Project MUSE®: History of Social Science - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/892
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in History of Social Science.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2025) through current issueLatest Articles: History of Social ScienceTWOProject MUSE®History of Social Science2835-02002835-0197Latest articles in History of Social Science. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Institute Life: Bruno Latour, Studying Science, and Faculty Politics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985884
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In October 2022, Bruno Latour passed away after years of battling pancreatic cancer. A widely celebrated scholar, Latour’s obituaries were glowing. A “leading thinker of the postwar era” and an “ally of the science establishment in the face of attacks by climate deniers and conspiracy theorists,” he was, by the estimation of Le Monde, “one of his generation’s most important French intellectuals.”1 Many insisted Latour was a “genius”—even if his writing challenged the legibility of that idea—as his work over multiple decades shaped not just science studies but a range of disciplines. He was the kind of transformative scholar that the world’s illustrious academic institutions delight to call their own. Yet three
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/892/image/coversmallInstitute Life: Bruno Latour, Studying Science, and Faculty Politics2026-03-24text/htmlen-USInstitute Life: Bruno Latour, Studying Science, and Faculty Politics2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®1578192026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24In Search of Lost Reason: Ramsey, Keynes, and the Intellectualism Debate
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985885
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They brought new forms of art and literature into British public life, often casting themselves as custodians of high culture and refined taste. They practiced homosexuality and free love, defying the moral codes from the Victorian age. They lived in relative economic comfort, far from the hardships faced by the working class, even as they denounced the bourgeois obsession with wealth. The Bloomsbury group of the early twentieth century lived largely insulated from the everyday desires and struggles that defined the lives of most Britons. They were a set of artists, writers, and intellectuals, bridging the gap between dream and reality with their way of life. They were promised “a new heaven on a new earth,”
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/892/image/coversmallIn Search of Lost Reason: Ramsey, Keynes, and the Intellectualism Debate2026-03-24text/htmlen-USIn Search of Lost Reason: Ramsey, Keynes, and the Intellectualism Debate2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®1846942026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): A Short Biography
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985886
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The Theory of the Leisure Class entered the world in the final years of the nineteenth century, when its shy but affable author, Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), was a middle-age academic economist, holding the rank of instructor of Political Economy at the recently founded University of Chicago. Veblen first put the book’s title on paper in a November 10, 1895, letter to Sarah Hardy, a graduate student of his at Chicago (and his secret love interest). In the letter, Veblen told Hardy: “I should like to write something sometime, [but] it will be a long time before I shall get to it, if I ever do. The first volume on the list [envisioned] is The Theory of the Leisure Class.”1 In February 1896, he continued to Hardy:
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/892/image/coversmallThe Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): A Short Biography2026-03-24text/htmlen-USThe Theory of the Leisure Class (1899): A Short Biography2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®590932026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Lombroso? The Historical Scope and Limits of Biocriminology
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985887
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Until recently, much of the historiography on biological theories of crime tended to be rendered in narratives of growing influence over judicial decision-making processes. And there can certainly be no doubt that over the course of the twentieth century, such theories enjoyed considerable purchase. Accordingly, historians have shown little interest in charting the actual limits and shortcomings that circumscribed the impact of those theories. But one of the foremost authorities on the history of forensic medicine, Joel P. Eigen, has recently concluded that the overall impact of neuroscientific evidence on courtroom decisions has been, so far, very limited.1 Eigen attributes this to the fact that biology is mostly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/892/image/coversmallWho’s Afraid of the Big Bad Lombroso? The Historical Scope and Limits of Biocriminology2026-03-24text/htmlen-USWho’s Afraid of the Big Bad Lombroso? The Historical Scope and Limits of Biocriminology2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®372862026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Governed by Affect: Hot Cognition and the End of Cold War Psychology by Michael Pettit (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985888
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In this rich and distinctive account of the rise of contemporary affective science, Michael Pettit mobilizes compelling archival research to construct a new narrative of psychology’s postwar past—one animated by salient counterstories that emerged when the discipline’s dominant theories were still in flux. In taking seriously the influence on American psychologists of the Popular Front in the 1930s and the New Left in the 1960s, Governed by Affect: Hot Cognition and the End of Cold War Psychology figures antiracism, sexual liberation, Black power, and feminism as vital to psychology’s history—yet ultimately interprets affective science as the impoverished outcome of these radical political interventions’
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/892/image/coversmallGoverned by Affect: Hot Cognition and the End of Cold War Psychology by Michael Pettit (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USGoverned by Affect: Hot Cognition and the End of Cold War Psychology by Michael Pettit (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®184262026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985889
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Historians have tended to overstate the influence of thinkers, experts, and intellectuals. This is certainly not the case with Milton Friedman. One of the most famous economists of the 20th century, Friedman emerged not only as the main character of the “monetarist revolution” in economics but also as an influential public figure in the making of neoliberalism. However, despite his undeniable footprint on both realms, neither the monetarist approach to economics nor the rise of a neoliberal order were merely Friedman’s creatures, as some popular narratives on the right and left have claimed.In her new book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, Jennifer Burns elegantly navigates this dichotomy between the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/892/image/coversmallMilton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USMilton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®98012026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America by Beth Linker (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985890
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Beth Linker’s fascinating new book examines the rise of a “panic” about correct posture in the early twentieth century. She skillfully merges perspectives from the history of medicine, disability history, history of race, and history of gender and sexuality. She begins with an incendiary 1995 article in the New York Times Magazine exposing the fact that thousands of nude photographs of students from elite colleges and universities existed in the Smithsonian Archives, which were open to researchers for public viewing. The author of the article, Ron Rosenbaum, claimed the photos were part of a eugenics program that resembled that of Nazi Germany. These photos were taken decades earlier as part of routine physical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/892/image/coversmallSlouch: Posture Panic in Modern America by Beth Linker (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USSlouch: Posture Panic in Modern America by Beth Linker (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®98592026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain by Freddy Foks (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985891
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Freddy Foks’s Participant Observers weaves two stories of twentieth-century British anthropology’s social and intellectual formation. The anchor story tracks the field’s growth from the 1920s through the 1950s. This growth was nourished by traffic between reciprocal spheres of exchange: seminar cultures in the metropole and fieldwork across the empire’s reaches. The narrative complicates a pervasive field of indictment: accusations (sometimes finger-pointing) that paint anthropology as a colonial science.British anthropology has long been the focal point of this colonial painting. Internal critiques across the 1960s simmered over into Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Humanities Press 1973).
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/892/image/coversmallParticipant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain by Freddy Foks (review)2026-03-24text/htmlen-USParticipant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain by Freddy Foks (review)2026-03-242026TWOProject MUSE®112222026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-24