Joel Isaac
Biographic Data
| ID | 3739895 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joel Isaac |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joel |
| FAMILY NAME | Isaac |
| SIGNATURE | ISAAC J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 130 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The History of Economics
Historians of economics are haunted by the marginalization of their field. What was true at the birth of the field is even truer today: To most economists, historical thinking is hardly relevant. Viewed from a different perspective, however, the history of economics thrives as never before—only now it is written as much by historians and social scientists without formal training in economics as it is by economists who specialize in the study of p…
Anthropology and the Turn to History
Among the social sciences, the discipline of anthropology displays perhaps the greatest affinity for the methods and assumptions of historical enquiry. Anthropology’s turn to history began as early as the 1950s, but the relationship between the two fields was cemented a generation later. Yet because it is now disciplinary folklore, the precise character of anthropology’s turn to history is less well understood than it should be. In this chapter, …
Durkheimian Thoughts on In the Shadow of Justice
This paper uses Durkheim’s distinction between cause and function to explore the aims and implications of Forrester’s critique of liberal egalitarianism in In the Shadow of Justice . I suggest that there is an interesting tension in Forrester’s argument between the portrayal of Rawlsian justice theory as a vestigial institution—a ‘survival’—left over from 1950s liberalism, and its continuing presence in political theory as a doctrine that has a s…
A min S amman . History in Financial Times
What has happened to the historical imagination in our present age of financialization? This is the question explored in Amin Samman’s insightful and pathbreaking book, History in Financial Times. To some, it might seem quixotic to return to the careworn problems of historical theory in order understand the heady world of global finance. As Samman notes, the triumph of finance-driven neoliberalism “is often thought to correspond with an extinguis…
States of Exception in American History
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1942) is the most famous book you’ve never heard of. It has had a remarkable career: a big seller on the mass paperback market of the post–World War II decades; a key text in musicology, aesthetics, religious studies, and anthropology; a founding work of Langer’s decades-long attempt to reinvent philosophy. And yet, precisely because the book possessed such remarkable crossover appeal for generations of n…
Democracy in Exile
A number of recent works have explored the afterlife of the intellectual culture of the Weimar Republic in the United States. As studies of thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau, Carl J. Friedrich, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss have demonstrated, important synergies existed between the crisis and collapse of Weimar Republic and the apocalyptic, sometimes-antidemocratic inflections of American Cold War ideology. These synergies were interpersonal and …
The Intensification of Social Forms
It is often suggested that the career of Clifford Geertz falls into two parts: a youthful dalliance with modernization theory followed by a turn toward questions of interpretation and symbolic action. Attempts to reconcile these two phases of Geertz’s career usually posit a change of heart or a drift away from the preoccupations of youth. In this article, I argue that Geertz’s mature engagement with hermeneutic methodology did not mark a break in…
Strategy as Intellectual History
The world of grand strategy is not one to which intellectual historians have devoted a great deal of attention. Matters of interstate economic competition and imperial rivalry have, of course, long been at the center of histories of early modern political thought. Yet, when these currents in the history of political thought narrow into nineteenth-century realpolitik , and then turn toward the professionalized contemporary discourses of internatio…
Donald Davidson and the Analytic Revolution in American Philosophy, 1940–1970
Histories of analytic philosophy in the United States have typically focused on the reception of logical positivism, and especially on responses to the work of the Vienna Circle. Such accounts often call attention to the purportedly positivist-inspired marginalization of normative concerns in American philosophy: according to this story, the overweening positivist concern for logic and physics as paradigms of knowledge displaced questions of valu…
Working Knowledge
The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century’s middle decade…
Epistemic Design
In the spring and summer of 1946, John Milton Roberts, a graduate student in anthropology at Yale University, conducted fieldwork among the Navajo Indians in the Ramah area of western New Mexico. Among his observations, Roberts recorded the actions of three households as they butchered and cooked one of their sheep. In a report published in 1951 by the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, Roberts, by now an assistant professor in Harvard's Depar…
Kuhn's Education
Among the topics discussed in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , those of education, training, and pedagogy are apt to seem the least compelling. Certainly, the earliest debates about Structure focused on other, more controversial, matters: incommensurability, meaning change, the rationality of theory choice, normal science—the list goes on. Over the past two decades, however, a growing concern among historians and sociologis…
Missing links
This essay argues that post-analytic philosophy finds its origins not only in an invented tradition—that of ‘analytic philosophy’—but also in an invented dilemma: namely, the response to the allegedly overweening dominance of ‘positivism’ in American philosophy. I begin by surveying the problems with the folk wisdom about positivism and analytic philosophy. This pervasive narrative locates the emergence of post-analytic philosophy after a period …
Introduction
Studies of the history of the human sciences during the Cold War era have proliferated over the past decade-in JHBS and elsewhere. This special issue focuses on the connections between the behavioral sciences and the culture and politics of the Cold War in the United States. In the recent literature, there is a tendency to identify the Cold War human sciences with two main paradigms: that of psychocultural analysis, on the one hand, and of the sy…
Theorist at Work
In this article, I pursue two related goals. First, I aim to put theory back into our picture of the development of the American human sciences during the Cold War. While historians have rightly highlighted the empiricist methodologies employed by postwar human scientists, I show how an influential group of social scientists, led by the sociologist Talcott Parsons, attempted to establish theorizing as the primary means of interdisciplinary inquir…
Tool Shock
This essay explores a form of reflexivity peculiar to the postwar social sciences. The mobilization of science in the United States during World War II released across the social sciences a wave of new research tools: mathematical models and calculation techniques ranging from game theory to cybernetics. As this profusion of analytical technologies gathered pace in the early years of the Cold War, practitioners of economics and cognate discipline…
Tangled Loops
During the first two decades of the Cold War, a new kind of academic figure became prominent in American public life: the credentialed social scientist or expert in the sciences of administration who was also, to use the parlance of the time, a "man of affairs." Some were academic high-fliers conscripted into government roles in which their intellectual and organizational talents could be exploited. McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamar…
Emplotting Analysis
Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Murray G. Murphey, C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005) The lives of analytic philosophers and logicians do not prima facie appear to be the stuff of popular intellectual biographies. Who but former students or specialists would want to know the details of lives devoted t…
The Human Sciences in Cold War America
The last fifteen years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the history of the Cold War. Historical attention has focused not only on the diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, but also, increasingly, on its cultural, intellectual, and technological dimensions. One of the fruits of this widening of scope in Cold War studies is a burgeoning literature on the development of the post-Second World War American human sciences. Studies …
Why Not Lewis
ing. At same time, he offers penetrating and sympathetic insights into Lewis's reformulation of philosophy, along with a spirited defence of his subjects work against attacks of contemporaries in logical positivist and Quinean camps. Given this thorough handling of Lewis's intellectual biography, it is all more curious that Murphey does not explicitly justify his claim that Lewis was the last great pragmatist until very end of book. And when he d…
W. V. Quine and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy in the United States
W. V. Quine is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Quine wrote and lectured on logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology throughout his long career, and was one of the American figures who did most to establish the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. Until recently, the historical development of both Quine's philosophy and the analytic tradition of which it i…
Republicanism
The Human Sciences in Cold War America
The last fifteen years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the history of the Cold War. Historical attention has focused not only on the diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, but also, increasingly, on its cultural, intellectual, and technological dimensions. One of the fruits of this widening of scope in Cold War studies is a burgeoning literature on the development of the post-Second World War American human sciences. Studies …
Tangled Loops
During the first two decades of the Cold War, a new kind of academic figure became prominent in American public life: the credentialed social scientist or expert in the sciences of administration who was also, to use the parlance of the time, a "man of affairs." Some were academic high-fliers conscripted into government roles in which their intellectual and organizational talents could be exploited. McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamar…
Theorist at Work
In this article, I pursue two related goals. First, I aim to put theory back into our picture of the development of the American human sciences during the Cold War. While historians have rightly highlighted the empiricist methodologies employed by postwar human scientists, I show how an influential group of social scientists, led by the sociologist Talcott Parsons, attempted to establish theorizing as the primary means of interdisciplinary inquir…
Tool Shock
This essay explores a form of reflexivity peculiar to the postwar social sciences. The mobilization of science in the United States during World War II released across the social sciences a wave of new research tools: mathematical models and calculation techniques ranging from game theory to cybernetics. As this profusion of analytical technologies gathered pace in the early years of the Cold War, practitioners of economics and cognate discipline…
W. V. Quine and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy in the United States
W. V. Quine is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Quine wrote and lectured on logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology throughout his long career, and was one of the American figures who did most to establish the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. Until recently, the historical development of both Quine's philosophy and the analytic tradition of which it i…
Introduction
