Social Science as Civic Discourse: Essays on the Invention, Legitimation, and Uses of Social Theory.

Brown's argument is straightforward enough. Social science today, willy nilly, is the language of such civic discourse as we manage. "Why do just men suffer?, one formerly asked the rabbi. Because of structural unemployment, today answers the economist." (4) Planning and policy are exercises in social science expertise. Our notion of expertise depends, however, upon a positivistic epistemology, in which a mechanistic sense of causality is thought to permit prediction, which allows experts to plan, before action and divorced from it.

Brown argues that such planning is not only anti-democratic, but (relatedly) certain to fail because positivistic social science reflects and when embodied in planning will reproduce the structures that lie behind the problems to be remediated. Social science, so organized and supported, ignores at peril to its own predictions the socially-situated nature of knowledge. What is required, Brown maintains, is an emancipatory social science in the service of policy no less than of wisdom, a self-reflexive social science that participates in democratically evolving policy, "a more wholistic, localized, 'bottom-up,' inductive approach in which the rationality of planning is part of the process of implementation itself." (155)

To attack mainstream American social science on such a basis is not unusual, for both the philosophic contradictions and the practical implications of positivist epistemology are frequently remarked. What is rather unusual is Brown's refusal to launch his attack from an "interpretive social science" posture. Hermeneutic or ethnographic epistemologies, Brown argues, cannot find a comfortable stopping point short of a relativism that privileges that authenticity of each voice, each assertion of intentionally, finally at the cost of interpretation itself. Such a "romantic" perspective, Brown maintains, may serve as a counterpoise to the still-dominant positivism, but cannot itself provide an adequate basis for social discourse, in part because it cannot "distinguish the degree to which social structure controls or constrains individuals. . . . The unawareness and miscomprehension of members involves their failure to recognize their activities as the organizing of which their organizations are made." (42)

Brown aims to provide a third way, neither positivistic nor romantic, by employing dialectic to mediate between structuralism (Levi-Strauss is the exemplar here) and existentialism (Sartre is Brown's man). The key to this procedure is Brown's argument--which after the "linguistic turn" he reasonably presumes most of us will share--that neither structures nor individuals are things, but each constitutes the other in practice, and practice. Necessarily, Brown argues, the stream of communicative acts in context is understood in both its structure and its intentionality through the observer's own subjectivity, a subjectivity itself constituted through having played such a society-constructing "word games" previously.

Brown's argument, as extracted here, makes sense to me, but I don't really think that Social Science as Civic Discourse makes great sense as a book. Perhaps it is my own lack of philosophic background that is to blame, but I read Brown's proposal for a third way as in the main wishful thinking. Perhaps the dialectic has given these wishes a sound philosophical underpinning (perhaps not), but I simply can't imagine what social science in the third way will look like. Brown, it seems to me, has done precious little to help me, either with the workings of the dialectic or with the intellectual product he attributes to it.

Analogously, when Brown turns, in two chapters, to "Metaphor and Knowledge of History," I know what (and generally appreciate) what Brown is talking about, but find the details of his argument arbitrarily arranged and consequently elusive. The chapters are the more confusing to me because to a great extent they gloss Hayden White's extended treatment (in Metahistory and elsewhere) of the four topes underlying historical discourse. Yet Brown does not allude to White's key notion of "emplotment." Instead, Brown ties to the topes "four main ways of historical knowing"--evolutionism, empiricism, structuralism, and phenomenology. But whereas (with effort, to be sure) I can see why the topes underlie White's four forms of emplotment, I simply can't imagine a generative process (or a field for such a process) generating Brown's ways of historical knowing. White situated his argument in historically-defined set of historical thinkers; but just whom is Brown talking about?

A quick if crude way to locate the field of Brown's argument is to note the individuals (outside of himself) he cites more than half a dozen times. My dichotomy into human scientists and philosophers (each list ranked in order of frequency) is awfully porous, but so also are Brown's favorites hard to characterize. You should note that: (1) there are more philosophers than human scientists; (2) lots of the philosophers are the great fundamental thinkers; (3) among the human scientists, too, there are lots of old ones; (4) and even among the new ones, most are great fundamental thinkers rather than empiricists.

Human Scientists

Karl Marx Emile Durkheim Claude Levy-Strauss Max Weber Kenneth Burke Harold Garfinkel Paul Ricoeur Giambattista Vico

Philosophers

Rene Descartes G. W. F. Hegel Immanuel Kant Issac Newton Ernest Gellner Jean-Paul Sartre Aristotle Jurgen Habermas Friedrich Nietzsche Plato Manfred Stanley

Inherently, of course, there is nothing wrong with this mix. The problem for me is the way Brown employs these figures (and scores upon scores of others less frequently mentioned). None is much analyzed, or even exposited in a very direct fashion. The references go beyond name dropping, but not far enough to enlighten me much. Brown's references sound like this one: because of the problems posed by ethnographic knowledge,

this would be the reductio ad absurdum of any social science knowledge, since no social understanding or explanation on Winch's (or Schutz's) account is possible other than by an inward familiarity with concepts used in a society by its members. . . . A non-positivist corrective to Which is provided by Winch himself in an earlier essay on 'Nature and Convention.' Here the author . . . adduced belief to be a noncontingent precondition for the operation of any discourse or interaction. Other emergents such as canons of integrity or fair play also are presented in this light. In a similar spirit, Garfinkel . . . (44)

Now, these ideas are interesting enough and just about coherent enough. But I can't honestly say that I gained a thing from their having been connected with Winch (or Schutz), or, again, with Garfinkel, As for the startling "Which," be assured that he or she is not listed in the' index, but is a typographical error. Perhaps Brown's editor had wearied(1) of Brown's so-frequent references, or, alternatively, was lulled rather than distracted by his use of a sentence that doesn't parse.

Does it matter much that this book is imprecisely and inelegantly written? Perhaps so. Something is wrong, and if that something is not just that I am not fluent enough philosophically, it is that Brown just hasn't taken the trouble to address his valuable argument to readers very well.

John Modell Carnegie Mellon University 

ENDNOTE 

1. The book is filled with little errors. Who cares? A quotation from Talcott Parsons is to a publication not referenced. E. A. Ross is misidentified as an economist. A quotation, obviously from E. B. Tylor, is attributed to Taylor, although the References includes a Tylor with just about the proper publication detail, but no Taylor. Theda Skocpol becomes Theodora, a nice touch. "A Merleau-Pontean approach thus would not damn the political currents in planning." (160)