Professionalism, Authority and the Transformation of American Thought

Abstract

Thomas L. Haskell. The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth Century Crisis of Authority. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. 276 + xii pp. Bruce Kuklick. The Rise of American Philosophy, Cambridge Massachusetts 1860-1930. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977. 674 + xxvii pp. These books continue, and carry to a higher level, the discussion of "professionalism" which has been so prominent a feature of American social history in the last decade or so. However valuable their contribution to that enterprise, though, they are both rich in a number of other themes, and make notable contributions to our understanding of that decisive change in the American mind which occurred in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth.