Didier Fassin is Professor at the Collège de France in Paris and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Director of study at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, he is the author of numerous books, including Life: A Critical User’s Manual.

George Steinmetz is Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of various books, including The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire.

Introduction: Toward a Social Science of the Social Sciences / Didier Fassin and George Steinmetz 1
Part One. Disciplines in the Making
1. Concept-Quake: From the History of Science to the Historical Sociology of Social Science / George Steinmetz 21
2. Spaces of Real Possibilities: Counterfactuals and the Impact of Donors on the Social Sciences / Álvaro Maorcillo Laiz 81
3. The Social Life of Concepts: or, How to Study the Idea of Creativity? / Bregje F. Van Eekelen 107
4. Epistemological Crises in Legal Theory: The (Ir)Rationality of Balancing / Carel Smith 129
5. The Reinvention of Sociology: Into the Trenches of Fieldwork at the Time of the Algerian Liberation War / Amín Pérez 147
Part Two. From the National to the Global
6. How Sociology Shaped Postwar Poland and How Stalinization Shaped Sociology / Agata Zysiak 175
7. The Public Anthropology of Violence in India / Chitralekha 195
8. Challenging Objectivity in Japan’s Long 1968 / Miriam Kingsberg Kadia 218
9. How Political Commitment Delineates Social Scientific Knowledge / Kristoffer Kropp 240
10. Making Sense of Globalizing Social Science / Johan Heilbron 262
Part Three. Exploring Borders and Boundaries
11. Critical Humanities and the Unsettling of the Sociological Field: Is There a French Exception? / Jean-Louis Fabiani 287
12. Recovering Subalternity in the Humanities and Social Sciences / Peter D. Thomas 310
13. Thinking about Cognitive Scientists Thinking about Religion / John Lardas Modern 328
14. Cooperative Primates and Competitive Primatologists: Prosociality and Polemics in a Nonhuman Social Science / Nicolas Langlitz 351
15. The Rise and Rise of Posthumanism: Will It Spell the End of the Human Sciences? / Didier Fassin 368
Contributors 393
Index 397