Book Reviews : ANDREW ABBOTT, Chaos of Disciplines, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 259

Abstract

Chaos l)f ~~I.SC’I f)IllTt’.S’ is a theoretical tour deforce of the social sciences. While the last few decades have witnessed a large body of work on the structure and history of the natural sciences, there has been a surprising paucity of works that theorise the history of the social sciences. Using sociology as a stand in for the social sciences, Abbott argues that the social sciences have been unable to decide as to whether their brief is the study of facts, or the study of values (p. 35). This vacillation is reflected not only in each discipline, but also in every research tradition within the disciplines, whose practitioners soon divide into two antithetical groups of those who study facts and call for causal explanation, as against those who study values and offer inter-