Studies of the history of the human sciences during the Cold War era have proliferated over the past decade-in JHBS and elsewhere. This special issue focuses on the connections between the behavioral sciences and the culture and politics of the Cold War in the United States. In the recent literature, there is a tendency to identify the Cold War human sciences with two main paradigms: that of psychocultural analysis, on the one hand, and of the sy…
Strategy as Intellectual History
The world of grand strategy is not one to which intellectual historians have devoted a great deal of attention. Matters of interstate economic competition and imperial rivalry have, of course, long been at the center of histories of early modern political thought. Yet, when these currents in the history of political thought narrow into nineteenth-century realpolitik , and then turn toward the professionalized contemporary discourses of internatio…
Donald Davidson and the Analytic Revolution in American Philosophy, 1940–1970
Histories of analytic philosophy in the United States have typically focused on the reception of logical positivism, and especially on responses to the work of the Vienna Circle. Such accounts often call attention to the purportedly positivist-inspired marginalization of normative concerns in American philosophy: according to this story, the overweening positivist concern for logic and physics as paradigms of knowledge displaced questions of valu…
Kuhn's Education
Among the topics discussed in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , those of education, training, and pedagogy are apt to seem the least compelling. Certainly, the earliest debates about Structure focused on other, more controversial, matters: incommensurability, meaning change, the rationality of theory choice, normal science—the list goes on. Over the past two decades, however, a growing concern among historians and sociologis…
Democracy in Exile
A number of recent works have explored the afterlife of the intellectual culture of the Weimar Republic in the United States. As studies of thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau, Carl J. Friedrich, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss have demonstrated, important synergies existed between the crisis and collapse of Weimar Republic and the apocalyptic, sometimes-antidemocratic inflections of American Cold War ideology. These synergies were interpersonal and …
Missing links
This essay argues that post-analytic philosophy finds its origins not only in an invented tradition—that of ‘analytic philosophy’—but also in an invented dilemma: namely, the response to the allegedly overweening dominance of ‘positivism’ in American philosophy. I begin by surveying the problems with the folk wisdom about positivism and analytic philosophy. This pervasive narrative locates the emergence of post-analytic philosophy after a period …
Republicanism
W. V. Quine and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy in the United States
W. V. Quine is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Quine wrote and lectured on logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology throughout his long career, and was one of the American figures who did most to establish the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. Until recently, the historical development of both Quine's philosophy and the analytic tradition of which it i…
Republicanism
Why Not Lewis
ing. At same time, he offers penetrating and sympathetic insights into Lewis's reformulation of philosophy, along with a spirited defence of his subjects work against attacks of contemporaries in logical positivist and Quinean camps. Given this thorough handling of Lewis's intellectual biography, it is all more curious that Murphey does not explicitly justify his claim that Lewis was the last great pragmatist until very end of book. And when he d…
Emplotting Analysis
Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Murray G. Murphey, C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005) The lives of analytic philosophers and logicians do not prima facie appear to be the stuff of popular intellectual biographies. Who but former students or specialists would want to know the details of lives devoted t…
The Human Sciences in Cold War America
The last fifteen years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the history of the Cold War. Historical attention has focused not only on the diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, but also, increasingly, on its cultural, intellectual, and technological dimensions. One of the fruits of this widening of scope in Cold War studies is a burgeoning literature on the development of the post-Second World War American human sciences. Studies …
Tangled Loops
During the first two decades of the Cold War, a new kind of academic figure became prominent in American public life: the credentialed social scientist or expert in the sciences of administration who was also, to use the parlance of the time, a "man of affairs." Some were academic high-fliers conscripted into government roles in which their intellectual and organizational talents could be exploited. McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and Robert McNamar…
Theorist at Work
In this article, I pursue two related goals. First, I aim to put theory back into our picture of the development of the American human sciences during the Cold War. While historians have rightly highlighted the empiricist methodologies employed by postwar human scientists, I show how an influential group of social scientists, led by the sociologist Talcott Parsons, attempted to establish theorizing as the primary means of interdisciplinary inquir…
Tool Shock
This essay explores a form of reflexivity peculiar to the postwar social sciences. The mobilization of science in the United States during World War II released across the social sciences a wave of new research tools: mathematical models and calculation techniques ranging from game theory to cybernetics. As this profusion of analytical technologies gathered pace in the early years of the Cold War, practitioners of economics and cognate discipline…
Missing links
This essay argues that post-analytic philosophy finds its origins not only in an invented tradition—that of ‘analytic philosophy’—but also in an invented dilemma: namely, the response to the allegedly overweening dominance of ‘positivism’ in American philosophy. I begin by surveying the problems with the folk wisdom about positivism and analytic philosophy. This pervasive narrative locates the emergence of post-analytic philosophy after a period …
