Introduction; Part I. Truths (and Methods): American legal, political, and economic thought before 1870; Part II. The Turn to Process, 1870 – 1970: Three Essays: A. Law: becoming procedure; B. Political science: the group as process; C. Economics: man and market as technique; Part III. Conclusion: History, method, fracture.
Explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking from truths to methods between 1870 and 1970.
Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami. He is the author of Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1700–1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism (2011) and Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (2015).
'Ranging widely across disciplines, crossing political boundaries,
and unsettling conventional wisdom at every turn, The Turn to
Process provides a brilliant new synthesis of a transformative
period in American intellectual life.' Angus Burgin, Johns Hopkins
University
'This book is a real tour de force, a return to intellectual
history in the grand manner. In Kunal Parker's synthesis, the
leading theorists of law, political science, and economics in the
twentieth century all contributed to, and followed, a shift away
from theorizing their sciences as means to substantive ends such as
justice or morality, to thinking about them only as methods or
procedures. The book is marked by deep learning in the sources of
all three fields and an uncommon lucidity in exposition.' Robert W.
Gordon, author of Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and
History in Law
'In this revelatory account of 'a world rendered process', Kunal
Parker brilliantly reframes the history of modern American
knowledge-making. As foundational certainties faltered in the late
nineteenth century, he contends, the language of tools, methods,
and techniques remade entire disciplines and professions - with
enduring consequences for how we understand law, democracy, and
markets.' Sarah Igo, author of The Known Citizen: A History of
Privacy in Modern America
'In this brilliant book, Kunal Parker examines the causes and
consequences of this 'turn to process' in political science,
economics, and the law. Parker's findings will be of great interest
to scholars of US intellectual history, the history of science, and
social theory.' Joel Isaac, The University of Chicago
'Among many achievements, Parker's book is an incisive and
essential history of how today's fields consolidated around their
contemporary focus on method. In this way it is not only a striking
and synthetic interpretation of the mid-twentieth century
intellectual world. It is also a powerful account of the extent to
which even as the driving methods of that era - for instance, the
legal process school in law - collapsed, greater space for plural
methods nonetheless continues to go hand in hand with the dominance
of method itself as the basic source of scholarly authority.' Aziz
Rana, Balkinization Blog
'In a world of earnest but inevitably middling scholarship, Kunal
Parker has written a book worth writing, one that is worthy of the
effort, redemptive of the genre, and rejuvenating for even the most
jaded of weary readers.' John Fabian Witt, Balkinization Blog
'Kunal Parker has completed a stunning and sweeping history of how
a certain segment of American legal, political, and economic
thinkers reoriented their respective fields away from stable
notions of “truths, ends, and foundations” toward dynamic “methods,
techniques, and processes.” In doing so, he makes several
contributions to the existing literature by complementing and at
times challenging some of the most canonical works in American
intellectual history, especially by uncovering the multiple
meanings of “the turn to process” and by re-periodizing our
conventional understanding of this otherwise familiar story about
change over time.' Ajay K. Mehrotra, Balkinization Blog
'This work is a sweeping intellectual history of great ambition.
Spanning the period between 1870 and 1970, the book draws on a
remarkable depth of erudition to argue that American thought
leaders across the domains of law, politics, and economics
responded to the challenges of modernism by embracing methods,
procedures, and processes. By converting substantive truths into
procedural techniques, these scholars were able to establish forms
of disciplinary authority that were immune to the corrosive effects
of the modernist predilection for subjecting truth to historical
and psychological critique. Grand in scope, Parker's book also
shines in its illuminating close readings, which bring to light the
surprising parallels between seemingly quite distinct textual
traditions. In all these respects, The Turn to Process is an
important contribution that promises significantly to reshape the
boundaries of scholarly debate across a range of disciplines.'
Amalia D. Kessler, Balkinization
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