism seems often to be in spite of his central arguments rather than because of them. 1

Although Mazlish draws from an amazing range of sources, he starts from a Comtean understanding that downplays the importance of psychology and of quantification in the human sciences. With Auguste Comte, he also insists that there is a core of method—grounded in observation and experiment, the construction of general laws and theories, the use of reason to infer consequences, and the testing of generalizations against experience—that unifies the sciences. That core is, however, modified in each science to be appropriate to its particular subject matter. Thus, "each science develops by a logic proper to itself, a logic that is revealed only by the historical study of that science" (p. 52). Morover, although he acknowledges recent work on the complex historical interactions between scientific and religious practices and ideas, like Comte, Mazlish believes that science and religion are ultimately incompatible with one another and that science seeks "to substitute scientific method for religious conviction" (p. 211). . . .

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