Introduction
Studies of the history of the human sciences during the Cold War era have proliferated over the past decade-in JHBS and elsewhere. This special issue focuses on the connections between the behavioral sciences and the culture and politics of the Cold War in the United States. In the recent literature, there is a tendency to identify the Cold War human sciences with two main paradigms: that of psychocultural analysis, on the one hand, and of the sy…
Working Knowledge
The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century’s middle decade…
Epistemic Design
In the spring and summer of 1946, John Milton Roberts, a graduate student in anthropology at Yale University, conducted fieldwork among the Navajo Indians in the Ramah area of western New Mexico. Among his observations, Roberts recorded the actions of three households as they butchered and cooked one of their sheep. In a report published in 1951 by the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, Roberts, by now an assistant professor in Harvard's Depar…
Kuhn's Education
Among the topics discussed in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , those of education, training, and pedagogy are apt to seem the least compelling. Certainly, the earliest debates about Structure focused on other, more controversial, matters: incommensurability, meaning change, the rationality of theory choice, normal science—the list goes on. Over the past two decades, however, a growing concern among historians and sociologis…
Donald Davidson and the Analytic Revolution in American Philosophy, 1940–1970
Histories of analytic philosophy in the United States have typically focused on the reception of logical positivism, and especially on responses to the work of the Vienna Circle. Such accounts often call attention to the purportedly positivist-inspired marginalization of normative concerns in American philosophy: according to this story, the overweening positivist concern for logic and physics as paradigms of knowledge displaced questions of valu…
The Intensification of Social Forms
It is often suggested that the career of Clifford Geertz falls into two parts: a youthful dalliance with modernization theory followed by a turn toward questions of interpretation and symbolic action. Attempts to reconcile these two phases of Geertz’s career usually posit a change of heart or a drift away from the preoccupations of youth. In this article, I argue that Geertz’s mature engagement with hermeneutic methodology did not mark a break in…
Strategy as Intellectual History
The world of grand strategy is not one to which intellectual historians have devoted a great deal of attention. Matters of interstate economic competition and imperial rivalry have, of course, long been at the center of histories of early modern political thought. Yet, when these currents in the history of political thought narrow into nineteenth-century realpolitik , and then turn toward the professionalized contemporary discourses of internatio…
Democracy in Exile
A number of recent works have explored the afterlife of the intellectual culture of the Weimar Republic in the United States. As studies of thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau, Carl J. Friedrich, Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss have demonstrated, important synergies existed between the crisis and collapse of Weimar Republic and the apocalyptic, sometimes-antidemocratic inflections of American Cold War ideology. These synergies were interpersonal and …
States of Exception in American History
Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (1942)
Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1942) is the most famous book you’ve never heard of. It has had a remarkable career: a big seller on the mass paperback market of the post–World War II decades; a key text in musicology, aesthetics, religious studies, and anthropology; a founding work of Langer’s decades-long attempt to reinvent philosophy. And yet, precisely because the book possessed such remarkable crossover appeal for generations of n…
A min S amman . History in Financial Times
What has happened to the historical imagination in our present age of financialization? This is the question explored in Amin Samman’s insightful and pathbreaking book, History in Financial Times. To some, it might seem quixotic to return to the careworn problems of historical theory in order understand the heady world of global finance. As Samman notes, the triumph of finance-driven neoliberalism “is often thought to correspond with an extinguis…
Anthropology and the Turn to History
Among the social sciences, the discipline of anthropology displays perhaps the greatest affinity for the methods and assumptions of historical enquiry. Anthropology’s turn to history began as early as the 1950s, but the relationship between the two fields was cemented a generation later. Yet because it is now disciplinary folklore, the precise character of anthropology’s turn to history is less well understood than it should be. In this chapter, …
Durkheimian Thoughts on In the Shadow of Justice
This paper uses Durkheim’s distinction between cause and function to explore the aims and implications of Forrester’s critique of liberal egalitarianism in In the Shadow of Justice . I suggest that there is an interesting tension in Forrester’s argument between the portrayal of Rawlsian justice theory as a vestigial institution—a ‘survival’—left over from 1950s liberalism, and its continuing presence in political theory as a doctrine that has a s…
The History of Economics
Historians of economics are haunted by the marginalization of their field. What was true at the birth of the field is even truer today: To most economists, historical thinking is hardly relevant. Viewed from a different perspective, however, the history of economics thrives as never before—only now it is written as much by historians and social scientists without formal training in economics as it is by economists who specialize in the study of p…
Sociology (17 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · History (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (7 works)